Some of my oversights were really obvious head-clutchers (e.g., Trabant, Saab 96, De Tomaso Pantera), while others required making all sorts of crypto-arbitrary judgment calls. In order to prevent the flood of hate mails I got from Land Rover, Jeep, and Toyota FJ freaks with Part I, we're going to make one seemingly obvious point even more obvious:
NO TRUCKS! NO TRUCKS! CARS ONLY!
Got it? And, once again, we're denying the Ford Fox and Panther platforms and the Volvo 140/240 entrance to this list. That doesn't mean we don't love those cars (in fact, I've owned at least one of each), but each underwent a major chassis redesign before it hit the magical 20-year mark. I'm still not convinced that the C2 and C3 Corvettes are the same car, and Ford's nostalgic reissue of a handful of ceremonial Model Ts doesn't add another year of production to the T's scorecard. Feel free to debate the merits of these decisions in your comments, but try to keep the venom level at or below rattlesnake level. OK, here we go, in order of years of seniority:

Morgan 4/4
54 years (1955-present)
When Morgan redesigned the suspension for the 4/4 Series II in 1955, they figured there wouldn't be much need to change anything after that. Engine suppliers come and go, so they've had to change powerplants every so often (the current 4/4 comes with a Ford Duratec four), but otherwise the Morgan remains pretty much the same wood-framed machine our grandparents knew and loved.
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Lotus / Caterham Seven
52 years (1957-present)
You don't see Sevens on the street very often, since the racetrack is this car's natural habitat, but they are road-legal motor vehicles and thus qualify for this series. Lotus built the Seven until 1972, and Caterham (and about 500 million others) have kept the production lines going since then.
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Hongqi CA770
40 years (1958-1998)
Even the Great Helmsman himself needed a car, for those occasions when he had to inspect the progress of the Great Leap Forward, and there was no way that the People's Republic Of China was going to let the running dogs of imperialism outdo them when it came to classy luxury rides for important government officials. Thus was the Hongqi CA770 limousine born. It appears to have ZIS ancestry, but the Bamboo Curtain keeps such sensitive state secrets from our hands.
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Nissan President 150/250
24 years (1965-1989)
Until replaced by a stretched version of the car we know as the Infiniti Q45, Nissan's luxury flagship was the mighty President. The styling appears to have hints of Mercedes-Benz W123 and Plymouth Volaré, and power came courtesy of the President-only Nissan Y OHV V8.
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Trabant
34 years (1957-1991)
There's not much to say about the most famous Warsaw Pact vehicle of all: two pistons, two strokes, plastic body, and more than three million made. Primitive by any standard, but it put East Germany on wheels!
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Bristol Type 603
33 years (1976-present)
The case could be made that the 603 was really just a warmed-over version of the 1946 Bristol line, but we're setting the 1976 body redesign as the cutoff. You could get a 603 with a Chrysler 318 or 360, and some even came with factory turbocharging!
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Lada Niva
32 years (1979-present)
I dismissed the Lada Niva for its truckishness the first time around, but Unicmanest has convinced me that it's no more a truck than was the AMC Eagle or Subaru Outback. And no, there's no possible way to convince me that the Land Rover was really a car.
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Toyota Century
30 years (1967-1997)
The first generation of the Toyota Century limo, which was based on the Crown luxury car, stayed pretty much the same for 30 years. Why tinker with a successful formula? The "Toyota Hemi" V series V8 powered this perennial zaibatsu favorite.
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Lotus Esprit
28 years (1976-2004)
This was a really tough one, but I'm going to say that the endless series of minor mutations in the Esprit kept it essentially the same car for its run.
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Shanghai SC760
27 years (1964-1991)
It's tough to get good information about Chinese cars designed before Nixon's 1972 trip, but it appears that the Shanghai SC760 was an all-Chinese design and remained virtually unchanged throughout its production run.
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Studebaker Avanti / Avanti II
25 years (1962-1987)
I wanted to stay away from the slippery slope of replica cars, if only to avoid the nightmare of dealing with Cobra replicas, but the Avanti II was built using the original Studebaker frames and tooling and thus qualifies. The engines were small-block Chevrolets (proper Studebaker V8s being unavailable), but otherwise we're dealing with genuine Avantis.
