(first posted 1/14/2013) Since today has become Brougham Appreciation day, we need give this brown baby brougham a bit of love.
I don’t take credit for finding it; Richard Bennett sent me the pictures, and tells me they’ve been posted at the Brown Car Appreciation Society or something like that.
I’m running out the door, so you all have free rein to explain its existence. I’m sure you’ll do it justice.
Gag!!!!!! The only thing worse than a Brougham is an ineptly built attempt-at-a-brougham on a Chevy Monza chassis. Somebody obviously had WAAAAAAAY too much time on their hands, and no sense of aesthetics. That said, the actual execution seems to be rather competently done. Somebody is a good bodyworker.
No, they already did the Vega Brougham (Cabriolet)… Not that it looked any better:
Hey, the Vega Cabriolet looks positively wonderful next to the Broughamette (or is that TBrougham1000?–way better! I like Broughams, but this thing is really, REALLY bad! Ugh!
My guess is someone really, really wanted a Monte Carlo and had a spare Chevette and a ton of parts on hand. As ugly as it is, it’s quite well done–nice paint, non-wavy sheetmetal, etc.
This just goes to show Tom, that everyone has their limits when it comes to Brougham Love…
Chevette actually. I remember seeing this before but I can’t recall the details. Is it at all related to the Standard Motors Classic Coach?
Car and Driver did a feature on that car. IIRC, it was called the Custom Cloud. C&D took it to England, where it met with a certain amount of ridicule.
Yes indeed, the Chevrolet Monte Carlo Custom Cloud, as tested in my favourite car mag, C&D, in March 1976. But wait, there’s more! If anyone in NZ wants that issue, I have one on trademe! (It’s been unsold for two years now, guess no-one likes the Custom Cloud!)
Rolls Royce took legal action against Standard Motors, Inc where the company was issued a cease and desist order
Yeah nar, I’m good
I was thinking Chevette as well.
Still have my Car & Driver article about the “Rollsy-Carlo”. Diggit.
This has Chevette written all over it. The Monza might have been better proportioned.
This thing is so stunning ugly I’m left speechless.
This is what happens when a body man combines a fifth of vodka, 10 cans of sardines, three raw eggs and an entire half-gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
Flashes back to the aromas of Russian buses in the summer of ’95….
If only there had been any mint in the city…
I tend to agree with you, Tom. And, probably just a little too much of one of those items.
“…we need give this brown baby brougham a bit of love.”
No, we don’t.
Not a Monza, it’s a Leata Caballero!!!! Based upon a Chevette…….as built in Post Falls Idaho.
http://jalopnik.com/351450/leata-cabalero-most-beautiful-car-ever-built-in-post-falls-idaho
There was an El Camino Version too!
http://www.barrett-jackson.com/application/onlinesubmission/lotdetails.aspx?ln=315.1&aid=403
Bingo! Yes, this is a Leata.
“Talk about throwing your money away. I hope you kids see what a silly waste of resources this was.”
“He worked really hard, Grandma.”
“So do washing machines.”
(apologies to Clark Griswold)
It’s ugly, but I love it, sort of like the pug dog version of a monte carlo.
Love the attention to detail, hate everything else!
I seem to remember this same car coming up on eBay a few years ago and the owner having a good sense of humor about it, but still asking some totally ridiculous price. Granted, in 2013 something like this is so patently absurd that I’d actually love to own it as a really, REALLY strange period-piece/caricature kinda thing… I just wouldn’t be willing to pay actual money for it.
Nothing wrong with this car that couldn’t be fixed with a big brown paper bag.
Or one of these babies:
What a picture! Just like the rest of us, whether high-born Mercedes or peasant pickup, it’s all the same at the end.
Is it just me, or does it seem really stupid to crush them with the wheels and tires still in place? I can’t believe that it’s cheaper to sort out the rubber and aluminum alloy AFTER the whole mess hase been shredded.
Actually I think it is cheaper to let the shredder mills separate the tires. For years, the mills refused to accept tires which left the scrapyards stuck with tire disposal. My father owned a small scrapyard years ago & his solution was to give away all the loaded rims to a few guys who would remove (burn) the tires off, then bring the Krispy-Klene Rims back and resell to us. It worked out because the guys made money and my dad didn’t have to mess with tire disposal.
