Biggest Chevy Ever with the biggest socks ever!
In 1989, I went to Newport Beach, California, to work as a sailing instructor for the summer at the Newport Harbor Yacht Club, and I needed transportation. My godfather, my dad’s childhood buddy, lived in Newport Beach and had a friend whose aunt had recently passed away, leaving behind her 1976 Chevy Caprice Classic Coupe with 16,000; yes 16,000 miles. The tires were lumpy from sitting, so my God-father’s friend replaced the tires and then sold it to my dad for $1,000! The car had one smash on the front and one on the rear from parking lot type of accidents, but was otherwise in original shape, with shiny paint, a 350 V-8, and seating for six.
The Caprice in my mind’s eye
When my dad first told me that Tony, my godfather, had found me a 1976 Chevy Caprice, I was excited, but the picture I had in my mind’s eye was not of the 1971-1976 Caprices, but of the first generation Caprice, which I still find to be a far more attractive car. Upon seeing the car in my God-father’s driveway, I was a touch disappointed on a comparative scale. But once I got used to the bulbous looks of the 1976, we hopped in and took a ride, and it was a time machine back to a time I barely even remembered. My grandparents were Ford people in the 70s; my parents mostly drove imports (except for a 1975 Jeep Wagoneer); and most of the GM cars I remembered were the downsized B-Bodies from 1977 and on. I can remember one friend having a clamshell wagon, and I had once ridden in a 1975 Cadillac Series 75 Limo, but that was my entire experience with the 2nd generation B- or C-Body.
The first thing I noticed upon getting in the driver’s seat (well the driver’s side of the bench) was the size of the car, but the second thing I noticed was the very small steering wheel and very short column-mounted shifter. My dad mentioned that it was his recollection that in response to complaints from female owners about the size of the car, GM had downsized the steering wheel and transmission lever to make the car easier to drive.
The third thing I noticed was the 8-track player and stereo speakers in the doors. Fortunately we knew about the 8-track in advance and a friend of my dad’s who owned a 1977 Thunderbird lent me his cassette adapter, so I had music!
1976 Caprice Coupe Low Rider
The next day we took the car to get inspected and licensed, and when we took it to the shop for inspection, the mechanics said to us “do you realize this car only has 16,000 miles?” We said “yes”, and they said “no really, the carburetor has never been adjusted, it still has the factory caps over the adjusting screws! You could take this to East LA today, even with the damage on the corners, and get $3,000 – $4,000 for it right now!”
Well they got the car in tune, and off we went. Despite being a V-8, it sounded a bit like a sewing machine. It did motivate the car pretty well in comparison to my Honda (68hp) and Saab (110hp), about the same as my 1981 Buick V-6 Skylark. The steering took a bit of time to get used to, with a lot of power assist and a bit of play in the center. The front disc brakes slowed the car pretty well, but I learned quickly to watch 1/2 a mile ahead on the southern California interstates, as sudden and unexpected slowdowns caused panic stops that made the rear of the car quite light and threaten to swap places with the front of the car. The Caprice was quite fun to drive around town, with room for three across in the front, and simple, one-hand steering. It had huge body roll and understeer on off ramps, but otherwise, southern California didn’t challenge the car with lots of corners.
Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie
One night, I was watching a movie at a friend’s house, and it was Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie, and the only thing I remember about it is that the mechanic seemed to be right; 1970’s Caprice low riders were everywhere in East LA, at least in the movie!
Trunk big enough for a 10-speed!
One time I needed to take my bike somewhere, which was a basic 10-speed I had borrowed from my godfather, and I thought well maybe if I take the wheels off, it will fit in the trunk. On a lark, I tried just putting the whole bike in the trunk, wheels and all, and it fit without a problem!
Gas cap behind the license plate
When it came time to fill up the car, I would put about 22 gallons into the tank through the filler behind the license plate (couldn’t find a picture of a 70s Chevy so equipped, so this Pontiac will have to do). I would get about 210-220 miles before my next fill up for a 9.5 – 10 mph average.
Well the summer came to a close, and as much as I wanted to drive the Caprice cross-country back to my mom’s house in Rhode Island, I didn’t even have 5 days between the end of my job and the beginning of college and I didn’t have a buddy to share the driving with, so it was time to sell it. Turned out a business associate of my dad’s had a nephew who was heading to San Diego State University and needed a car, and so we sold him the Caprice for what we had invested, $1,089 (I had killed the battery and the new battery was $89), and paid the cheap transportation forward.
That 2 door model rusted so bad here in the north east ,by the late 80s you could remove the roof by hand . The molding on the vinyl roof would collect dirt ,salt and rain water
Nice ride. I’d prefer a 71 or 73, but there’s something about enjoying an unexpected pleasure like this. Keep them coming Matt.
