Car Stuff: Random Sighting #1

I should have realized a long time ago that it was a good idea to include car stuff here. The car show posts and last week's celebration of the '61 Chrysler station wagon finally got it through to me.

As it happens, I have some pictures I've collected on my phone of interesting cars I have come across in various places, so that's where I'm going to start. I may also intersperse those with other content depending on how I'm feeling on a given Monday. All right then...

That's a 1965 Ford Falcon Futura convertible that I spotted on a street in Winthrop, MA last summer. The back bumper has clearly had more than incidental contact with a solid object, but otherwise the car looks pretty good for going on 50 years old.

Ford introduced the compact Falcon for the 1960 model year, right around the time General Motors was bringing out the Cheverolet Corvair and Chrysler was debuting the Valiant (which would soon become the Plymouth Valiant). By the time this car came out, all of the "Big Three" would also have intermediate-size models—bigger than the compacts, smaller than their full-size cars.

Ford also found huge success with the Mustang, which was a humble Falcon under the skin, just dressed up in nicer threads. The Mustang was so popular that people lost interest in the sportier Falcon models like this one. When the Falcon was redesigned for '66, it came only as a two-door or four-door sedan or a station wagon. The same thing happened with the redesign of the '67 Valiant (hardtops and convertibles wore their own sheet metal and became Barracudas) and the '68 Chevy Nova (the Camaro had come out in '67), and both the Valiant and Nova did away with their wagons as well.

Still, this is a nice-looking car, its mechanicals are dead simple, it would be a blast to run around in for the summer, and it shares a lot of parts with its Mustang sibling, for which there are all kinds of reproduction parts available. If you were looking for a way into vintage car ownership, a car like this would be a far less painful (and less expensive) way to start compared to many other choices (like, um a '61 Chrysler Town & Country?).