This 1978 Emilio Pucci Lincoln Continental Mark V Was Peak Malaise Era Personal Luxury Coupe Madness

good morning this is bill from curious cars and auto europa naples on you know it's kind of a math florida tuesday i have to say you know the weather is neither here nor there you know i'm still dripping i'm still moist but that's more a result of the whiskey as somebody might have pointed out to me in one of the comment sections on the prior videos they said i would sweat less if i were drinking vodka which just isn't gonna happen because i'm no great fan of vodka uh one i got intensely sick on a uh over indulgence of you know if you've ever thrown up on nine screwdrivers then you probably are gonna be tapping on vodka for a while uh you know i also had the same issue going with tequila uh there's some insane sound coming from up i've been waiting for 20 minutes for this to abate but i have no it sounds like somebody's garage testing an airboat or something and it won't shut the hell up so for all i know that uh sound is going to really hit the mic on this camera and the whole video is going to be ruined but yeah i guess we'll see when we get it into editing but otherwise i'm going to go ahead and go forward you know animal report slim haven't really seen anything since that rabbit the other day peter is back which is why all of a sudden the yard looks a little bit better and it's obviously uh somebody's broken out the air blower um you know his kid just didn't have the same love apparently so we've got that going for us uh but uh otherwise and i did scare the crap out of a cat today which you know in return scared the crap out of me i was moving peter's uh kubota you know you can't just have a regular golf cart you have to have a diesel-powered golf cart when you're at peter's level so he does i hopped in so i could put this thing in the carport so it wouldn't get all misty and as a result the cat got i hopped in the thing fired it up i you know apparently the cat was asleep and it's a very sound sleeper it didn't wake up when i just hopped in but when i fired that thing up it took off and scared the crap out of me surely as much as it scared the cat so he and i both had a bit of a rough morning so the animals are are you know they are what they are i haven't really heard much from the birds either and again the goats are just a distant memory uh the thing that surprises me the most are the deer maybe the neighbors took me up on that whole deer be gone product thing they bought some winchesters and took them out so who knows this whole street could be eating very well now so the weather's shitty the animals are you know at a lull and we're just gonna carry on forward with this car and this is a 1978 god that is so loud what the hell are they doing over there [Music] hopefully it isn't as loud on camera as it is in person and there's a bird there's one right look at a whole flock of them coming in coming into that tree right the minute i get started you see they know i'm going to be distracted they're hoping i'm looking the other way and then whammo they come down and start pecking my eyes out little bastards anyway we'll keep an eye on them um so where was i 1978 lincoln continental mark v and not just any mark v but this is an emilio pucci edition uh which is one of the uh oh i don't know and lincoln had like four designers who came in and did some uh rather interesting cars for them over uh over the course of a few years and we'll get into all of that i want to do a little quick thought on the insane drivers today you know when i was driving home the other day from work uh you know heading home quite normally i was trying what the hell was i driving something pretty oh andrew's elantra i was driving that so i didn't really want to screw it up but all of these people and i have to say honestly the majority of them seem to drive korean cars not unlike the one that i was in with this uber excessive try you know they're gonna haul ass to oh my god i've gotta get in front of this guy or my life is gonna end or you know it's unbelievable i mentioned that i had a road rage incident that was actually a guy in a rider truck wearing really stupid white sunglasses who decided that you know again it would have a very negative impact on his life if he had to wait for four friggin seconds before he could merge behind me so he hammers it in this rider truck which has no acceleration to try and get in front of me the only way i could have met him in front is if i had just come to a complete stop so the hell with it i'm going to keep going and the two of us had a real near collision and then i break checked them and we went back and forth and it was just you know what the hell man you know i don't understand the the way the aggressive way that people drive today i have a sebring race coming up and i have to be deadly honest that i feel much more comfortable on the racetrack with the drivers there even though some of them are nitwits myself included than i do just driving around the street so for christ's sake people tone it down man you're gonna get where you're going and i promise you 95 of you whenever you get to your destination nobody's going to care that you've arrived i mean certainly not to the point that it was worth you know killing whoever was around you to get there so it's not like people are brain surgeons on their way to do some kind of emergency surgery on a eight-year-old girl who was hit by a tractor on the way to school you know