Danville Street Sighting - 1984 Peugeot 505 STI

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.

San Ramon Street Sighting - 1984 Ford Mustang SVO

If you like grey Foxbody Mustangs, you're in luck this week. After an '87 GT coupe, here's the second one, a 1984 Mustang SVO.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1984 Citroën 2CV Charleston

It seems that people with Citroën 2CVs attract shutterbugs like myself. The 2CV with its cartoonish proportions and roll-back fabric sunroof, especially a later-model Charleston special edition with its deep red and black paint, separated by a cheeky swoosh, is a magnet for attention. Millions of the little cars were sold worldwide over four decades, but America was hardly Citroën's best market. I suppose that when you're pinning your hopes on the small and underpowered but very advanced DS as a luxury car in a market dominated by chrome-laden V8 boats, it doesn't do well for the company's upscale image to field a 2-cylinder garden shed on wheels in the same dealership. It was no secret that the 2CV was intended to be a peasant's car from the beginning. Citroën didn't even actively advertise the Deux Chevaux here, and a lot of the cars that exist in the USA were imported later.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1984 Peugeot 505

Carrying a camera around the same city for years can be a blessing and a curse. You see all kinds of cool stuff, but you also see that stuff age. When I first saw this 1984 Peugeot 505, it was one of the cleanest and shiniest examples I'd seen. Four years later, it's baked all over. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. The same thing happened to my 1985 Pontiac 6000 STE after it was parked outside for years, washed rarely, and not waxed. Cars look great under the California sun, but the sun does not like them!

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.