1976 Chevy Caprice / Impala Catalog

[KoolChris]

I've kept an immoderate love, ever since childhood, for American cars, especially those long, wide, powerful, gas-guzzling chrome-and-steel palaces of the '70s.

Among these cars, comes a model I found strange looking, -almost awkward, until 1976 came along, and fitted the Caprice with square headlights, which, from a seemingly minor cosmetic detail, changed a car I had associated with grannies driving to the church down the block, into a bold, cool, badass car that just seemed to say: "lower me, feed me an Alpine, and give me chrome 5-spoke Cragar or Astro Supreme rims, and I'll be set".




Here's the 1976 Catalog for both the Chevy Caprice & Impala:

check out the baaaaad lime green!

[Videoskooter]

What a great collection of boats

I always loved them and a lot of Europeans were crazy about them but they were rare here!

I had one though, my first car ever was a Buick Regal like this one!

[KoolChris]

Originally Posted by Videoskooter

What a great collection of boats

I always loved them and a lot of Europeans were crazy about them but they were rare here!

I had one though, my first car ever was a Buick Regal like this one!

Cool car, VS!! What prompted you to get that particular model? Seeing it in "Kojak"? I like it too!

Living in Belgium, you still have easier access to these cars. From my experience visiting Europe, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium, and most of Scandinavia were markets quite open to US automobile imports, as you spot quite a few more cars , vans, & trucks from various US makes on the roads over there. Moving to Paris in the early '80s was a let-down for me, being so in love with the cars I saw every day in L.A., and all of a sudden being restricted to renault 12, 5, and the like... Before Euro laws kicked in, French import taxes for US cars was 100% of the purchase price, to which you had to add actual import (shipping), crazy insurance premiums etc... Any American car was de facto a luxury car in France...

My favorite cars are the '75 to '77 Eldo, and the Lincoln Town Cars of the same era; I've been hoping for years to buy one; unfortunately, living inside Paris makes owning one extremely impractical: price of gas, scarcity of parts, narrow city streets, carelessness and general stupidity of Parisian "drivers"...





My first car was a '73 Chevy Monte Carlo. I brought my French High school sweetheart to L.A. for summer vacation, and we found this car for $400! Funny thing was that guys were coming up to me all the time, proposing way more than the initial purchase price to buy the car from me, just to transplant the 350 engine into their own rides!...

The car was awesome!! Incredibly powerful engine, a trunk you could hide 5 people in, power seats, access to the gas tank by swinging down the license plate, chrome bumpers and doors that probably weighed more than the average whole Daewoo car... My girlfriend had to push her door with both arms just to be able to close it when she exited the car...
A funny thing happened when we went shopping with a friend who owned a Toyota: upon arrival, Vanessa unfolded herself out of the car, and slammed the door so hard because she hadn't assessed how flimsy the doors of the Toyota were, compared to those of our Chevy, and used the same strength she was used to having to use...