Suzuki Alto / Maruti 800
25 years (1984-present)
The Maruti 800, still in production in India today, is based on the second-gen Alto. It has a long way to go in order to match the Hillman Hunter/Hindustan Ambassador, but 25 years is a good start!
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Rolls-Royce Corniche
24 years (1971-1995)
There's not much you need to change on a car like this, so Rolls-Royce stuck with a winning formula.
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Rolls-Royce Phantom VI
23 years (1968-1991)
374 were made. The Queen got two of them. Any questions?
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Wartburg 353
23 years (1965-1988)
With only seven moving parts in the engine, there wasn't much to go wrong with this East German machine.
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Audi 100 C3 / FAW Hongqi CA7200/CA7300
(21 years) 1982-2003
FAW (or some copycat) might still be making Audi C3-based cars in China now, but we can't be sure. We are sure, however, that the production run lasted at least 20 years.
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Jaguar XJS
21 years (1975-1996)
Should this car be lumped in with the XJ6, just because the chassis is pretty much the same? Blasphemy!
De Tomaso Pantera
21 years (1970-1991)
Can we write about the Pantera without mentioning Vince Neill and his ill-fated 3-block trip to the liquor store? Apparently not! Anyway, the Ford Cleveland-powered Pantera stayed more or less the same for the entirety of its production run, and we all want one!
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Reliant Regal
21 years (1951-1972)
Yes, three-wheelers with closed bodies count as cars. The Reliant Robin nearly qualified as well, but missed by a couple of years.
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Volkswagen Karmann Ghia
20 years (1955-1975)
I left the Karmann Ghia out the first time because it's just a Beetle pan with a sporty body, but that wasn't fair. The Karmann Ghia was a distinct model! Too bad the Brazilians didn't keep making it for an extra 30 years.
Reliant Scimitar
20 years (1964-1984)
The first few generations of Scimitar were pretty much the same car under the skin.
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Saab 96
20 years (1960-1980)
How did I miss this car the first time around? Its ancestry stretches well beyond 20 years, but a couple of decades as perhaps the best two-stroke car ever made is accomplishment enough.
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Cadillac D Body
20 years (1977-1997)
I was very skeptical about including this car in the list, but Cadillac ice-racer William sold me on it. He also came up with some exhaustingly comprehensive rules for determining eligibility for the All-Time Survivors list, and I'll post them pretty soon, but for now I'll just share what he had to say about the Caddy D:
Of course it's the downsized Cadillac Rear Wheel Drive Fleetwood/de Ville ("D" Body), introduced on Cadillac's 75th anniversary for '77. Built from August 1976 until July 1997, the new "Right-Sized" Caddie (and GM's first full metric car) came in a variety flavors (de Ville sedan and two door, Brougham & Fleetwood) and a litany of engines: The program started with the L33 425, last of the "big iron" Caddie V-8's (down from the glory days 500 CID and nearly the same digits in torque), and soldiered on with the most diverse/bizzare collection of engines ever to grace a motor car: 368 Cadillac "Sleever," LF9 Buick diesel V-8, 253 Buick V-6 (the first non-V-8 for a Cadillac), the "8-6-4" disaster variant of the 363, an Oldsmobile 5.6, and finally the Cadillac "GM Corporate V-8 engine of Tomorrow" (forgotten the next day) the All-Aluminum cam eating 4.1 HT. And that's just the first ten years. Sure the de Ville and Fleetwood nameplates bailed to the dark side going front wheel drive in 1985 but the Brougham soldiered on in venerable "D" body glory for another decade and more.

The engine-of-the-week theme continued with an Oldsmobile 307 LG8, Chevy 5.0L and finally the Chevy 5.7. With the beginning of the Republican power shift, production packed up and moved to Texas to be closer to oil millionaires who would soon rule/ruin the world. The 1994 re-deux took the "D" body into the world of suppository-based styling complete with Corvette-derived LT-1 350, but in reality it was just a re-skin with the same frame and underbody of Grandpa's car. GM corporate greed and America's thirst for pickup trucks finally made the plant more desirable for more profitable mobile gun rack production and the last GM rear wheel drive passenger car was retired, but only after Elvis and 1.7 million examples had left the building for the last time.

