I was watching some tv shows from the 60s and noticed that were a lot of cars on the streets in the background that i had literally forgotten about. They seem to have completely disappeared. Is this a European thing or are there cars in the US that have gone from the streets because there were deemed too dull for anyone to save.
Used car dealers have a saying, "There's a butt for every seat." Around here, if it's a running survivor, someone's going to drive it. It may not be worth spending any money on, but if it will go, they will cruise it. Just remember, no matter what you think of it now, someone bought it new.
its weird to look at old photos and realize how many cars were not Fords and yeah, most off- brands are and have always been undesirable. Some young people think if its old, its cool. nope
When I watch old British shows I see a whole bunch of cars in the background that I have no idea what they are. When I watch old US shows I see a whole bunch of boring cars in the background that I don't really have any desire to mess with, if I could find one. Does that answer your question?
I think my short answer is... here in car-crazy*** America, most any car (make and/or model) here up through the... 70's?... 80's?... likely has a following, so there will be ardent supporters sprinkled about. Since I live in Seattle, I have seen a variety of cars at shows that are not the typical things one would expect. And because I live in a large area, like Seattle, I see car shows catering to some of the off-beat offerings. *** car-crazy may be lapsing into the past tense, but I think there is currently a fairly healthy interest in hobby cars
Sort of.. there were cars that were not popular back in the day that have achieved cult like status (and value) recently. Conversely cars that were seen everywhere that have completely disappeared. I wonder how many have become extinct.
My opinion ( 12 cts. ) Old cars here were eye sores to the general public. Not until the 1970's did the general public, thanks to HollyWood, realize the attraction of certain older models. Until then the way to motoring happiness was released each Sept-Oct. Meanwhile 'The Industry' needed raw material. A lot of pre war metal went to Stopping WWII. So off beat designs ( poor sellers ) were scrapped along with many popular makes to keep new ones coming. Can't erase the memory of seeing a 2 story high, pile of engines sitting at the scrap yards. My young eyes knew that many were Hemi heads. I wanted to stop the madness. As well is the memory of unpopular older cars sacrificed at some college frat party fund raisers. They would sell swings of a sledge hammer, to assault the glass and bodies.
Interesting thing: one of the most common classics to see on the street here is the Citroën DS. When younger they were thought of as a maintenance nightmare, but because they're quirky and interesting and clever people have gone to the trouble of maintaining them, especially after discovering that the hydraulic system is far more diy-able than you'd think, once you've got your head around it. Meanwhile, cars formerly thought straightforward and indestructable, like BMC ADO9 Farinas for instance, have pretty much disappeared. Still, things like Datsun 120Ys, which I thought in their day too dire to contemplate, are popping up with a lot of attention lavished on them. The cruelest irony is that I actually see the point of that, in light of what currently clutters the roads.
Growing up I used to see a lot of Hudsons, Ramblers, Studebakers,etc but the young guys did not want those, they wanted Fords Chevys and Dodges. So a lot of them went to salvage yards when they wore out. Then in the 60s along came Lady Bird Johnson, the president's wife with her clean up America campaign and her lot in life was to eradicate every auto salvage yard she could and it eliminated lots of unpopular makes.
Lots of stuff from the 80's and 90's would fit that bill, but I can't think of any car in the US made before the mid 70's that doesn't have at least a cult following.
Well, there's a thread here where a guy is very excited about the 1964 Chrysler 4 door station wagon he just bought. But I don't think he was around in 1964. That kind of thing happens more and more. I guess it's an age thing.
I saw a completely original one of them pass though an intersection in front of me a couple of years ago. It was like seeing a ghost. As the lights changed and I drove off I thought to myself about how strange it looked in the modern context, how I'd forgotten about them and how they were once so common in everyday traffic. Off topic of course.
When an auto became worth less than what it would cost to repair it for reliable use, it was disposed of in the most practical way. You could trade it on a newer unit, sell it to someone who would repair it, or sell it to the junker. There were very few folks interested in "old cars" before the '80s, so scrapping was the normal procedure.
