Corey Behrens apparently was (or still is) back in The Netherlands, and has posted some of his finds at the Cohort. I’ll start with this Malibu coupe, not for any particular reason. As we’ve seen so many times before, the Dutch have a real thing for American cars, so this looks right at home in Heiloo.
We’ve had a fair number of these Colonnade Malibus here over the years, and way back in 2010, I had the audacity to call one of these a GM Deadly Sin. I doubt I could be that harsh anymore, as they’ve become rather rare and I appreciate survivors. Of course GM Deadly Sins was never about ragging on the cars themselves, but about certain decisions that were made in their creation. There’s a lot to love here; maybe a bit too much, actually.
This one has lost its rubber rub strip on its bumpers, and a bit of other trim, but looks to be pretty solid generally.
They’re simple and tough. Sort of a passenger car truck; no wonder trucks are so popular today. And they represent the seventies perfectly, for better or for worse.
Wow! Delivered new in The Netherlands in 1976. That’s a rare survivor!
Unfortunately, it hasn’t seen a lot of love lately, as this car has changed ownership 8 times in the past 9 years.
Count me as another who has warmed a bit towards these Colonnades. I remain, however, unimpressed with Chevrolet’s styling jobs on them. The B-O-P versions were all better styled, IMHO. Or at least more interestingly styled. It seemed to me that all through the 70s Chevrolet’s styling on its regular sedan lines (meaning not Camaro or Corvette or Vega/Monza) carried a theme best expressed as Zero Personality. The cars were not unattractive, but they carried designs where almost all visual interest was left on the drafting room floor.
Guess it represented Basic Functionality. You want more, go to the Olds or Pontiac store.
“The rain on my car is a baptism. The new me. Iceman. Power Lloyd. My assault on the world begins now. Believe in myself. Answer to no one.”
gotcha.
If I drive for you, you get your money. You tell me where we start, where we’re going, where we’re going afterwards. I give you five minutes when we get there. Anything happens in that five minutes and I’m yours. No matter what.
The length of the doors on this two door reminds me of my buddy who had a Cutlass Supreme. He could barely make it out of the car when parking it inside his single car garage. It was a tight squeeze. That included parking it all the way to the passenger side as far as possible, and there was no way of storing anything on that other side.
All that said, I liked the Malibus and Cutlass Supremes in the earliest iterations of Colonnades, say 1973-74. By 1977 they had just gone on a seafood diet. If they saw food, they ate it, and gained visual heft.
The greenhouse on the 4 door Malibus in 76-77 seemed to be visually too open somehow, as if the roof was too thin or something. As written here before, where I worked had a 77 4 door Malibu, with the underpowered 250 CID six. A bunch of us had to go to Hamilton on a work trip, it felt like it would take all day with that six wheezing its way along to motivate the 4000 – odd pounds down the road. A very unfavourable comparison to the 350 Le Mans models I had driven a summer earlier.
It would be nice if the owner likes this man’s music. Most likely, that’s not the case.
Whoa, is that Max Headroom?!
Max is fake, Heino’s Schlager Musik FTW!!
😂
Wasn’t that Buick Skylark of a few days ago missing its rub strips, too? Are they illegal or unfashionable in Europe, or is someone stealing them?
The opera window looks better than the Laguna window louvers.
Virtually impossible to find overhere, and they are the first things to get damaged of course.
Lot of people simply remove the remains and let it that way.
I was working for GM when they built these things. The Laguna was kind of cool in a Nascar kind of way, the Monte Carlo was good looking to me. The regular colonnade Chevelles? A total lack of grace, especially compared to the ’68 through ’72 predecessors. Yuck.