More obscure than even the early “Swallowtails,” the Mk1 Volkswagen Golf Van might be the rarest of all Mk1s, and one of the most interesting.
Posts tagged 1980s
Gallery: Radwood PNW 2021
We usually post show galleries to our Facebook page, but not everybody uses that platform, so for the first time ever we’ve decided to host a gallery here. All of these photos were taken at…
Honda Accord Aerodeck: The Shooting Brake Experiment
At the end of the eighties the Honda Accord became America’s best-selling car, the first foreign car to achieve that title, though this Accord Aerodeck wasn’t involved in that particular quest. It was 1989. Honda…
Range Rover Classic: The Beginning of the Luxe Truck
Even Bentley and Rolls-Royce make SUVs today, as unusual as that idea might once have seemed, and 2021’s roads are chock-a-block with luxe utilities. That might not have happened if not for two pioneering trucks,…
Mk3 Honda Prelude: The Prelude Perfected
When the second-generation Honda Prelude came along, it defined the car. Sure, the first generation had been modestly successful, but the sedate Mk1 Prelude always drew complaints that it wasn’t fast enough or sharp enough….
1980 Pontiac Yellowbird: Birds of a Feather
It sure is yellow! And appropriately so, since this is a Pontiac Firebird “Yellowbird,” a one-year-only special model for 1980, obtained by checking off RPO W73. By this time the 2nd-gen Firebird was ten years…
Decade: 10th Anniversary Mazda FC RX-7
Everybody’s celebrating “100 years of Mazda” this week (though it did not build any vehicles until 1931) so here’s an actual anniversary Mazda – 1988’s 10th Anniversary RX-7. Mazda’s road to recovery from its slump…
Acura Integra Mk1: The Social Climber
It’s fair to say that nobody was quite sure how American customers would react to luxury cars from Japan in January of 1985. In the works since 1981, it was that month that Honda introduced…
SUV Mania: 1993 Ford Explorer Limited
The year was 1985. Just a year earlier, famous auto exec and future Chrysler and GM product Czar Bob Lutz had returned to Dearborn, Michigan. He was still working for Ford then, and fresh off…
The Cadillac of Minivans: Oldsmobile Silhouette
GM’s first attempt at minivans, the long-lived 1985 Chevy Astro/GMC Safari, were more “van” than “mini.” This wasn’t so surprising since they were designed in a hurry and therefore based mostly on off-the-shelf truck components….
Modern Vanning: Toyota HiAce 4wD
In its first few years, it was only a Toyota, but the 4th-gen HiAce van has been in production in various countries since the spring of 1989 and is still being churned out in fair…
Raising Arese: Alfa-Romeo Milano
The Alfa-Romeo 75 was the House of Arese’s replacement for the first “Nuova Giulietta,” which ran from 1977 to 1985, but Americans had never seen the wedge-shaped Giuletta, or the AlfaSud, or the Alfa Six,…