MURILEE MARTIN - 27 DE MARÇO DE 2014
Vedette Trianon
The
Simca Vedette has about the most fascinating lineage of any postwar European car, made even more fascinating by the fact that it started out as a 100-percent pure Detroit car. The Ford Motor Company anticipated a period of economic depression after World War II, so they designed the Ford Vedette as a small, V8-60 flathead-powered sedan to sell to presumably cash-strapped Americans. As it turned out, the economy boomed like never before after the war, and so Ford built the Vedette, which boasted the first-ever use of a MacPherson strut front suspension in France for the European market.
Simca bought the Vedette factory from Ford, which had become weary of constant labor disputes, and built the Vedette until 1961 (production continued in Brazil until 1969). Vedettes aren't exactly easy to find in North America, but we searched and searched and finally discovered this 1954 Simca Vedette Trianon in southwestern Colorado (go here if the listing disappears). Asking price? Just 500 bucks!
The interior is obliterated in that special way that you get in high-altitude deserts with 2-percent humidity and solar flux not unlike that on the surface of Mercury and almost all the paint has been irradiated into nonexistence, but the seller says there's just "A LITTLE RUST." V8-60s that sit for decades (as this one appears to have done) tend to have stuck valves and other problems, but perhaps the dry climate has spared this one from total and permanent seizure. If not… well, these engines are pretty easy to find.
SIMCA TEMPESTADE
Travado
