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I dearly LOVE the vintage Buicks! My all-time dream machine is a 1956 Buick Super, but alas one in good condition is a far cry above my budget......now all is not lost though, as I see this when I look into my driveway these days......

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Oh yeah baby!

I grew up riding around in a '53 Plymouth Cranbrook(?) which was dad's work car, and a '57 Plymouth Belvedere sedan, mom's car. However, I had aunt's and uncle's who drove Buicks and Pontiacs and I was in awe of them as a child. One uncle had a '57 Buick convertible and his wife had a '58 Buick convertible, both red! He was the mayor for a couple of terms in a Chicago suburb, Wheeling, Ill. and they drove in parades with those. The '58 was my absolute favorite. Then another aunt bought a new green '59 Buick convertible, total change in bodystyles. At first I didn't care for the '59, but it grew on me. I really didn't care for the '60 when they rounded the fins off. That was definitely Buick in their heyday! I could'nt believe the change when they came out in '61..no fins! The sad thing was, by the time I was ready for my driver's license, all those beautiful cars had been traded away! I settled for a '62 Impala, oh well.
 
David

Absolutely right! That's my 54 Special! I absolutely love driving that car, it's so much fun to get all the waves, thumbs up, and of course watching folks nearly get whiplash from craning their necks as I go by! It's not a 56 but I am VERY happy with it!
 
I vividly remember my dad watching TV when an old Pontiac ad would come on. They used to have a guy dressed up as an indian chief who would say in a phony Tonto accent with a deep voice; "Pontiac, heap fine car" My dad would match the fake indian chief's accent and tone saying "Pontiac, heeeeeeep". My dad didn't like GM products and the one time I sorta talked him into buying one it turned out to be a real turd, one recall after another, uneven panel gaps, orange peel paint, a wavy joint at the C-pillar with grind marks visible through the paint and it had little squeaks and ticks from the day it was new. Lesson learned. I'll never make that mistake again. Ever.

I dunno, I spent a whole crap load of time and money restoring an old car from that era once, a 1954 Plymouth. I'll never do that again either. I was about to buy a used '65 Corvair and my dad panicked and handed me the keys to the old Plymouth. He didn't do me any favors. Now I have a real allergy to cars from that era.

I'm sure that car in restored form is much nicer than anything that ever rolled down the Pontiac production line. The restoration staff paid very close attention to doing quality work when restoring it, not the slap-dash crap "workmanship" typical of a GM assembly line, then and now. I'm sure most high end restoration shops would never stoop to turning out something as poorly assembled and painted as a stock production GM product.

I think if I showed up with a car like that my neighbors would all ask if I need therapy. No, seriously. It would be, how to say, most out of character for me. In fact, many people I know have never seen me drive a car. I use motorcycles for daily transportation. My cars get a few hundred miles a year (nice insurance break for keeping the miles low) while the bikes get 15-20K miles per year.
 
I don't think you would want to beat up a valuable old restored car like that in the day to day grind anyway. I have also experienced Australian heat and I don't remember cars from that era doing too well in high heat. Over boils and the like were pretty common back then. You would have to turn the AC off (if the car had AC which was far from standard then) to keep the car from overheating. Not so comfortable for sitting in heavy traffic on hot days. Cars like that are strictly collectables now. Save the daily grind for a modern car that isn't valuable.
 
a mate of mine has a Chev belair as his daily driver but it has been kitted out with a huge radiator and much improved cooling system, It runs a treat. 


I had for a long time a 500e 123 merc but the huge fuel bills got me after a while, I now have a Hyundia as my daily driver and a sl500 as my toy 
 
LOl No problem, Just as hot here if not hotter in places, Porsche and Audi do a huge amount of hot weather testing here. In an area Near to Calvinia( were I often go on holiday and weekend breaks and get some cool vintage vacuums ) you will often see disguised taped up cars doing high speed runs on the open roads. There is a place about 200km from their were manufacturers simply park cars and leave them their to see what damage the sun can do to them, rows upon rows of brand new cars , prototypes just parked rotting in the sun 
 
Here's the 1959, and the 1960 Electra 225s

I would LOVE a 1959 Buick Electra 225 in my driveway!! I prefer the 6 window Riviera hardtop, but would take the 4 window, or even a standard Electra. 


 


I accidentally insulted one of the Australian members one day, he took one of my comments about American cars there, as a complaint that they did not use them exclusively. I don't know how he got that out of it. Australian and European, Asian cars work better in their country. Those gigantic '50's through '70's cars barely got around over here.

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OHHH BUT!

Out on the open road they were a dream!! you felt like you were going down the road on a sofa!LOL You know, I learned to drive on big cars, so I really seemed to be able to park them easier than the new stuff, when I was 17 my Uncle bought me a 63 Olds Starfire, you could see every corner!! I wish I had it now!! great car all but that awful transmission!!! it had every option offered except tilt wheel and power vent windows..it even had the Wonderbar radio with foot control and my favorite thing of all, the Autronic eye headlight dimmer.,also had cruise and air...Ultra High Compression, use Premium Fuel Only! Thats what the air cleaner had on it in red letters!!394, 345 Horsepower.
 
Gsheen, BMW does their hot weather testing nearby in Death Valley in July, our summer. 45 degrees C or more. Based on what a friend of mine who was a former tech in BMW Research tells me, they would pay the California Highway Patrol a gratuity to look the other way while they drove BMW test articles flat out across the park and adjacent state highways. He has some hair raising stories of getting sideways at high speed in big 7-Series sedans, doing a little cactus surfing with them. It was those annual sojourns to California for hot weather testing that finally convinced him to leave Germany for good and move here.

Kia/Hyundai has a big test track outside California City, also in the high desert but Honda closed their even larger test facility just north of Cal City. I have been tempted to try to sneak in there with a motorcycle and see if I can get up on the test track, but I'm the kind of person who always and forever gets caught trying to have such fun, so I haven't yet had the nerve to try it.
 
My dad's driving technique on the old '54 Belvedere was to start in first (three speed column shift), lift the lever up to neutral and just drop it in third, skipping second entirely. Man I can still feel that poor old flathead six lugging away in third at a few hundred rpm and the whistle of air sucking through a small bore one barrel carb.

Funny thing but more than a decade after that old Plymouth was sold I was on liberty in Hong Kong sitting in a Nissan Cedric taxi. It had bench seats front and rear covered in thick clear pastic seat covers like your elderly aunt had on the seats of her old Buick. Though it was a late 1980s Cedric, it had a three speed column shift (on the left side of the column!) and the cab driver drove it exactly as my dad did, skipping second and lugging the living crap out of a big straight six in third. You could even hear the whistle of a carb sucking hard at the humid Asian air. Gawd, a Chinese version of my ol' man!
 
Phil
Yea BMW has a guge test facility here too. Not far from there roslyn manufacturing plant. I have seen some pretty cool prototypes. Here they have big Goverment approved highspeed testing stickers on them. Porche too I have seen a few hyundia test cars but not much. A friend of mine recently saw a really tapes up super car testing here we think its a pagani
 

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