Today’s vehicle represents a couple of firsts for the Rare Rides series. It’s the first time a Rare Rides has featured an old car that’s still new, and it’s also the first time your author actually drove the Rare Ride in question.
An Aegean Blue luxury coupe awaits.
The De Tomaso name keeps surfacing in the Rare Rides series, almost as often as BMW. The honorary first mention came via the Chrysler TC by Maserati, followed by the Qvale Mangusta that initially bore the De Tomaso name. Most recently, we featured the Maserati Ghibli, which was the very last new Maserati presented by the man himself, De Tomaso.
Today we step back in time, back to an era before any of those aforementioned Rare Rides were ever considered. Let’s have a look at the very luxurious De Tomaso Longchamp.
Right around this time last week, we featured a QOTD about the most boring car you’d ever driven. Searching through your memories for a boring car was apparently very easy, as nearly 200 comments quickly gathered together to cover all things boring and car.
Today, we’ll head the opposite direction and talk about driving excitement.
Comfort, spaciousness, luxury, formality. All of these things mattered to the early-1990s Japanese domestic sedan buyer. Today we take a look at a sedan that possesses all of these qualities in spades. It’s the Toyota Crown Royal Saloon, from 1992.
Buick’s on again, off again relationship with the Opel brand is currently very much on, as two Opels badged as Regals tempt buyers, and one Opel badged as Cascada tempts rental companies. But these recent exercises in marketing are somewhat tame in comparison to the experiment General Motors conducted in the 1980s with a little company called Bitter.
Reading Matt Posky’s review of the new Edge ST got me thinking about CUVs of the expensive variety. Though Ford argues that the Edge ST is in a “white space” of its own because of the serious performance it achieves, I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure that outright performance makes that much of a difference in this segment.
Let’s put it to the people and find out if I’m wrong.
What do you get when you cross practical Swedish design sensibility with some Italian flair? You get a very expensive and boxy two-door sedan with a Bertone badge on it.
Presenting the 1989 Volvo 780.
Perusing the responses to Matthew Guy’s QOTD post about the ideal $40,000 vehicle, three sedans kept surfacing in the comments. All three were compact, all of them had engines of identical displacement, and all of them were restrained by a price ceiling — meaning no optional extras.
Today we’ll narrow the $40,000 field to these three, and see which one you’d buy with your own bank’s money.
They’re big, expensive, luxurious, and have 12 cylinders sitting under their long hoods. All of them will deplete your checkbook in multiple ways, but you can only take one home with you.
What’s it gonna be?
In Part I of the Citroën CX saga, we learned how the big sedan replaced the outgoing and legendary DS. Now, let’s find out just how difficult life was for the last genuine large Citroën.
Huge amounts of interior space, a silky smooth ride, and quirky features inside and out. These are the qualities one expects from a large Citroën, and all are present and accounted for in today’s Rare Ride — the CX 25 Prestige, from 1987.
Today’s subjects are ponderous, expensive, and very heavy. No, we’re not talking about state government representatives; we’re talking about full-size SUVs.
Come along, and we’ll select a big truck to burn.
Today’s Buy/Drive/Burn trio represent the high-dollar sports car that doesn’t quite make it into supercar territory. They’re very expensive, yet among other extra-fast vehicles in the six-figure segment, they’re considered relatively good value.
This makes them all oddballs; none ever burn up the sales charts. But that doesn’t mean they can’t catch fire.
Certain extraordinary circumstances can move a vehicle from the standard Rare Rides classification and into Concentrated Rides. Take today, for instance, where a concerned collector has gathered together 24 Chrysler Imperials in a California desert.
The why here is unclear.
In the mountainous country of Switzerland, there once existed a company called Monteverdi. And for a few decades, it built luxurious and sporty coupes and sedans for a very wealthy clientele. Today’s Rare Ride is the first sedan offering from that company. It’s a High Speed 375/4, from 1970.
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