Best say i won’t be making a beater anytime soon 
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1985 Blackwood Astoria – “It’s Hip To Be Square.”
Whether you’re a crooked cop, cosa nostra consigliere or a cunning cabbie, you know that European imports are for yuppie pricks and Japanese imports are for communists – You drive proudly American made cars that are built like bricks and smell like Newports, and the Astoria – named for the neighbourhood in New York City – is the epitome of what it was like to cruise down the worst parts of the Bronx or Los Angeles’ east side, getting nice and up close with society’s gooey underbelly.
Powered by a 3.5L V6 producing 121HP paired to a 3 speed or 4 speed selection of slushboxes, the tall gears make it more than suitable for honking at New Yorkers always walking wherever they please as a yellow cabbie or chasing down errant sun-drunk Californians as a highway patrol car on flimsy drug charges, the Astoria is the be-all, do-all American sedan of the early 1980s with coffee on the seats, a piece in the glovebox and a stiff in the trunk.
And for the rapper who refuses to wear a belt to keep his pants up and the retiree who can now only scantly remember storming the beaches of Normandy, there’s an estate for those who think this new minivan business Centurion is peddling is a load of crap, a good old-fashioned wood-effect all-American station wagon brought to you by the Blackwood Motor Company. The withering picture of the American Dream still lumbers on in this absolute land-barge of a car, the same V6 engines from the sedans coughing out a meagre 19.9 MPG, even worse with the weight of an entire white middle class family and all their stuff piled inside.
Besides, why go taller when you can go longer? Why have a one-piece tailgate when you can have a two-piece that doubles the number of failure points? Why be different when squares are more stable, comfortable and familiar? Plus, when can you say the Panorama got it’s turn in the spotlight as the crime/action car on TV that more often than not was the punching bag for the much faster and frankly cooler cars driven by the heroes and villains on every show and film that came out in the 80s.
From workhorse to movie star, the icon of 1980s misery, crime and despair has never looked better.
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1986 Gotha Leiter 2.6D Executive - “Strength in Simplicity.”
If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to get on the bad side of a mafia boss with an accent hailing from some nondescript post-communist state in Europe or have taken a taxi in West Africa where there’s a new leader every other week, you’ve probably spent a good amount of time in the trunk of a Gotha Leiter. For every German middle manager, Russian mob boss and Mauritanian cabbie, the Leiter that blows black or light grey smoke (depending on the engine’s mood) from the exhaust and leather seats that wrap you like a fly in a spider’s web if you’re even just a little bit moist, is your noble steed.
Powered by engines starting at a lowly 1.9L inline-5 diesel pushing 94HP in the fleet-spec for taxis and polizei use around West Berlin, 2.5L inline-5 diesel pushing 141HP for those looking for more poke, all the way up to a 3.0L inline-6 petrol pushing 297HP in the illustrious but understated RTi for outrunning peeved mafia hitmen shooting at you as you speed down the Autobahn.
Whether waxed and polished every Sunday in a driveway in Geneva as father’s baby or Frankensteined together from various salvaged cars and beaten upon daily on the bustling streets of Ouagadougou as a run-of-the-mill bush taxi, the Leiter is the dependable, dutiful and borderline indestructible workhorse anyone can get no matter where they are in the world.
1987 Gotha Leiter 3.0 RTi – “The Boss Says Guten Tag.”
They say that if you put the Germans and the Japanese together in a room, they either start a world war or they make performance cars. Either way, the engineers will always figure out how to squeeze as much power out of an engine as is physically possible; Nakano over in Japan did it with the Invicta NX4, and now from Cologne’s finest – enter the Leiter RTi. Unlike its angrier younger sibling, the Brise RTi, the Leiter is more stately, refined, elegant and willing to punch you in the gut before any money comes up in conversation.
Under the hood is a 3.0L petrol straight-six with 297HP paired to a LSD-lubricated 6-speed manual. On paper it was hard-limited to a top speed of 155MPH as per the gentlemen’s agreement, but if you had a few extra deutschmarks lying around and asked the ghost of Dieter Gotha very nicely after sacrificing a canister of 15w40 motor oil and coolant each in his honour, you could have that limit removed to push your top speed all the way up to 192MPH.
To match your ludicrous speeds are some ludicrous looks. If the Brise RTi is derived from the mud-wrestling Group B cars, the Leiter RTi is its bare-knuckle boxing DTM counterpart. Only available in either Stealth Bomber Black or Fighter Jet Silver, you also get more powerful foglights, a low-slung sleek bodykit, alloy rims, quad exhaust and a large spoiler to subtle signal to others on the road that they best make way for you, lest they incur the wrath of the car that makes the finest Italian supercars and mightiest American muscle cars sit down.
6 Likes
Here’s some miscellaneous designs I don’t feel are worthy of their own posts so here’s all of them together.
1953 Marquis Jubilee Super Saloon – “Britannia Rules The Waves.”
Picture this; it’s 1953 – The war is over, the empire has just crowned Queen Elizabeth II, British colonies in Africa haven’t taken after India yet, and the utter misery that is British Leyland is still fifteen years away. So right now things are going quite well, and the Marquis Jubilee is here to epitomise the good years of the British car industry. Powered by a 4.2L straight-six engine making 134HP, it’s designed to be butter smooth, quiet and perfectly tailored to insufferably pompous lords, barons and heads of state.
1978 PFS Kabanos 1600 – “Bajo Jajo, Bajo Jajo!”
The star of many a low-quality drifting video around the streets of Warsaw beating out Daewoos and BMWs set to a homemade mixtape of Skaner tracks. Named for the iconic Polish kabanosy smoked sausage, the Kabanos is the pinnacle of Polish socialist motoring, powered by a 1.6L OHV 4-cylinder producing 76HP paired to a 4-speed manual transmission with gears just tall enough to swing the rear wheels out as you hit that field jump.
1979 PFS Kabanos 1600 “Piorun” – “Inicjał D.”
And coming in hot from the streets of Bieżanów-Prokocim blasting disco polo and powered with a 170HP turbocharged 1.6L OHV 4-cylinder 1979 PFS Kabanos 1600 modified for kielbasy delivery, behind the wheel the legendary 19-year-old smoked sausage and smoked cheese delivery boy, Tadeusz Fujara.
1980 PFS Kielecki 750 – "TONY!"
For those who aren’t high enough on the PZPR food chain to get a Kabanos, there’s the new, smaller answer: the Kielecki 750. Built at the same factory in Poznań as the Kabanos, the Kielecki is the 30HP 750cc 2-stroke powered answer to the get the Polish people and one particularly shouty Australian man and his collection of questionable low quality electronics moving.
1986 Assalto Ladra Turbo CC – “Lost in Translation.”
“CC” stands for “cinque cilindri”, Italian for “five cylinders”. Likewise, “ladra” means “thief” in English. Regardless of language, the Ladra Turbo needs few words to say a lot; it’s loud, it’s Italian, and it’s horrifically unreliable. Powered by a 2.3L 5 cylinder making 172HP that frequently broke down. Even though more than 34,000 Ladra Turbos were produced, there’s a good reason you don’t see too many of them on the road nowadays.
1994 Apalis 580 Celebrity – “Caravancatraz.”
Built on the island of Crete and designed to curse the island of Great Britain, the Apalis 580 is the fibreglass menace that clogs up roads all summer long, and for what? To look at fields and trees all day?
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truly a tony
edit: “one particularly shouty man and his collection of questionable low-quality electronics” GUESS WHAT TIME IT IS
edit 2: he is worthy of his own post IMO but it’s okie
2 Likes
Not sure if you can post your cars in other people’s threads for their own ones but ok 