The scrapyard I currently hang out at used a modified log-splitter which crushed the rims enough to where the tires would slip off. It was pretty powerful but it required a lot of extra labor…and that was when the machine was actually working right. The yard would still have to pay some guy to come haul the tires off to some mystery location. It was a huge load off the scrapyards’ backs when the mills caved & started taking cars with tires still on them. Not having to jack around with air wrenches on every vehicle freed up a lot of time.
The separation process for some of these mills is actually pretty incredible. “Shredders” in Birmingham had an Oprah-sized shredder which pulverized the cars into fist-sized pieces & blew the chunks into railroad cars. Another huge pile of non-ferrous crap was being simultaneously produced, courtesy of some kind of magnetic separation apparatus inside the shredder. Evidently adding a little rubber to the mix of plastic, foam, paper, and dead bodies didn’t make that big of a difference.
That Sweptside is so solid! What a waste! Screw that P.O.S. Benz tho…
Wrong, two brown paper bags.
Or 5 gallons of diesel fuel, applied externally, and a lighted match. 😉
And this from one of CC’s biggest Chevette fans.
This is kind of like the ’58 Mercury Park Lane convertible recently featured — so over-the-top that it’s beautiful in a kitschy sort of way — a Mini Carlo!
I think the name should be ‘Chevarlo’.
WTF! It’s an amazingly well-done horror show. My first thought about the function of the passenger-side saggy pouch is to keep the carpet clean.
For some reason I expect to see a dozen clowns pile out. In brown polyester leisure suits.
Broughamo the Clown!
+1 😀
I wish I could un-see things.
Now I know where they got expressions like “lipstick on a pig”…”polishing a turd”…et. al.
I think my biggest complaint about this, other than the lack of A/C, is the GLARING lack of a hood ornament!!!
Here at CC, you want your Broughams, we’ve got your Broughams! Big Broughams, Little Broughams, Everywhere a Brougham Brougham…
Old Mac Niedermeyer had a Brougham, e-i-e-i-oh….
(And yes, the Brown Car Appreciation Society exists, as does it’s competitor, the Brougham Society, over at Facebook.)
Excellent catch! How can it be a real brougham without a hood ornament?!!?
And where are the wire wheel covers? C’mon!
It may have had A/C… It’s possible the conversion eliminated the two outboard vents. I’m pretty sure the Chevettes without A/C did not have a center vent. (I’ll go home & check mine and recant if my car has the center vent).
Nope, all the Chevettes had the center vents. I had relatives in Tennessee that had a few of these, and none of them had AC, but they all had the center vents.
“Oops”. You’d think I’d remember what the dash on one of my own cars looks like.
Plus you can just barely see the OFF-VENT-DEF cheapo heater controls not hte MAX-NORM-BiLEVEL etc a/c controls.
It’s where the hot (always hot) air came out.
Now thats what I call a Bad Brougham!!
Had the real thing in a 73 Monte and a 89 Fifth Ave. Both fine automobiles though the Fifth liked transmissions too much
Breaking Bad Brougham!
It would only be cool if there was a competing Omni Imperial Crown Royale Hatch and Pinto Continental Town Runabout, Timex Edition, of course.
Or Casio Edition.
“Uh, I have two dollars…and a Casio!”
I’m gonna have to say….goodnight
I’m beginning to wonder if this was one of those test mules for the soon-to-come Cadillac Cadette. That 2 tone brown dash with exclusive Elasto-Stretch map pocket holder looks mighty familiar to fans of that famous 4-3-2-1-0 engined wonder…..
*tears streaming from eyes from laughing so much at those possible competitors*
My wife just asked me why I was crying. I showed her the picture and now she won’t stop.
And it has Washington plates. Of course it does. Just a little bit more of that Pacific Northwest Whimsy. Sooner or later, all the frickin’ rain just gets to us, and we come up with stuff like this. Looks like the answer to “What if British Leyland made the Monte Carlo?”
Its awful what were they thinking
Or, what were they drinking?
This has cured me of the urge to brougham-ify my John Deere tractor. Now I don’t have to worry about how to get a vinyl cladding on the roll-bar.
You can get three or four different colors of duct tape at Home Depot….
It also needs wire hubcaps and whitewall tires, in addition to the hood ornament. Until then it’s not a genuine Brougham.
Yes, Jonathan, I think those are indeed required.
Kill it with fire. Please.
Sophomoric, perhaps, but utterly apt 🙂
Call it Brougham Hilda.
LOL!
