Well, probably not- a career of filming Ukrainian junkies performing lewd acts with surplus Soviet Navy dental gear requires more dedication to one's craft than I can muster. Anyway, during 1984 and 1985 I put together a few short Super 8 films, with my sleazeball friends as cast and plenty of beater vehicles. You've already seen the protagonist of The Green Death, a cautionary sex-education film warning America's youth of a brain-dissolving STD, siphoning gas for his '68 Cyclone, and now I've dug up a few outtakes from The Phone Police, a crypto-documentary showing the psychosurgical methods employed by lab-coated, Ford Granada-driving rent-a-cops employed by The Bell System. We've got the beater 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air owned by my friend Willy (seen here flying off the hood of his car) and the evil ex-rental-car 1979 Ford Granada that spent most of the 1980s as La Familia Martin's vehicular punching bag; I believe it had already been wrecked and repaired with junkyard parts on three occasions at the time of The Phone Police's shooting.

Vehicle: Ford Fairmont wagon (I believe it's a 1978, as the '79-on models seem to have amber front parking lamps).

Location: Jaffrey, New Hampshire

It's about 100 feet from where I photographed the International Harvester, Thunderbird, and Model A (not the Model T, that was up the street).

Another one I've been stalking, this car's been in town for years, but I haven't caught it street-parked until now. The rub strips on the doors are in interesting condition, as if they're very lightly but completely surface-rusted. My first impression of it was "wow, Ford couldn't even be bothered to make it look like FAKE wood", as it's a brownish color. It wasn't a standard thing, certainly, as this Google-sourced photo shows, but then, it doesn't have the awful black bumper trim either, so it could be a poorly-chosen aftermarket thing.

The cargo area's got tools and a couple bottles of motor oil inside, indicating that the owner works on the car himself (or herself, I suppose). The interior appears to be in decent shape (and matches the exterior, even!), but I couldn't get that good a shot of it, due to the rain (which was steadily increasing while I was shooting the car).

All four dog-dishes are present and accounted for, though one's got a good-sized dent in it, and the body's mostly straight, with only a few small rust patches and impact marks (right front fender, front edge of the hood, and the damage to the left rear door). The emblems, aside from the Ford lettering on the grille, are well on their way to becoming Ghosts of Emblems Past.

Unless, of course, the cargo includes a waterbed and a a few hundred hards of purple shag carpeting!

It appears that the guy in the 5, finding himself behind the CX, takes a "short cut" across the countryside in order to reappear… still behind the CX. Some pretty good Franco-hoonage here, and that's what counts!

This 3/4-ton hauler belongs to the Alameda Unified School District, and probably delivered the crates of pencils, gallon jugs of Elmer's Glue, and that terrible pulpy gray paper that I used in elementary school. Nobody notices a plain white cargo van; I've probably seen it hundreds of times and only now have I paid enough attention to photograph it.

It suffers from the usual Northern California top-down rust, which should eat through the metal in another decade or two.

Face it, what does the $9,000,000 '62 Ferrari 330 have that a Malaise Era Alfa or Lancia doesn't have? Wait, don't answer that! Instead, consider this: for around 1/9000th the price, you can have a sporty machine from the very same country!

What kind of car can you get for $1,250 these days? Maybe a 15-year-old Sentra, speckled with shopping-cart dings and filled with the smell of countless spilled McDonald's chocolate shakes? Or an Olds Cutlass Ciera with a potato for a gas cap and Bondo-and-rust clusters falling off on every speed bump? How depressing! But wait- what if we were to find you a genuine Alfa Romeo GTV for that price? A car with just 58,000 miles on the clock, because more than half its life has been spent sitting in a garage… waiting for you to rescue it? No, really! Here's a "garage find" '74 Alfa Romeo GTV (go here if the listing disappears) for next to nothing. It appears to be complete, and the seller says the "motor and tranny seem to be somewhat clean and oil free," which we hope isn't referring to their innards. Who knows, it will never might start right up with a simple tune-up! You might need to do a little metal cutting and pasting once you do have it running, because the seller admits that it has "all the usual rust problems of an alfa," and the registration paperwork will require negotiating labyrinths of bureaucracy you never imagined existed a bit of work, due to the car's "unknown title." Is an unknown title worse than a missing one? Never you mind about that stuff- just buy this project and start enjoying the benefits of an Italian basket case daily driver in about 10 years no time!

