re: #354 Jay C

Your vanity plate doesn’t say “ NOS4A2”, does it?

1968: Silver Shadow?

No on the plate. It is indeed a Silver Shadow. As is traditional in British automotive circles, this was severely criticized by traditionalists when it first appeared in 1964. One valid criticism is what looks like technical complexity for its own sake rather than any genuine functional purpose. The Citroen designed brake system might be necessary on, say, a Mirage 2000, but it is pointless on a car. A full brake job costs around 10K. Fortunately it is fairly durable. The most gadgety gadget was probably the original gear selector. This used an ordinary column-mounted gear quadrant to operate an electrical switch to control a remote servo-motor that actually changed the transmission gears. This could easily have been done by connecting the column quadrant directly to the transmission, as with practically all other cars. The previous owner had this fail once. Outraged, he had replaced it with a normal gear selector. The latter was salvaged from a quintessential Republican car, a Buick Electra, which, in true Republican fashion, had sacrificed itself for the benefit of its betters.