This doesn’t bother me like it does some people. From the front it reminds me of the title character from the 70’s movie The Car:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075809/
It sorta reminds me of a Henry J.
You beat me to it!
+1
If you can stand it, I did a post on some photoshopped mid-Seventies Montes a while back, including a Mini Carlo: https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/what-if-four-door-monte-carlos-mild-and-wild/
LOVE it. Google Chevette Cabalero (one L).
I thought it was a little too well-done to be Backyard-Bubba engineered. This thing looks better than any air-cooled Beetle with Rolls-nose, HHR, SSR, new Fiat, , Excalibur, Juke, etc. It just needs to be taken to the next level. I’d add whitewalls, wire caps (perhaps off an early Celebrity?), clock, tilt column first.
BTW, there’s a truck version of this car also. Nice!
Funny, I kind of like it as a pickup!
At least that one has the proper hood ornament!
El Cabelero?
This is like some sort of freakish creation from The Island of Dr. Broughameau. Its cries for quick death.
Chasing the Japanese market?
It’s so ugly that I would actually drive it to work everyday. It just need A/C and nothing else.
I think I saw its cousin
OMFG!! My first reaction was “That’s the most hideous car I’ve ever seen in my life!”
Then it was like a dog or a kid that’s so ugly you just want to comfort it.
Now I just can’t stop laughing whenever I look at the pictures…
Here’s the cousin
Whoa. Stylish trim, it even has ventiports. What is this thing really?
Ford Thames or something?
The base of the windscreen is so much higher than the side window line it looks almost Eastern European maybe?
I dunno what it is. Somebody said it was made in Israel, but I’m not sure I believe it. Impressive though isn’t it!
Maybe everyone would like it more if it had the 76-77 quad stacked headlamps?
It could be interesting to imagine how a Honda Civic hatchback Brougham would had look. 😉
I believe this is a Letah. They were made in Post Falls Id.
This is a second generation Letah. My father knew the man who built them. He toured his factory, which was nothing more than a garage, back in the late 1970’s.
It’s pretty much my favorite conversion car. It’s like a lion and a cheetah mixed…bred for its skills in magic.
THIS THING IS A DECRODED PIECE OF CRAP!!
It looks very FUGLY that it is a Chevy Chevette on steroids.
Is that a 74 Cougar grill?
Meth….Not even once……
In comparison, for what that is worth, this styling exercise(?) makes the Mustang II look positively attractive (what am I saying, do I have early dementia?).
But does it have fine Corinthian leather?
! The fit and finish on this thing are too good to be the work of just one man. It probably is the idea of one person, and then he had other people roped into this delusion, and then he apparently made almost 100 of the things. Almost 100 other people wanted to buy it, and on what sort of advertising budget who knows. Hell. Aston Martin came up with the Cygnet and the Spirit was a restyled, plushly trimmed Gremlin, so his idea of a nicely trimmed tiny car probably wasn’t a terrible idea, it’s just the execution . . . well, it looked less like a Chevette than the Cimarron looked like a Cavalier. I bet he went on and on and on about the thing in bars and long after its demise went on and on and on about it.
Doesn’t look much worse than some of the stuff Detroit was pooping out back in those days…
All you, or anyone else, needs to know about the Leata.
https://auto.howstuffworks.com/1975-leata.htm
Bodyside sculpting and headlight bezels reminds me more of the 1973
Pontiac LeMans than it does the Monte Carlo. Grill is definitely scoured from a 74 Cougar.
Looks like it would fit right in today: Spark, Juke, new Civic & Prius. Nissan Maxima, Infiniti, Lexus.
Ahead of it’s time, I’d say, though the vinyl top does date it somewhat
+1
As for the look…from the front as well as at the fenders it does look more Pontiac than Chevrolet. 1973 Grand Prix, even though it took a Cougar grill to do it.
I want it! Just for the sake of stupidity and goofiness, I want it!
If Ford had built the Chevette?
More like if history had taken a different turn in 1980, this would have been the 1985 Monte Carlo of a 2nd term Jimmy Carter Joan Claybrookized America!
The thing that blows my mind is you could’ve probably bought a brand new Monte Carload for what it would take to “craft” this automotive equivalent to head lice.
This isn’t different at all from what Mitsuoka has been doing for the past two decades, truth be told.
CC on the Viewt next?