Everyone loves an Alfa, of course, but what would Fabio drive? A Lancia, of course! You can still buy Fabio's Appia, which hasn't dropped in price by a single lira in the last couple of years, but you might not have the pecs and/or hair to pull off looking cool in a cute little sedan. But buy this '75 Lancia Beta (go "http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/jalopnik/2009/11/75_lanciabeta-ss.jpg"/>here if the listing disappears) and you'll find your image on the covers of paperback bodice-rippers within weeks of getting it running. Of course, that might be akin to cleaning the Augean stables a couple of weekends of work, considering that it needs a "new timing belt to run and a little TLC" (translation for those of you who don't speak Craigslist-ese: "Something terrible is wrong with the engine, including what you hope will be just the timing belt"). But hey, Mr. or Ms. Thousandaire, imagine yourself behind the wheel of a genuine Italian sports coupe and it will all seem worthwhile.

Mr. Hansen is also the guy who sold a running '72 Mercedes-Benz 280SE 4.5 to a LeMons racer for 500 bucks, so that we might have a Roten Sau shoving those boring E30s and RX-7s into the perceptual background noise. OK, here's "710" for your dancing enjoyment:

Actually, the Arrow did all right for its time, certainly a more interesting car than most of the other vaguely sporty economy machines of the Middle Malaise Era. We wish more Arrows were on the street today, but most were crushed decades ago. Thanks to Joe Hardrock for the tip!

These cars are rare even in their native Japan, so it was an exciting moment for loyal Jalopnik reader Nick to spot one in Central America. Hey, check out that Dave Zinn Toyota emblem on the trunk lid; looks like this car made the drive from Florida to about 1,000 miles to the southwest. Here's what Nick has to say about his find.

So I live in Argentina (originally from Vermont) and had the chance to go to Nicaragua with my dad recently. I spent a couple days attending a fair trade conference and then had some time on my own to travel. I was in Granada when I spied this beautiful toyota than I just had to take some photos of. Unfortunately the windows were completely tinted so I had no shot at seeing inside but I tried my best to capture the car.

I am an avid jalopnik reader without actually knowing much about the history and inner-workings of cars and I've always enjoyed the DOTS section. There is something about older cars that excites me. With this car, I especially liked the "liftback" badge which I had never seen. The whole GT thing also helps.

I've got quite a backlog of DOTSBE vehicles built up, so I'll try to do at least a few every weekend from now on. Thanks for sending 'em in, and for your patience if you've been waiting a year... or two.

That approach made sense, because Datsun dealers were getting tired of all the lust-crazed car shoppers passing them by in favor of custom vans equipped with purple shag carpeting and airbrushed bongs that matched the paint job. Emphasizing the car's "SX appeal" shouldn't have been necessary, though, because the Mid-Malaise 200SX was a good-looking machine that offered decent performance for the time: 97 horsepower in a 2,300-pound, rear-wheel-drive car wasn't too bad by '77 standards.

Known as the Datsun 140J in Europe and the Nissan Violet in Japan, the Datsun 710 was priced between the sporty 610 and the bare-bones B210 in the North American market. You got a 100-horsepower L20 in your $3,469 2-door 710 in 1975, which was pretty steep compared to the $2,769 Pinto or the $2,786 Vega. In fact, $3,195 would have bought you a brand-new '75 Dodge Dart with a V8... but inflation and crazy gas prices were making the Datsuns look pretty good to car buyers back then.

It's always fun when I can get more than one DOTS car in a single photograph, as we see here with the '73 BMW 2002tii in the background.

Check out the laughably cramped passenger compartment in the '77 Datsun King Cab. Why, that microscopic truck would be dwarfed by the '10 Versa! How was it possible that our forefathers accepted such hardships? Truly, they were a stoic and uncomplaining breed.

Let's take a look at the others before we admire today's street survivor:

First, this '72.

Another '72.

Yet another '72.

This '76.

This '77 Traveler.

And this final-year '80. OK, now on to today's truck!


This truck, built during the next-to-last year of Scout production, lives just around the corner from the super-clean '64 Galaxie 500 convertible we saw last weekend. It appears to be a daily driver. Who needs cup holders and faux wood dash trim?

Some might say that Alameda- which is quite urban, completely paved, snow-free, and lacking in any hills of any sort- isn't the kind of place where a Scout makes sense. We disagree, however; a Scout always makes sense!

What can we say? I was going to use it for a Project Car Hell contestant, but what could possibly compete with a 1980 Cadillac Seville limo for this kind of price? Not only that, the seller claims "HELL YES IT DID RUN WHEN PARKED!!!! Rats chewed some of the wires." How hard could it be? And not only do you get the reviled much-sought-after "bustle-back" trunk, you get genuine CIA provenance!
[Craigslist Inland Empire, go here if the listing disappears]

Even though I live in a parking-challenged downtown neighborhood and have maxed out my off-street parking with several cheap heaps, I really really really wanted to go over to San Francisco and buy this car, that very minute (the listing included the ominous words "MUST SELL THIS WEEKEND"). My parents bought two brand-new 1973 128 sedans when I was 6 years old, and at the time I thought they were the most awesome-sounding motor vehicles on the face of the earth. In fact, the engine noise produced by those Fiats may have been what turned me into a car freak at an early age (I choose to not dwell on the fact that both cars were completely kaput within several years and sent my parents scurrying back to Detroit iron for the next decade). Foolishly, I decided that buying a Fiat wasn't my best move, and I never called the seller.