My Dad had a 73 LeSabre from 87-89 which constantly gave transmission problems. What a dinosaur that car seemed in 1989, compared with the modern fwd cars that were flooding the market! It was only 13 years old then, but it seemed ANCIENT. Today, a 13 year old car would be little different from a new car.
Nice car and write up, thank you
Grand old girl with ekelings of the ’77 downsize to come.
As far as the socks in the top photo are concerned: ABOUT
TIME we saw some REAL socks!! LOL In this vain 21st
century even CEOs and corporate VPs are ashamed to
show they are even wearing them! This whole low-cut
or no-show sock trend is ridiculous!
Ok. Maybe at the gym, but in most social or business
situations… WEAR REAL SOCKS America!
Umm…in press photos, CEOs and VPs are generally wearing business attire, which white sneakers and crew socks (and jorts) certainly are not…
MT:
Totally missed my point. I was referring to the HEIGHT
of socks then vs now. Bare ankles are common even
at the office & church, because people wear socks that
barely peak above the top of their shoes or not at all.
And no-show socks can be any color – black, navy,
brown, as well as gym room white. I have chronically
chilly ankles, so I wear no-shows only on the hottest of
days, and when I’m off work.
Ah, I see what you mean. That “style” would indeed be uncomfortable in a drafty building.
Those were not Jorts!;-) They were made of a sail material, and I think they were made by Mistral, the sailboard company!
These cars look okay, but I REALLY prefer the silver/black ’70 example pictured here.
There was a 76 Caprice 2 door on 1 of the northern Florida Craigslists a few weeks ago, a creme yellow car with a tan/very light brown vinyl roof. The car appeared to be in near showroom condition, and I bet the next owner will paint it some stupid “candy” color and jack it up so he can put some 22s under it.
If it were possible to shrink this car to 7/8s or 3/4s, then I’d be interested.
I had no idea these Caprices got such dismal gas mileage.
What a big, beautiful monster! What style these had.
Congratulations, you are in the club. What club is that, you ask? When someone sees a Panther or 80s-90s B body and goes on and on about how huge it is, you can say “Awwww, aren’t you just so cute!” That club. 🙂
I will say that some of you are starting to bring me around on these, from an almost pathological hatred of them to mere indifference. Which is not nothing. An enjoyable read, and yes, it’s a shame that you could not take it home.
And the 8 track to cassette adapter is sure familiar from my time in a 77 New Yorker in the mid 80s.
The cassette to 8 track adapter is awesome. I didn’t realize that the cassette to 1/8″ adapter I use for my iPod in my beater ’98 Voyager had a father.
You could then, in theory, hook up the aux-to-cassette adapter to the cassette-to-8-track adapter and listen to an iPod or phone in an 8-track-equipped vehicle. But I think going between two adapters of questionable fidelity would make the resulting sound unlistenable.
Like MP3s don’t already do that? WMA or FLAC has much better fidelity. But for the noisy confines of a car, MP3s are just fine. You won’t hear the nuances over the road noise.
One alternate workaround: Get a MP3 to FM transmitter. You can put a 10 gig usb on one and have enough music to cross the USA and not hear the same song twice. Tune the AC Delco radio to an unused frequency and enjoy the music of your life.’
I have used one of those. In my area, finding an unused FM frequency is not simple. You need to have 2 or 3 scoped out as you drive different areas of the city. The 06 Lacrosse suffers from the lack of an aux jack. Fortunately, it is my kid who has to deal with it and not me. (The tuner or the Lacrosse, ain’t saying. 🙂 )
I’ve had the same experience. Intermittently used an FM transmitter to listen to my iPod back when I had the ’96 Lincoln, which certainly didn’t have an aux jack. And it was quite frustrating to use, as even around town I’d get bleed-over onto frequencies that seemed unused. Highly annoying, and though the sound quality was better than a cassette adapter, the PITA factor made it kind of a wash and i ended up listening to FM radio more often than not.
We had one in my family’s 78 Impala. It was awesome. And sounded great!!
I forgot about plate-mounted gas doors! What was the last car with one?
I was going to originally say YJ Wrangler up to ’95, then remembered the B bodies went up to ’96.
Back in the day you would see cars with these leaving a trail of gasoline behind them leaving the gas stations.
Had one on my Malibu, and on Mom’s Parisienne as well. So convenient, to be able to pull up to a gas pump and not care which side of the car was facing it…
Though occasionally, even in the early 90’s when these setups were still relatively common, you’d get a clueless full service attendant who would circle the rear fenders a few times trying to figure out where the gas cap was until they figured it out!