Shit, I saw a really clean Chevy Lumina this summer and that had to be the first time in probably a decade I can remember one of those on the road. Here in Wisconsin, you have to be pretty dedicated to keep a car on the road past 25 years.
We had a grill out at school a few weeks ago. I was standing outside with students when a bunch of them started pointing. I turned around and a 56 4 door Chevy was cruising by. Old faded paint, poverty caps and sounded like a 6. The students thought it was the coolest thing ever. so did I.
Did the driver have a little tweed hat with a feather on the side? And it topped out at 30 MPH? Every 120Yuck I saw was like this.
Most of the tv show that I do watch are old (70s and older). I like that ALL the cars are old, that ALL the businesses are old, ALL the people are in old fashion and ALL the scenery is open (and not crowed).....it's not a fake period piece, it's real.
A lot of cars from the teens, 20's and early 30's just flat were not very well built. I had a 34 Olds 4 door in Texas that the body was basically tin brad nailed over a wood framework. When the wood rotted away (this was 1974) it was all too flimsy. A bunch of cars were built that way. We had a ton of manufactures in the us building cars all over the US who went down the dumper after a few years and that left those cars with little or no support for repair parts. Some of those have a hand full of examples sitting in museums around the country but when was the last time you saw someone driving a Star at an event of any kind. Scrap drives over the years or scrap prices cleaned out of a lot of even interesting 70's cars or parts donors. A lot of 80's and 90's cars, Even if they have a real nice body and interior they are often too damned expensive or hard to fix. That 2000 Cad DTS I had was an example of that. Changing the back spark plugs was a challenge beyond belief and changing the back valve cover gasket called for loosening the subframe and letting the engine drop down several inches for clearance. My wife's 77 Monte Carlo has a bolt holding the heater hose pipe that is not accessible to anyone except those with very nimble fingers.
I'm guessing safety regulations get more cars scrapped in Europe that they do in the US. I spent 2 years in England and had a 10 year old Ford Cortina that wouldn't pass MOT and I couldn't afford to get it to pass. I drove it anyway of course.
When you look up how many car companies merged or outright folded in the late fifties and sixties you get a bit of the picture. Popularity of lower production cars only dwindled after that for years. Combined with massively increasing population. And way back a car was considered a beater after a few years. So they didn't see a point in building a bathtub Nash with a flat six when they could get a 57 Bel Air hardtop with a 283 for literally a few dollars more. And lesser popular cars were likely to get crushed or used to fight river bank erosion. Then when the lesser cars gained some popularity the even fewer left were harder and more expensive to get parts for. You can build a 32 Ford now with factory correct stampings without using a single part older than 2023. Meanwhile even on a more mainstream car like my 53 Bel Air while there are a lot of parts available the majority of the available trim is rechromed and only patch panels for the bottom of the doors and quarters....no full skins. And average old car driver isn't going to redo their own car.....at least not most of it. On a solid clean and complete fifties car a resto can still run $20-40k plus. So even with someone willing to throw $ away they aren't going to want to spend $40k on a car worth $20k finished. And at this point majority of people think of iconic cars when hunting a vintage rod. So even if they're willing to settle for an off brand they'll still want a car that has a similar look. My old snap on dealer for example. He wanted a 55 Chevy. But he came across a really clean original 56 Pontiac hardtop in nice driver shape (almost too nice to fall in driver shape) for about what people were wanting for rusty incomplete 55 Chevy roller shells. Combined with USA hotrodders having a tendency to follow trends hard(while claiming to dare to be different lol), the intervening 60-80 years, and recycling drives the off brands just really didn't stand a chance
Once I pull it out of hibernation I have a similar car that'd blow your mind if a reg lumina got you lol. Full on custom 97 monte Carlo (glorified 2 door lumina). Supercharged engine, interior swap, beefed up suspension with a drastic drop, heavy(but low-key) body modifications to fit wide wheels (can clear 11" wide wheels in rear and 10" in front.... possibly 12" rear and 11" front of offset and backspacing is dead on). And completely 100% rust free. It'll likely get relegated to my long trip and winter ride.