20 years? The (separate) frame, main body structure (more steel alone than most complete cars) is the same from the first to the last. Panel for panel all are the same until '93, when the got out the hasp and rounded out the edges. But nothing else built by Detroit comes even close, so I think we have a strong candidate for the something that was truly Big Three built "big iron" and didn't finish out its production life in exile in Argentina (though likely this was the car exiles in Argentina where driving)..

Yesterday was filled with change- some of it good, some of it bad, and some of it found under the cushions of the sofa. The trophy-winning Dodge took home a well-deserved Crack Pipe prize, and Jalopnik Commenting 2.0 brought cheers from a hungry and appreciative commenterati. But today we're getting back to brass tacks. That's because brass tacks were what was used to build the interior of our Nice Price or Crack Pipe contender - a 1986 Jaguar XJS that has had more work done than Madonna, but is hella-more British.

Jaguar had an impressive run starting in 1949 with the XK120 sports car. Sleek, fast, and reasonably priced became synonymous with the brand's two-door sportsters. 1961 brought the legendary, and incredibly rewarding to drive E-Type which, through four iterations - concluding with the dachshund-like V12 - brought exotica to the masses. Replacing the long-in-the-tooth E was tough for cash-strapped Jaguar, and instead of developing a new platform for the next two-door, they used the underpinnings of the XJ sedan, already seven years old at the time. The result was the XJS, and its grand-tourer image stood in sharp contrast to the lithe sporting pretensions of the E-Type.

Like the E-Type, the 1976 model-year S was styled by Malcolm Sayer, and the story goes that it was the last Jag personally approved by Sir William Lyons. Despite being introduced at the height of the first gas crisis, the car was exotic in feature, if not in appearance. The 5.3 litre V12, which had first made an appearance in the E and XJ12 sedan, elevated the coupe into the same haughty league as Ferrari and Lamborghini, and was the only English V12 sold at that time.

Jaguar managed to muddle through the remainder of the disco era, and made some headway in the ‘80s, enough so that Ford envisioned eventual profitability for the brand, buying the company in 1989. Before that happened however, our '86 XJS left its Coventry birthplace, and first suckled at the petrol-soaked teat of OPEC's deliverers.

The seller appears to have been trying to unload this car for some time, and remarks that the auction reserve has been lowered "due to the recession". That can only serve to cut into his profit margin as it's evident that he has dumped some cash into making it both shiny and mobile. The paint is reasonably fresh, and pictures provide evidence that it was a bare-metal job. Not only that, but you get two of the H.E. V12 motors- one installed, and a spare - it is British after all. He has also installed a Hess and Eisenhardt Sunroof and has a complete set of Dayton 90-spokes in case you want to go full Cleveland. And despite his claim of being cognizant of the realities of our nation's current financial doldrums, he's still trying to sell this 23-year old, 9MPG boat for $40,000. That kind of wampum gets you all the goodies listed in the ad, plus a woefully claustrophobic interior and climate control that does little of what its name implies. Also, while later cars came as cabriolets and full drop-tops, this year only coupes were available so you can't enjoy the wind in your hair while watching that gas gauge roll over to E and will have to develop the "Lane Change Wince" caused by just missing the horn-blaring Kenworth which was hidden in the blind spot of the flying buttress.

But it's a big V12 coupe, and it has a presence, and there's a significant following to the marque so you'd run with a fun, and dedicated crowd. And it's veddy, veddy British, which is always a nice thing when you're justifying trying to track down which of the three fuse boxes (no, I'm not kidding) has the blown wiper fuse - in the pouring rain.

So, does $40,000 feel like the right spot for 24 cylinders of big cat scat? Or does that sound like a seller who's been sniffing more than just cans of B.R.G. Krylon?

You decide!

