Until you’ve crossed the pond and have spent some time watching traffic patterns to see just what is going on, it is difficult to tell just exactly how out-of-place it is to see an American car roaming the streets. A few years ago, on a trip to Scotland and Ireland, I was trying to keep track of all that I saw. There were a couple of pickup trucks working as tow trucks and utility vehicles, so I didn’t count those so much, but the Dodge Ram parked in an apartment complex, the 2005-ish Shelby Mustang tearing down the N1 just past Thistle Cross, or the Chrysler 300 pulling taxicab duty in Dublin might as well have been glowing in the middle of the day for what it mattered, mixed among the endless sea of Renaults, Peugeots and Toyotas. Having an American car in the UK doesn’t make much sense, and that’s from an American’s perspective. The roads are narrower, the curves much tighter, the fuel nice and pricey, and to be honest, in many situations the public rail system makes automobile travel more or less redundant. You can be at any part of Ireland in half a day on the train if you plan ahead…why would you want to pay the cost of fuel? To fill up the Angry Grandpa Chrysler’s tank, you’d need, at minimum, $100 or so in U.S. dollars.
Now think back to 1977…cars that were monsters on our own roads had to be proper leviathans in cities and small towns alike. Unless you had a clean shot on a motorway and traveled at odd hours, a Chevy Monte Carlo would be a supremely odd choice for a personal vehicle, never mind an ostentatious brick of a Lincoln loaded to the moon and drinking fuel like tap water. Yet some did buy these cars…whether they loved the overkill “luxury” or wanted a taste of that hot power that we were being weaned off of at the time, there was (and still is) a market for American machines in Europe. And funny enough, in the comments for the video, we can learn the fates of the cars. The Lincoln Continental was gone by the early 1980s, the Trans Am lived until 2000, and the 1931 Chrysler is still registered and on the road.