I think a lot of common cars from earlier times have vanished because they were so common. The basic run of the mill transportation vehicles that 1/2 the people in town had were just used until they were wore out. Then they were either traded in, sold to some kid, or scrapped out. The people that had those common cars usually bought what ever the the popular common car was, and the trend continued. When the 1st round of the common transportation cars were wore out and discarded, few were ever saved. Those few that made it through became the cars with the cult following, everyone remembered them because everyone had one. If they were dependable cars, those previous owners wanted another one, 20 years later. Then there was the not common cars, the strange things very few people bought. The non-main stream people bought those cars because they were not the common cars everyone else was driving. Those are the car that seemed to get stuffed into garages, sheds, and fields. Even though less were built, probably a high percentage of the ones built may still exist today. People still want them today because most of those cars are still not common, and really stand out in the crowd. If we really look, how many of the most popular car models from 15 or 20 years ago are still around? Many have simply disappeared. How many would buy one now if a nice example would turn up at a decent price? Do you realize what is considered a decent price these days is probably what the cars sold for new off the showroom floor? Its the same deal with that strange, unpopular car from the same time period. People would still want to buy it simply because it is still different from the "normal" cars on the road. Time passes, cars change, people still want what was popular, or what was very different and stood out in the crowd of the popular cars, from their past.
Many pre-c.1933 cars went away because of the ease with which they disassembled into relatively small, relatively simple, relatively generic parts. A neglected car could easily reach a point where it's worth more as a job-lot of useful hardware than as a car. The history of the automobile from c.1933 to c.1989 can be typefied as a gradual transition of the car as a collection of parts to the car as a necessarily — and eventually legally constituted — unitary entity. That can also be expressed as a transition from processes of manufacture, repair, and maintenance being practically identical, to those processes being completely separate, with no overlap between them at all. This rush towards One Big Part, which you can either have or not have, with no intermediate qualification, was not spontaneous; it was neither technologically necessary nor historically inevitable. It was driven by interests which the most cursory analysis of the institutions involved would reveal. "Originality" means little in a context where, apart from major castings and forgings, making a car is pretty much the same kind of thing as keeping it running. This was indeed reflected in the early old-car enthusiast movement, where making replacement parts with more regard to broad appropriateness than exact correctness was common and accepted. I have a few books dating from the mid-'50s and oriented to the Veteran/Edwardian/Vintage enthusiast, which describe processes for remaking a variety of components, in which a lot of leeway as to design is implicit. And excepting the work of a few historical masters, this is wholly unobjectionable.
Are these prop cars or just a random sampling of what was parked on the streets during the filming? If they had to procure cars, either they were bought cheap, borrowed. The rental thing for car props is more recent. Sure cars are gone.... they hit 90k miles and they were at the end of their lifetimes. Not many owners really loved cars like they do today. Post WWII, they were point A to point B and sometimes the ugly ducklings were the hot ticket.
With apologies to the Mods, The '80s and 90s stuff is what the next generation is lusting over. Talk to y'alls 15 year old grandkids and look at some car pictures: they are usually buggeyed by 1920s-30s cars. 40s cars are "bonnie and cylde", '50s are gaudy grandpa cars, '60s and 70s muscle cars are redneck or cool but too expensive, but that 1991 Honda hatchback is the "fire" along with the lifted 1996 toyota truck. Much like many of us, they are nostalgic to the simpler times, just before they were born. For my generation (mid 30s now) the late '50s and early '60s ugly ducklings fall into that same category. Affordable nostalgia, for the simpler, more interesting times that we JUST missed. Besides, all you old guys bought up and horded all the cool old cars. Sure, a '57 Chevy hardtop is awesome, but I cant pony up $25k+ to get into a decent one, I will never be rich enough to own a '32 ford, but I can spent $5k for some running, driving Valiant, Edsel, Studebaker, Rambler, etc. I would rather drive a ugly '40s-'60s beater 4 door than some 2024 Toyotathon miracle wagon, any day.
Dull cars are just entry level hot rods. Eventually some become popular. There are always naysayers, but there are still guys happy to have fun with something old.
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