Camino LS6

"wadder" or "wooder" is also a philly thing.

Don't know. They haven't updated it lately.

Stainless coated? Never heard of such a thing.

You sir, earn a point for that!

Just the ones I was thinking of. Those and the psych-ward specials with the massive body mods.

True (and they are very weird). Some emulate the American vans of the 70s. Never know what's going to take hold somewhere.

I was never a part of it ( a tad before my time), but I sure remember them. Huge numbers, crazy airbrushing, Cragars, sidepipes, shag carpet, portholes... Some were super cheese, some were impressive, some were junk - but the owners seemed to be having a good time. In a way, it was like the ricer thing...

Shouldn't be done, but you know what? It works better than the Firebird attempts. Probably because this Camaro is pretty big.

Just about any custom touch you can imagine was applied to vans back then, and you can see most of them in this long slide show. Back then "Vannin'" was a common verb.

Ours weren't Ute-based of course, but there was a huge van craze here in the US during the seventies as well.

Saturn was a fiasco from the start to the finish, but that wasn't a traditional flop (as in a bad, or maligned, or slow selling car). What it was was a massive over-reach by GM in which it doomed both the Saturn brand as well as its other brands simultaneously. There were some great aspects to the brand, but the whole venture was an ill-conceived blunder that cut GM to the bone. And it was a self-inflicted wound. All of that said, calling any Saturn a flop ( with the possible exception of the ION), sort of misses the story. I don't think I'd name a single Saturn to this list.

Yes, a very cool fellow C&Ger sent me one! I kinda like Atomic green.

In the case of the SSR, it actually lasted longer than planned - it was only supposed to be a three year run.

Smart flopped in your local market. Yet again you can't imagine that things aren't uniformly the same across the nation as compared to your little burg. You also can't imagine a world that isn't 100% dependent on driving somewhere every day. And you can't post without being rude and insulting. Philly is a sizeable market, they'd be here if they sold.

Hell, anything's worth a shot.

Vandalism.

I watched the local Benz store waste a ton of money on a new building to sell Maybachs, they might have sold 3 before they threw-in the towel. For their next trick, they decided to sell Smarts using the same building. The result? They bailed after selling maybe a dozen or so. This all happened in the space of, at most, 18 months. They now sell used cars there. I see a Smart maybe once every three months, and a Maybach never. Yet I see Ferraris, Bentleys, and Maseratis almost every day. Both are flops.

I guess I'm too late to suggest stainless lines... I'm a big fan of only doing that job once.

Very clean, and probably worth the price. Ever go look at that Suburban?

Well, your "poster child rates highly on my list. At one point I referred to it as the ugliest car in history - then something worse came along. On opposite ends of the scale I nominate the Smart car and the Maybach. Utter flops.

I see both all the time, along with XLRs and Bentleys.

Yup.

I've waited in that traffic. I have zero tolerance for that sort of traffic, and don't want a job that would require me to deal with it on a daily basis. It is too dense for me here, no way could I deal with "in town" traffic.

In fairness to American cities, their European counterparts have the advantage of centuries of non-car centric planning to make them easier to get around in.

If I ever win the lottery, I'm going to kidnap you and drag you to see what a city can be like. While I know it would never suit you personally, you'd probably end up conceding that the city life I'd show you would be desirable to a great many people in this country. I'll hold you to that offer! I don't dispute the urban life is desireable to many, but it isn't the panacea some make it out to be. A population moving to urban centers presents a host of ills. Cities are most defininitely not the models of sustainability they have been made out to be.