In the ’50’s there were all sorts of ingenious places where the manufacturer hid the gas filler. Behind the license plate was popular, but there were also a number hidden behind the left tail lamp assembly. Check out this 1956 Chevy.
During the mid-90’s, a good friend of mine inherited a cherry 1974 version of this car from his recently deceased grandfather. It had 106,000 miles on it, but gramps kept it in top shape. The car was always garage-kept.
The car’s color combo was typical 70’s funky- chocolate brown with a tan vinyl roof and an avocado green interior. It also had a stash of vintage Playboys in the trunk :).
This particular friend was highly anglocentric, a budding greenie, and a yuppie-in-training, so he hated everything about this car- the size, the thirst, the sheer ostentatiousness of the thing, and the social / cultural connotations of owning a car like this. He promptly sold it to a homeboy from East L.A. for a paltry $800.
His main reason for unloading it so quickly and cheaply was that he didn’t want to be seen driving it.
Sure that the 1971-76 Chevrolet Caprice might be the largest at 222.9″ and with a curb weight of 4,300 pounds but, the newly downsized RWD BOF C-Body 1977-79 Buick Electra was not that far off in the size and weight department with a 222.1″ and a curb weight of 4,200 pounds and the related Cadillac Fleetwood’s curb weight is at 4,500 pounds.
I think you are probably right about the ’77-’79 Electras and DeVilles/Fleetwoods being about the same length as the 1976 Caprices/Impalas, but they were also narrower and taller, and with their crisply drawn lines didn’t looks as huge. Plus, most people were comparing the new downsized Buick and Caddys to the old models they were replacing, and not the old Chevys.
I had forgotten just how HUGE these Chevys had become before the downsizing of ’77. I was 12 in 1976 and remember there being scads of these things on the roads then. I also remember what a shock the new smaller models were, but once that wore off it quickly became apparent how much better they were.
The 1977 and 1978 rounds of downsizes at GM lost only
a fraction of their interior volume compared to what they
shed on their outsides.
Google up some images of traditional ‘3-box’ sedans from
40 years ago and of equivalent 2015 models, and observe
how the proportions have changed. Back then, hoods and
rear decks that could host cocktail parties coupled to a
relatively dinky cabin greenhouse. Now, bulbous cabin with
stubby engine bay and short, tall rear deck. Only today,
the windows in that cabin have become slits compared to
30-40 years ago!
It could be interesting to create some phantom 1976 Caprice like a Caprice sport coupe from a 1975 Impala Sport coupe with the 1976 Caprice front end. There some 1975 convertibles who swapped a 1976 nose giving some interesting “what if?”.
http://www.imcdb.org/vehicle_5143-Chevrolet-Caprice-Classic-1975.html
http://www.imcdb.org/vehicle_356013-Chevrolet-Caprice-Classic-1975.html
The mid-to-late ’80s must have been a really weird and interesting time to look around in everyday traffic. There had to have been scads of these domestic ’70s barges roaming around in various stages of beater-dom, very inconspicuously mingling with equivalent numbers of small, late model, “aero” cars like the Honda Accord and Ford Taurus. What a contrast that must’ve been! Cars like this Caprice were barely 10 years old, but they looked like they were from another planet in comparison to the average new car available.
The main picture at the top with the Caprice parked on the street in front of the compact, futuristic looking Honda/Acura shows exactly what I’m talking about!
Just think that today’s equivalent would be a 2003 Impala – which hardly looks any different in size, shape, and styling from the average 2015 sedan. Car development sure has reached a long and boring plateau in the last 20 years.
Max P.:
You can attribute that design plateau to a combination
of economics and tighter safety standards – save for two
stylistic atrocities:
Wider rubber at the corners, with nearly nonexistent
sidewalls and rim diameters averaging 5″ taller than
at the time the subject of this post rolled into dealerships,
and…
Rising belt-lines(window sills) relative to the total height
of the vehicle, resulting in limited outward side visibility, and
next to none out the rear slit- uhm – window. LOL!
Suffice it to say I’m having a harder time telling a Fusion
from a Sonata from an A6 from a …. oh I give up, LOL!
I do remember the contrast of the new vehicles (Ford Taurus, Chevy Celebrity, Honda Accord) compared to the vehicles built a decade earlier back in the late 1980’s, I don’t remember seeing too many mid 70’s GM biggies during that time period but saw plenty of mid to late 70’s Ford’s and early 70’s GM biggies during that same time period.