No matter whether any of us really like that funny little car, it certainly took a fair amount of talent and skill to built that little thing. There are always at least a few people who DARE TO BE DIFFERENT and like to have something nobody else has ever seen. You know, to stand out from the crowd of ordinary everyday appliances.
Here’s a good writeup on it:
https://www.makesthatdidntmakeit.com/blog/2019/1/18/the-leata-cabalero
From different angles I see Chrysler products Aspen/Volare and Ford/Mercury Capri. Capri II I guess. But still bad from every angle, but it was the 70’s and there was much bad taste in automotive styling. As far as the RR and other knock offs, yeah, for the most part they were pretty bad, but while there may have been more than a little hubris involved, at least some of it was likely just some guy trying to make a buck with out working at a factory (when they still had them in this country) or trying to sell insurance. There is still the bad taste thing, but if it’s your own, your vision is clouded.
Thank god the great brougham epoch never really took off here, downunder.
Local Australian built 1980’s Ford Fairmont Ghia and Holden Commodore SL/E and Calais’ had a microscopic touch of class. Nissan Bluebird GXE and Mitsubishi Sigma SE were more comfortable smaller basic cars. Vinyl roofs, velour and more chrome trim, maybe alloy wheels, bigger engine options, air conditioning, power steering windows and doors. Metallic paint possibly. I was never impressed by 1970’s Fairlanes, LTD and Statesman, Caprices with their bordello interiors driven by coked out big bellied toupee wearing real estate and insurance salesmen.
While I was born in 1971, I remember my parents friends, family members and my friends parents vehicles being really awful. Sluggish, noisy, hot vehicles. Horrendousl awful Ford Fairmont XA 1972 coupe that was incredibly cramped, nobody could see out of but it’s 351 V8 sounded wonderful and went like stink. Holden Monaro’s with either powerless 202 six or torqueless 253 V8’s, Dad’s 1969 VF Valiant Pacer 225 slant six with 175 bhp which felt like a rocketship and my mum drove it within a inch of it’s life as her usual lifeless Morris 1100 needed heavy whipping all its 40 horses. But he traded it in (when my sister was born) for a huge 1972 HQ Holden Belmont stationwagon with its 173 6 cylinder 3 on the tree which he hated, top speed 20 mph downhill with a tail wind. Both my parents bachelor brothers driving Datsun 280zx and Mazda RX7’s. Aunties driving VW Beetles, noisy cramped smelly, what utter crap! Both Grandfathers driving awful 4 cylinder English cars (Hillman Hunter and Morris Minor, with the Hunter feeling lightyears more advanced than the similarily aged Minor).
My best friend Carl’s mum drove a pretty rare and beautiful deep yellow with black vinyl roof Holden HQ Kinsgwood Premier Station Wagon 253 V8 with dual exhausts and black interior which was always really boiling hot inside. Sluggish and really loud, you could always hear Carl’s mum coming miles away, a 308 V8 optioned would’ve been a marvilous motor car. My other best friend Paul, his dad drove a 1971 basic XW Falcon 500 station wagon with base 200 6 cylinder which felt spritely compared with my dad’s and Carl’s mum HQ station wagons. Holden should’ve sold locally the 250 thriftpower Chevy 6 cylinder which was available to exported Holdens.
Why Holden designed a 6cyl OHV motor not able to be increased in size beyond 202 cubes?? Is a bit of a joke really, but Fords falcon six wasn’t any bigger or better in the early 60’s. Atleast it was eventually expanded to 250 inches. Chrysler never offered the Valiant with the smaller slant sixes. So Holden had to build the 253 V8 to keep up with competition, used more fuel and had to work harder to keep up with Ford’s 250 and Chrysler’s 240 hemi six. The Chrysler 263 hemi 6 cylinder motor was the equal to both the 302 and 308 V8’s, while the 215 inch base motor was better than both the 202 and 200 in basic tunes.
Just checked the stats, 1969 VF Valiant sedan and 1971 Holden HQ station wagon. Wheelbase: Width: Length
114″ – Holden 74″ Holden 192.3″ Valiant – hardtop incredibly about 200″
108″- Valiant 70″ Valiant 192″ Holden
Completely irrelevant comment on the subject.
Does anybody know why the General Motors Holden red six wasn’t designed to be upgraded beyond 202 cubic inches? Or why Holden never built the Chevy II sixes in Australia?
Hello Paul,
I think this Commer TS3 story is very Interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commer_TS3
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffspiccies/24108646193/in/gallery-elsie-72157629177699288/