For this first installment of a very irregular – think random – series, Leftlane’s Car Spotting, we’ve found some true Americana lurking in Europe. We’re on our way back to Geneva for the annual new car show after making a quick side trip to Munich to visit BMW ’s facilities (check back for future features!) and we couldn’t pass up these two gems.
Europeans generally flock to domestically-produced small, underpowered and ugly hatchbacks at about the same rate Americans gorge themselves on Arby’s value meals, so it’s always a bit of a surprise when we encounter a vehicle built in the United States snaking its way through the Continent. Spend enough time in Europe – especially in Germany and Switzerland, where wallets are fat and relations with the United States are fairly strong – and you’re bound to see a handful of North American-specification Chrysler Sebrings and Ford Escape s mingling with Fiats and Citroens. Yet just outside of Zurich, we stumbled across two ultimate expressions of the red, white and blue: A Ford Excursion and a Cadillac Fleetwood.
The Excursion, taking up a pair of slots in a hotel parking lot, boasts a shrunken registration tag that indicates its home base is Leer, Germany, a small town just over the border from Holland. We haven’t been there, but based on its geography, it strikes us as a place where the locals likely pride themselves on their sensibility. Perhaps this German found the Excursion’s impressive towing capabilities to be suitable for hauling a caravan, but none was in sight. We shudder to think of the cost of filling up this Excursion, which might see 15 mpg on a downhill stretch.
Though it hardly fits in with the green image Ford pushes today, The Excursion’s reputation for sheer excess has netted it a small but strong following and above-average resale back in the U.S. of A. We can’t guess what it’s worth in Europe, although we can surmise that it probably entered the continent through one of the many exporters that take advantage of lax import laws. We spotted some limited tack-on reflectors and and a rear fog lamp on the Excursion’s rear bumper; try making small modifications like that to import a Ford Focus RS to the U.S…
Just minutes after marveling over the Excursion, we couldn’t believe our eyes when we found something even poorer-suited to Europe: A Zurich-registered mid-1980s Cadillac Fleetwood. After an exhausting half-hour Google image search (we had to order another round of Paulaner dunkel weiss just to keep us from closing the computer and wandering off), we gave up trying to determine the year. Maybe some of you eagle-eyed readers all-too-well-versed in Cadillacs can pinpoint it for us.
In retrospect, the Fleetwood’s roughly 196-inch overall length makes it more pint size than it seemed at the time. Still, it drove like a boat back then and we doubt time has been kind to it, even though this example appears to be quite clean and well cared for. If we learned anything from pouring over pages of images of boxy GM interpretations of luxury (no wonder Lexus did so well), it’s that they have a surprisingly strong following in Europe. Combine Switzerland’s natural propensity for rough-and-tough Americana with a wealthy population more than capable of pumping Franc after Franc into the Caddy’s big gas tank and the Fleetwood almost seems just right.
Enjoy the snapshots.