My earliest childhood memories in Drayton, North Dakota are (not surprisingly) of the cars that circulated around town. My Dad was transferred from Drayton to Crookston, Minnesota in 1980, but Drayton was still a lively business center at that time and D&S Chevrolet-Oldsmobile sold a lot of cars back then. That meant LOTS of Caprice Classics and Delta 88s. Among my most vivid memories are of the Caprice Classic crest that adorned the sail panel of the ’75-’76 vintage models. They were quite beautiful in their day, with their V8s burbling away from the curbsides of my post-toddler years. And, of course, shiny and nicely kept at the time…ostensibly because they were relatively new then. Nowadays, the closest you’d come to that would be a Chevrolet Suburban or a GMC Yukon driven by the descendants of the clientele from the late Seventies. 🙁
I’ve owned a few of these, from 4 doors to Landau’s. These things felt like they were floating on air at 100mph and I actually tuned my 2 door landau and could run a few cars at the stop lights, and if you kept your foot out of it, I pulled 21mpg with it once, avg was around 18mpg, the 26 gallon tank took forever to fill too.
I miss those days when cars were cars and not what they are today.
The extensive run down we’ve had on this car’s successor the past few days has been quite the tutorial, and has put some things in perspective for me.
First, I have long thought the ’75-’76 Caprice might be the best looking big GM car in those two years. Long, sleek, simple, a guilty pleasure where it almost seems we are not allowed to like these.
One of of the ’77 successor articles said the ’77 305 V-8 cars perforned similarly to the ’76’s standard 350. That seems quite acceptable to me as our ’78 305 Caprice was a good drive, and that would make the standard ’76 adequate. Later, learning that the ’79 and later 305 was detuned with a new carburator, and had become a bit of a dog, I can see where opinions would vary.
This Caprice coupe seemed to pull off the fixed rear quarter window about the best of any big GM car that was affllicted with it. The shape of the glass was logical with the shape of the pillar, and the relatively large window kept things open and airy. The big C coupes were the worst in my opinion, and the Cadillac Couple DeVille with its arbitrary square rear side window was rather awful. That sales of the Coupe DeVille remained strong seemed to be a product of the momentum Cadillac had at the time.
My nit pick on the ’76 Caprice was that the standard wheel covers seemed a bit cheap, where the ’75 and earlier versions better fit the top Chevy. On the other hand, I always thought the ’76 wore the new rectangular lights very well – they didn’t seem at all forced on 6 year old design.
Make mine a ’76 with the dual sport mirrors and the optional wire covers, in deep triple red.
Size/disparity issues were worse in the late 1990s when large numbers of people inexplicably started driving Suburbans, Pick-ups and other large, truck-based vehicles as everyday ‘cars’ for their perceived safety. But, if you were in a car, you couldn’t see over them; their bumpers didn’t line up with the passenger car you were in and threatened to crush you into your car by hitting you above the reinforced safety cage designed into passenger cars. Also the SUV centers of gravity were so far off of what people were used to driving before hand, the numbers of vehicles flipping on roadways increased dramatically — all of this in a vehicle people were driving to make themselves fell ‘safe’ in. In fact, this choice made everyone on the road much less safe, due to size mis-matches in collisions and poor road performance that no one recognized.
When everyone was in a car of relatively the same height, shape and center of gravity, the relative mass differentials were much less threatening or noticeable.
That’s actually a good point. The late 80’s did seem somewhat curious, with a decent number of these pre-downsized biggies coexisting with small, aero-styled lae 80’s imports. But the late 90’s were probably worse, as you note, with the first vanguard of the SUV fad coexisting with lots of early 80’s and more than a few late 70’s compacts. When those two opposites encountered each other in an accident, it generally produced very poor results for one party.
Whenever I see these cars I think of Marcia Brady trying to drive her Dad’s 1974 burgundy Caprice convertible around the slalom course that her brother Greg bet she would mess up to prove who was a better driver. They were both supposed to drive around the course, not knock over any pylons, and at the very end of the course not knock over the pylon with an egg on it. Of course, Marcia didn’t knock over the egg but Greg did!
nice write up.
I own a 76 caprice GLASSHOUSE today.1st car I ever wanted to own.
The 76 Caprice was in my opinion the best of all 70s Chevrolets.
I have a 75 caprice, hard top coupe, similar to the one in history, 42k original miles, I am its second owner, it is not the fastest or the most powerful or the most modern or the most efficient, but it is the one that makes me happy And I think that I will never sell him, his style is not owned by any other car that I can or want to buy, it is what I always wanted since I was a child, I waited for him many years and I will continue on the streets with him
Mi 75 caprice
I have a 75 caprice, hard top coupe, similar to the one in history, 42k original miles, I am its second owner, it is not the fastest or the most powerful or the most modern or the most efficient, but it is the one that makes me happy And I think that I will never sell him, his style is not owned by any other car that I can or want to buy, it is what I always wanted since I was a child, I waited for him many years and I will continue on the streets with him
NICE!!!!
My 76!