Automotif DCXXV...

A tasty Nova with an SS hood. The grille says '69 but it's modified enough that it's hard to be a hundred percent sure.

It's got aftermarket disc brakes on all four corners and the fat dual exhausts dumping out just aft of each rear wheel were emitting a noise advertising that this car had something serious going on under the hood. It was definitely ready to party.

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Automotif DCXXIV...

Here's a 1965 Electra 225 convertible in the color that Buick called "Bamboo Cream". It's in really nice shape; obviously not a garage-dwelling creampuff but a regularly driven car with which the owner's happily battling entropy.

Snapped with a Sony 𝑎77.

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Automotif DCXXIII...

Spotting MG TD kit cars built on a Volkswagen Beetle chassis is pretty easy from behind, as the exhaust system of the little rear-mounted air-cooled VW flat four is a dead giveaway.

From the nose end, you have to look at the front suspension. The coil springs and lower control arms let us know that this one's the real deal and not a replica.

Automotif DCXXII...

I was absolutely tickled to spot this very clean and straight Austin-Healey Sprite out and about. This would be a 1959-1961 model, and the color is Colorado Red.

This was from back when sports cars were very tiny. As an illustration of how tiny, the Sprite Mark II was a little bigger, and you can see how it's dwarfed by a Subaru Outback in this photo. (And an Outback itself is not a monstrously large automobile.)

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Juxtaposition

I've been waiting to get this picture for a while now. Amusingly, I think both the Mitsubishi Pajero Mini and the Chevy Silverado belong to the same people.

Automotif DCXXI...

Will I get up from my table and jog down the block to get a picture of a 1963 Buick Riviera idling at a traffic light?

Yes. Yes I will.

Photographed with a Canon EOS R and an RF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoom lens.

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Automotif DCXX...

Spotted this whimsical Volkswagen New Beetle ute conversion while dog sitting in New Hampshire recently.

10/10, no notes. I would definitely rock this.

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Automotif DCXIX...

This lovely old 1962 Buick Invicta will get photographed every time it drives by.

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Automotif DCXVIII...

I was aware of the existence of a Vietnamese automobile manufacturer by the name of "Vinfast". I knew that they were gradually getting a small toehold in the US market, but they don't make the kind of cars I really dig, and I couldn't have told you off the top of my head what any of their model names were or what their vehicles looked like, exactly.

Therefore, first time I saw one in the wild and thought to myself "I have no idea what I'm looking at here", I suddenly realized that this is what all cars look like to non-enthusiasts: an otherwise undifferentiated automobile-shaped object.

Anyway, this is a VF 8.

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Automotif DCXVII...

Driving home from TacCon I made a point of pulling over and photographing this Snow White 1958 Edsel Ranger 4-door sedan in Pryor, Oklahoma. (It was parked outside the same shop where I snapped that '57 Dodge wagon back in 2022.)

This is only the third Edsel I can recollect seeing in the wild, with the others being a '58 Citation and a '59 Ranger.

If you want to read the definitive story on Ford's Edsel debacle, it's Bonsall's Disaster in Dearborn: The Story of the Edsel.

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Automotif DCXVI...

Stumbled across this minty 1957 Mercedes-Benz 220S parked out in front of a local shop the other day. It has less than ten thousand miles on the odometer.

Automotif DCXV...

Here's a neat car you don't see every day, a 1960 Austin-Healey 3000 (referred to as a Mark I now, although that's a retronym because of the later Mark II and Mark III models.) You can see more deets here.

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Automotif DCXIV...

Here's a fairly early Porsche 914 getting some work done at a local shop. There was a guy in our neighborhood when I was a kid who had one of these and he would "wave" at us with the headlights if we were out playing in the yard when he drove past. I thought that was just the coolest thing ever.

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Automotif DCXIII...

This lightly restomodded 1971 Chevelle SS is absolutely eye-catching. I crossed the street to get a bunch of photos, using a Canon EOS R and RF 24-105mm f/4-7.1 IS zoom lens.

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Automotif DCXII...

Here's an interesting sight. It's a Toyota Starlet GT Turbo. The second generation of the Starlet, which was still rear-wheel drive, was sold over here from '81-'84, when gas was expensive* and its 39 City/54 Highway MPG rating made it popular.

The one in the pics, as you may surmise from the location of the wheel, is a Japanese market Starlet. It's a fourth generation car, by which time the Starlet platform had become front-wheel drive. As a '90-'91 GT Turbo model, it has a 1.3L intercooled turbo inline 4-cylinder making 135hp, which must feel sporty in a car weighing only 1,962 pounds.

*In 1981 the average gas price in the US was $1.35/gal, which works out to $4.78/gal in current dollars.

Like suddenly running over an alligator in Nebraska.

Of all the days to not have a camera with me, it had to be the one when I bumped into this beauty. If I'm reading my decoder wheel right, this C1 'Vette is a 1960 model in Honduras Maroon.

I took a couple of regular snaps with my iPhone and then backed up far enough to use the "telephoto" lens for this shot, which is probably the best cell phone photo I've ever taken of a car.

You don't often see cars like this out on the road in the winter months north of the Ohio, but it was a freakishly warm and sunny February Monday and there'd been some rain to wash the salt off the road, so I understand the urge to get some wind in your hair.

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Automotif DCXI...

A 1971 Ford F-250 Custom Styleside in Grabber Blue with aftermarket decals and partly blacked-out grille. Photographed using a Nikon 1 V3 and 1 Nikkor 10-100mm f/4.5-5.6 VR zoom lens.

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Automotif DCXI...

The third generation F-bodies have aged so, so well. Just a really great design, aesthetically. If they'd been built by an Italian manufacturer you wouldn't be able to get automotive journalists to shut up about what timelessly classic lines they have.

More on this '91-'92 Camaro RS can be found here.

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Automotif DCX...

The vanity plate reads "SWISS 1". Although when I greeted the owner with "Love your car!", she answered that it was her second.

Check out the little silhouette of Switzerland on the hood!

This one was photographed in August of 2020 using a Nikon D7000.

Automotif DCIX...

The coolest thing about this MGC GT is that the owner drives it fairly frequently. It's nearing sixty years old, so that's pretty neat.

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