Buy What You Love, Pay What You Should
Columns
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1970 Lotus Elan Plus 2 Coupe
Most pretty British sports cars of the 1960s and ’70s have appreciated beyond the means of entry-level collectors {vsig}2008-2_2131{/vsig} The original Lotus Elan was introduced in 1962 as a roadster, although an optional hard top was offered in 1963 and a coupe version in 1965. It was the first Lotus road car to use the…
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1967 Iso Grifo Coupe
This Grifo may not seem expensive for long. Euro-Americans are the ultimate street rod, and already great performance can easily be improved {vsig}2008-2_2132{/vsig} Renzo Rivolta started building Isothermos refrigerators before World War II. Following the war, Rivolta recognized another Italian need, transportation, and named his new car company Iso Rivolta. Starting with scooters, he expanded…
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Carrera GT Crash Hits a Nerve
The ink wasn’t even dry when the email inboxes, telephone lines, mailbox, and other forms of communication got red hot The “Legal Files” column in the December 2007 issue of SCM, which discussed the $4.5m settlement of the Carrera GT fatal crash lawsuit, hit a nerve within the SCM community. The ink wasn’t even dry…
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A Dose of Reality in Your Ferrari Dreams
Recently, one early-morning caller wanted an “F1 Ferrari.” That afternoon, another emailed wanting “a race car,” and a later caller wanted either a 246 GTS or a 550. While buying a Ferrari is an inexact science, I start by explaining that all Ferraris are in some way “mission specific.” To the first-time buyer who wanted…
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Extras, Extras, Read All About It!
How about fitted luggage, a child seat that mounted over the center armrest, and leopard-skin seat covers? {vsig}2008-2_2130{/vsig} “Comes equipped with clock, luggage rack, driving lights, detachable hard top, AM/FM radio, and air conditioning.” That’s pretty typical equipment for any new sports car today, and in the 1960s, high-end Jaguars and Aston Martins offered similar…
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A Costly 911 Dream
Don’t let a shop bill you for the time it takes them to gain experience on a complex set of pressed-steel stampings We got plenty of mail on McKeel Hagerty’s 1967 911S restoration story (December, p. 58), including this letter from Pete Zimmermann, longtime SCMer and author of The Used 911 Story. He writes: I…
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“Eldosaurus” Has Evolved into White Elephant
Cadillac had a tough task in replacing its first front-wheel-drive Eldorado, the Bill Mitchell-designed model of 1967-70. Although gigantic, this first-gen front-driver was, like its stablemate the Oldsmobile Toronado, quite beautiful. Its successor, built from 1971 to 1978, was simply large. But the second-gen did have one advantage over its predecessor- it was available as…
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Mucking out the SCM Stable
We began to wonder if the BMW had had some conjugal visits with our failure-prone Fiat 2100 and been the recipient of its DNA You might think that with all the transactions we track, and all the conversations we have, the principals at SCM world headquarters would make nothing but brilliant deals. We’d buy perfect…
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1991 BMW Z1
BMW reckoned owners could swap body panels in hours for a color change, though people who have tried it say to allow two days {vsig}2008-1_2120{/vsig} Like its predecessor the 507, which bristled with trick technology but ultimately failed to go as well as it looked, the Z1 is a bit of a novelty. But it…
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1911 Oldsmobile Limited 7-passenger Touring
Without evidence of time, what does a real object offer the collector that a perfect replica does not as well? {vsig}2008-1_2114{/vsig} Oldsmobile made its name with the tiny single-cylinder “curve dash” buckboard in the early years of the 20th century, but went on to produce one of the most significant and largest early American cars.…