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How to combined a family car with some action...

   So how does one get the family in to the thought of wanting an American car ?
- It´s all about finding the right reasons, make them feel the vibrations, pushing the right buttons...
   I used the arguments a mother really wants to hear, like enough space for the kids friends and gears, nice to go on holiday camping and the best one - safety for the kids ( nothing beats that one in a mothers ear ).
- what about gas consumption, she asked.
-  nothing to worry about, there is a lot of ´em with diesel engine, I said mostly convincing.
   I must have sounded very convincing because the model we decided to buy was a Chevrolet Caprice station wagon. We looked and called at a lot of adverts, without finding " Our car ". We learned diesel engined station wagons in good shape was hard, I mean really hard, to find. Finally I called the main Chevrolet sales company where a very nice salesman told me that " during his 20-years at the company they had sold some 15 new station wagons equipped with diesel, 2 or 3 of them had been resold in good shape, the rest never to be sold again - You keep them until they fall apart !!!"
   With those encouraging words ringing in my head I thanked him for spending his time and though it never going to be any V-8 car for us...
   BUT when my girlfriend got the message she just said " does it really have to be a diesel..." After a quick though, we agreed about it did not really matter if it is a diesel or gasoline engined car because we just drive it in the summer. ( At this moment I explained to her how small the difference in driving costs are between a small and a big engine, just in case we run in to some ).
   It took us two weeks before we found one...
This is a REAL family car....JPG (6835 bytes)
CHEVROLET CAPRICE ESTATE 1975 YEARS MOD , ENGINE : LS-5 1971 YEARS MOD.
( For those of You who don´t know what a LS-5 is, I just say this: 1971 Chevrolet made only two models of 454 cid ( 7.44 litre ) V-8:s. First You got the HP (=High Performance) engine producing 426 hp, equipped with solid lifters etc. etc. The other one was a low performance every day driver producing just 365 hp - that´s what we got under the hood...)

 
Campingsemester i Norge 1996.JPG (8207 bytes)    We have tried to use the stationwagon as much as possible. The first summer we went on a 10 days camping in Norway. We traveled along with a good friend Jonny and his girlfriend Sarri. It was a most exiting experience. The only negative I can say about Norway is " even though the weather was great it always came a short rain in the middle of the day ". To maintain a good looking car was a unfair struggle against nature...

 
   As my wife got a job in California we sold the car ( one does not need to bring sand to Sahara...), and we hope the new owner will enjoy the car as much as we did !!!

POLICE_CAR_1.gif (5458 bytes)

 

The new familycruiser

Dodge Durango R/T
Jag vet att bilden även finns på cruising sidan... My wife had her mind set when we left Sweden - she wanted a new Chevy Blazer. Nothing big like the Suburban we had on the company for a year and a half.
   But when we arrived to US it turned out to be so many more different modells of cars here, compare to Sweden. We desided to walk around the car dealers to have a good look before the final decission was made.
   Most of her new friends at work told her to go for a Japanese or Europeen compact car.
- Did we move to California to buy a small car like everybody have back home in Sweden - NO WAY !!!
   Finally she got hooked on a Dodge Durango R/T - a car, even I can enjoy driving...
   It got a 5.9 liter Magnum engine ( 360 cid ) with a improved intake and exhaust system, given the car about 255 hp, bone stock.
   Together with the full time all wheel drive and a 3.92 final gear ratio, my wife make the car do an average of 12 mpg... ( ...and then she tells me NOT to race the cars at the red lights, hmmmm.... ).
   Any way, we are very pleased with the way it handles and runs. It would have been fun to put in the tune up parts Mopar got for this car and see if we could have given the SVT Ford ( the supercharged Pick-up ) a hard time, but unfortunatly those parts voids the warranty, so we gonna wait some time before that...
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