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The elegant flying buttresses of the XJS are a perfect setup for a truck bed in the back, easily accomplished in this case with the removal of the trunk lid and the installation of a bulkhead and some aluminum plates. We'd have preferred some nice teak bed boards held in place with chrome strips, but beggers can't be choosers. It's definitely a helluva lot nicer than the clapped out version we saw in Project Car Hell. Now all it needs is some llamas in the back. [Autoblog.it]

Now that the rain has finally stopped, I can get down to making the Sprite roadworthy; such is Project Car Hell when you don't have a garage. One of the showstoppers- in addition to the lack of brake function and any semblance of a wiring harness- has been the terrible steering wheel that came with the car. Any torque on the wheel makes the spokes pull out of the tape, and I don't trust JB Weld to repair it properly. While I'm sure an Austin-Healey fanatic would fire the wheel straight to a wizened old steering-wheel restorer back in England, I'd rather eat a bushel of Circus Peanuts than spend £400 on the correct wheel. Supposedly you can get Mountney hub adapters to get an aftermarket wheel on a Sprite, but that's still going to set me back close to 100 clams, or bones, or whatever you call them. No, my steering wheel budget is more like 15 bucks!


There's no way in hell that any wheel out of Detroit is going to fit my car, and the all-metric German and Japanese wheels weren't going to bolt on either. Got to be British! Casadelshawn of the Faster Farms Belvedere spotted a chrome-bumper Midget (identical to the Sprite) in a junkyard in Sacramento while I was off covering the Gator-O-Rama, but the little MG had been picked clean by the time I got back to Alameda and could make the 90-mile trek to the state capitol. Let's see, what's the only British Leyland product that's plentiful in the cheap self-service junkyards around here? That's right: the Jaguar XJ! My first target was this Series 1 XJ-6's wheel. Sadly, the splined steering shaft on this car was bigger than the one on the Sprite.


But what's this a few cars down in the same yard? Why, it's a 1974 XJ12, which (according to some very headache-inducing online research) used a different wheel than its downscale six-banger sibling. Sure enough, the V12 Jag steering wheel is a direct replacement for the little Sprite's, right down to the rim diameter! The horn button doesn't quite work- a bit of corrosion in the contacts, which didn't really come as a surprise- but I'll sort that out later. Next step: a wiring harness that allows me to fire up the engine without twisting wires together!

There was much grumbling in the pits about the "really nice XJ-S," with talk about the impossibility of getting "such a nice car" for under $500. Nonsense! Anyone who reads Project Car Hell knows that you can get running, good-looking V12 Jaguars for next to nothing… and this one was actually a crude Tijuana bad-welds-and-bondo salvage job under the skin. For a big luxury machine- with all accessories still intact, including the stereo and ashtray- this car was pretty quick on the track, with a best lap of 1:42.746, and its 27th-place finish was very, very impressive. They stirred up some controversy over on Autofiends, thanks to the much-disputed cleanliness of a pass of the V.I.P. BMW, which really adds to the post-race fun.


This car was actually leading the race at the end of Day One, but some reading of the fine print was in order: Supreme LeMons Court Justice Lieberman heard the engine in this car during the BS Inspection- and it sounded terrible, even by very lenient Malaise British standards- and bestowed a whopping 50-lap bonus on the team. Ha ha, funny joke… right? Then, of course, the clattery, Lucas-haunted Triumph just refused to die, going around and around and around the track. Its best lap time of 1:54.673 was- for lack of a better word- gastropodal, but when the race was over, Team Cape Coventry was the triumphant- get it?- owner of the invented-just-for-the-occasion Alfetta Versus TR7 Challenge trophy. 21st place, or 56th place if you don't believe in bonus laps.


The Buick V6-powered Wedginator, which did most of its laps at the SF '08 race behind a tow truck (thanks to fuel-system woes), performed much better this time around, with an 82nd place finish. Its best lap time of 1:40.567 was about a week faster than its Triumph-powered rival- and up there with the E30s and RX7s- but too many thrilling driving adventures led Chief Perp Lamm to put it on the trailer on Sunday. Don't worry, Wedginators, there's always Reno!


This Chevy-powered XJ-6 is a much-battered vet of many previous LeMons events, but it didn't seem to be running quite right this time, with a second-only-to-the-Bipolar-Express best lap of 2:06.140.

