This month we're marking the Christmas holiday season with a silly theme: All I Want For Christmas Is "U". That means cars with the letter U in their brand name. We started with BUICK and DATSUN. This one is a 1984 Peugeot 505 STI.
If Santa can go around the world in one night, surely we can manage it in a couple of weeks. It's rare to find a French car of any kind in this day and age. The Peugeot 505 is one of the more commonly found survivors but still not something you see every month. This one turned up locally a few months after I saw it on display at the Radwood NorCal show in San Francisco. It wasn't until I checked the plates that I realized it was the same car. I love that cars from the 80s and 90s, many at the bottom of their depreciation arc and snapped up by nostalgic millennials and zoomers, are finally being preserved and appreciated instead of scrapped.
We've looked at a 1984 505 once before, over a decade ago. This one is still alive. The paint quality could be better and doesn't look original at all, but it runs under its own power. Peugeot got remarkable longevity out of this platform, producing over 1.3 million 505s in over a dozen countries. I've heard great things about the ride quality and comfort of these cars, and the brown leather seats do look nice. Parts support is questionable being a near-40-year old car whose maker wasn't known for great service even when they still had a dealer network here in the '80s. This one is an STI trim, which came with a naturally aspirated 2.0 liter four-cylinder engine producing some 96 horsepower. Peugeot also offered the 505 with a diesel option, and with a turbo. Later cars offered the troubled Peugeot-Renault-Volvo "PRV" 2.8 liter V6 also found in cars like the DeLorean and Eagle Premier. For anyone questioning the mechanical reliability of the four-banger cars, I looked up the vehicle history and this car has over 500,000 miles on it. I can forgive a bit of orange peel.
As for the rest of the California Peugeot population, I'm still on the lookout for a 505 wagon. I haven't seen one in a very long time.
Photographed September 2023
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