About a week later, I spotted a very Italian-looking profile in the holding yard of the now-defunct Hayward Pick Your Part wrecking yard. Orange, plenty of surface rust, hatchback- why, it's got to be the same car! At this point, I'm really kicking myself; this super-rare Fiat is about to get picked up by a forklift and dumped on the yard, where maybe 1% of its components will be purchased prior to its final ride to The Crusher a few weeks later (and yes, that's an early Scirocco in the background, also doomed to the same fate).

The engine looked intact and the car seemed complete. Junkyard employees just laughed, in traditional junkyard-employee fashion, when I asked about buying the car before it hit the yard: "¡Ja, Ja! ¡Gringo estupido!"

Fast-forward to last weekend. I was at the All-Italian Car And Motorcycle Show and here's an orange Fiat 128 Sport Coupe that sure looks familiar. What the hell's the deal here?


It turns out that the car on Craigslist and the car at the junkyard weren't the same Fiat after all; had I been a bit more knowledgeable about the 128 hatchbacks- which, needless to say, weren't exactly hot sellers in North America- I'd have recognized that one car was a Sport Coupe, while the other was a later 3C; similar cars, but different taillights and badging. The differences might be obvious to you Yurpeans, but I hadn't seen any 128s in the wild for many years.

And, in one of those weird small-world twists, it turns out that I know the car's new owner. It's Jalopnik reader Superasiaone, of Wedginators Buick-V6-powered TR7 24 Hours Of LeMons fame. The car just needed a tune-up to become a decent driver; you can read more about its story here.

The Buick-ized TR7 is long gone and Scratchy Bottom Racing is considering making the 128 Sport Coupe into their next LeMons racer. The car got pretty rusty during its long spell sitting in a San Francisco driveway, but the mechanicals are in great shape. Cars don't get destroyed in post-Altamont LeMons racing, so we might end up seeing a caged 128 SL getting track and street time in the near future.

Meanwhile, we can assume that the poor 3P and its Scirocco neighbor have been crushed by now, no doubt packed into cubes of metal in a Guangzhou-bound container ship at this moment. Contemplate the randomness of automotive survival versus death as you enjoy these galleries:
Fiat 128 3P On Death Row


Fiat 128 SL Gets Rescued

Check out that snazzy steering wheel and two-tone interior!

Of course, we all know now that you pretty much need AWD to negotiate your typical shopping mall parking lot, so maybe Chrysler made a mistake by killing off the Eagle soon after gobbling up AMC in 1987. Could Chrysler have beat Subaru at its own game, had they only kept developing the Eagle?

In North America, the Ford Capri was branded simply "Capri" and sold in Mercury dealerships; the later Mustang-clone Fox Capri had Mercury emblems on the car. I think sufficient time has passed since the Early Malaise Era to permit us to call this car a Ford.

This is only the second Alameda DOTS Capri, after this '72; beloved as these cars were (and are) in Europe, they never really hit it big on our side of the Atlantic. You could buy a new 1974 Capri with the 2.8 liter V6 for $3,807. Compare that to the $3,081 price tag on a 5.0 liter V8-powered '74 Grabber Maverick. Sure, the Capri handled better, but less car for more money?

The only problem with this deal, of course, was the car itself. By 1983, the early GM J Body (Cavalier, Cimarron, etc.) had already made a name for itself as an all-around miserable car, with reliability problems that made owners wish that Fiat would rethink its retreat from the American marketplace. But hey, a new car for cheap!

For the 1,750-pound '81 Rabbit Diesel, Volkswagen felt that 48 horsepower was plenty; in fact, the Rabbit Diesel had a better power-to-weight ratio than the 1,724-pound/53-horsepower '69 Beetle, and diesel torque should have made it feel even quicker. That was not the case, however; I've driven both cars (in fact, I did my driver training classes in a dual-brake-pedal Rabbit Diesel), and the Beetle feels slightly zippy while the Rabbit Diesel feels dangerously slow. Perception? Reality?
Still, these things sip that costly oil through a cocktail straw, giving Rabbit Diesel owners the right to sneer at those resource-depleters in thirsty Priuses. Most of the survivors seem to be the Rabbit pickups, but I was able to find this sedan parked by the Bay, quite close to the '88 Peugeot 505 Turbo.