There are ordinary Project Car Hell vehicles, and then there are the heavyweights. The projects that, in the words of the prophet John in Revelations 20:10, will have you "thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever." In fact, the Book Of Revelations is the only shop manual you'll need with a PCH Heavyweight, and quite a bit of it is devoted to the V12-equipped Malaise Era Jaguar. In '82, you could buy a new XJ-S in the USA for $32,100 (about 72 grand today), but some pollutin' folks decided they wanted the 299-horsepower UK-market engine instead of the emissions-friendly 262-horse unit and imported their own. And, of course, those buyers headed right to the DMV, where Franz Kafka himself was waiting for them behind the counter. Fast-forward 25 years, and we find this '82 (go here if the ad disappears), which has a steering wheel on the left side and a price tag of just $695. Whoa, that's just over $50 per cylinder! Only 37,000 miles on the clock, never titled in the USA… is that the deal of the century or what? In a sentence that pretty much sums up Malaise Jag ownership, the seller states that he or she "Had running once but not run in the past few years." Perhaps the Prince Of Darkness fuel injection (PODFI) system is a contributing factor to the non-runningness, but you'll sort that out. Thanks to Delsysdsoftware for the tip!

We never get tired of V12s here, and we also never get tired of the Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9. It's got a big hairy V8, it's got a Citroënesque hydropneumatic suspension, and it's got Top Mob Boss Grade luxury. In 1977, you'd have spent $39,377 for one. In 2008 dollars, that's about $141,000… but some folks don't understand the real value of these machines, which is why depreciation has gnawed away an astonishing 99.7% of the inflation-adjusted value of this 1977 Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 (go here if the ad disappears). That's got to be some sort of record, and you can be the beneficiary of this madness. Fainthearted types might think the seller's statement "this was a parts car i didnt use very many parts off of" is on the disquieting side, but the engine is (allegedly) good! We'll admit the transmission is bad, but the junkyards are full of V8 Benzes, and maybe the transmission out of a non-6.9 will bolt right up and not explode immediately. As for the suspension, how hard could it be? Hey, you can probably get this car for less than 400 bucks; in fact, "whatever you have to get it out of my yard" will take it away.

Why the heck didn't Jaguar put truck beds on their cars straight from the factory? Take the XJ-S, for instance: V12 torque, comfy leather interior, beautiful lines- in short, everything you want in a cartruck! Obviously, it falls to the Jaguar owner to deal with this shortcoming. Those of you who have been planning to build your own XJ-Schero can save many months of hard work by starting with this Rancheroized 1990 Jaguar XJ-S as the basis of your project. For some inexplicable reason, this car failed to sell for the chump-change price of two grand, and that means the seller is likely ready to deal! The seller, clearly unaware of the naming convention for cartrucks, has named this '90 XJ-S a "Jagmino," but the inclusion of a free '85 parts car makes up for the incorrect name. Yes, you get two Jags for the price of one here! There's no fuel tank, no back window, and no bed floor, and of course you get some funky E-Type carburetors to make things more interesting. Those minor headaches will be nothing compared to the pride you'll feel cruising your V12 Jagchero around town, however- a few repairs, some fabrication... how hard can it be? Thanks to BZR (who already has a PCH Tipster T-shirt) for the tip!

We like a V12 cartruck, that's for sure! But what if the future really will be about the electric car? You won't want to be caught driving weenie plastic bubblecars, and of course nobody is going to be able to afford the Tesla. No, if the electric-car future really happens, the Jalopnik-Approved™ approach will be something more along the lines of what Plasma Boy has done with his electric Datsun 1200. That's right, a drag racer that burns electrons! Of course, a rear-engined/rear-drive machine gives you better traction off the line, but that doesn't mean your high-voltage machine needs to be a VW or even a Porsche. Leave those machines to the conformists, because you'll be blasting out of the lights in this electric 1968 Renault 10 (go here if the ad disappears), which is available for just $1,500. What we have here is a 40-year-old French car with a 28-year-old electric conversion that's been sitting for decades, so you have to figure on at least a few hours of tinkering before it's ready to be used as an environmentally friendly daily driver. The daily-driver stage will be a temporary way station on your way to taking on Plasma Boy at the strip, however, and that means you'll need to get busy beefing up the chassis to handle the mighty torque of a monster electric motor and the weight of batteries. Hey, maybe rust isn't even a major factor here! Thanks, plus a half-credit towards a PCH Tipster T-shirt, to LTDScott.

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