Pleasanton Street Sighting - 1988 CMC Tiffany Classic

This week we're looking at cars from the 1980s that are uniquely a product of their time. Well, maybe not. Neo-classics have been a thing for decades. Ever since the Excalibur of the 1960s, people have been building cars that evoke the golden age of 1930s luxury and sports roadsters. Over the years we've seen the Clenet, Spartan II, Sceptre, Zimmer Golden Spirit among dozens of others, even such modern oddballs as the Mitsuoka Le Seyde and the SixTen Spirit. More exacting or approximate replicas of 1930s cars were also made, like the Auburn Speedster, Cord, Duesenberg II, Bugatti 35X, Mercedes 500K and Jaguar SS 100. Usually neoclassics use fiberglass parts on a donor body with contemporary chassis and drivetrain. They range from professionally coachbuilt cars to do-it-yourself fiberglass kits. A company called Classic Motor Carriages offered numerous products during the 1980s, ranging from Shelby Cobras, '34 Fords, Porsche 356 Speedsters, MG TDs and Gazelle "1929 Mercedes" roadsters. Perhaps the most extravagant of all of these was the Tiffany Classic.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1984 Excalibur Series IV Phaeton

One often-forgotten niche in automotive history is the Neo-Classic, a new car built to mimic the style of long, luxurious cars of the 1930s while employing modern technology in its construction. They were popular for a time, mainly in the 1970s and '80s, and were usually built using fiberglass bodies and parts supplied by various manufacturers from Detroit and abroad. Such small coachbuilders as Zimmer, Clenet, Spartan, Gatsby, Panther, Gazelle, Sceptre, Tiffany and several others came and went, their models often loosely resembling a 1920s or '30s Mercedes roadster and incorporating full fenders, fake external exhaust piping out the hood sides, wire wheels, external spare tire shells. Some utilized middle sections taken from such contemporary cars as Volkswagen Beetle convertibles (Clenet), Nissan 300ZX (Spartan II), Mercury Cougar and Ford Mustang (Zimmer), and MG Midget (Sceptre). One might call them the "retro" craze of their day, much like the factory-built retro cars of the late 1990s and early 2000s such as the Chrysler PT Cruiser and Ford Thunderbird. One of the original, and biggest names in neo-classics was Excalibur.