for christ's sake tone it down anyway that's my little rant for today so we're gonna get right back into this car again 1978 lincoln mark five emilio pucci edition and um it's interesting you know i've done some mark five before i look i did a pretty extensive video on a mark 5 before so i'm going to link it in the uh description here and that's the one where i get into all sort of the platform stuff uh the history of lincoln probably i don't remember but i probably got into that certainly the history of the continental so i'm not going to rehash all of that and we're going to take a different direction with this and get i'm going to touch on that stuff just on just a smidge and then get into the idea of what the designer editions were but let's start with the events of 1978 so we can sort of set the mood for what this car uh was released onto you've got jimmy carter he was elected i guess america decided that it wanted a religious guy after having nixon for a while and of course then gerald ford i don't know how that worked out for them but that was what they wanted obviously unlike today inflation was pretty high you know obviously everything cost a lot more like a loaf of bread or gasoline or a gallon of milk that sort of thing uh not as lucky as we are today with the way that inflation is um he had given away the pan we're not going to get into that idea okay look the number one story of the year space invaders came out i mean that's it i mean that was enormous uh that was a very big deal everybody started playing it and frankly we need something like that today to distract us from all the crap that's going on but uh that was a that was a huge deal at the time also the camp david accords were signed um sounds kind of like a ostentatiously gay guy came up with a way to keep the uh the israelis and the egyptians happy but anyway camp david they went there and they signed an accord and it was a big deal and they ended up with nobel peace prizes or something as a result so it was all enormous uh the in the uk they had the first test tube baby which uh you know god knows what people are thinking so you couldn't have a baby normally so they decide they're gonna create one inside a test tube i mean talk about really compounding the misery so you end up with one of these little things that you have to put in a containment net later and you pay a ton of money to do it but uh yeah you know who am i to understand uh the first cellular phone was released the very first one apparently in illinois which makes very little sense to me but that's where it came out uh jim jones if you remember that cat uh he had 900 of his followers killed themselves and guyana after um you know one thing i didn't realize i sort of touched on it last night was he had a bunch of gunman go and take out a united states congressman who had come down to check him out so that was one of the things that spawned him to have his followers all kill themselves by drinking the kool-aid which apparently wasn't kool-aid at all and kool-aid trademark wants you to know that it was something called flavor aid which from what i understand they didn't actually have to add anything to it to kill it right they could added cyanide or something but uh on theirs of course because i forgot to put on the damn mute anyway uh the flavoring killed everybody and it was a you know it's a pretty big deal i won't call it a massive event in american history but it was certainly a fascinating diversion and apparently prior to 9 11 was the largest amount of american citizens that had been taken out in one go so kudos there uh jim jones for you know having a pretty high body count higher even than the son of sam who was convicted in 1910 there's a b right in my face anyway the son of sam was convicted and sentenced in 1978 and uh he seemed to be like a pretty decent cat who just ran a film of things um what else do you have the feel good movie of the year came out the deer hunter everybody loved it uh very heartwarming uh neat thing there was also close encounters of the third kind if you remember that little guy from jaws built a mashed potato mountain that everybody went and visited it was kind of an interesting flick you had grease you had saturday night fever uh all very fascinating uh sweden banned aerosol sprays which ruined everything for the rest of us so he had that going on uh tv wise i'm choking to death you had the rockford files you had jim rockford driving that detuned formula to make it look like an esprit he was a bit of a hot rodder kind of a cool cat he had the love boat you know who could forget captain steubin uh floating that thing around and you know all the sex going on on that thing uh probably all that also means fantasy island was on because i remember watching that as a kid chips and of course happy days so so this is it that's the scene for which this car was released and it's one look a mark five they made him for three years 1977 1978 and 1979 the thing was 230 inches long like 19 some feet other than the lincoln town coupe and there's some debate as to whether that's classified as a sedan or not it was the largest two-door ford ever produced by the ford motor company i mean it was enormous and you could say okay well you know that was what was going on at the time well not exactly uh you know frankly everything going on at the time was downsizing gm had downsized all their birds [Music] gm had downsized all their stuff in 1977. so um you know lincoln decided to hell with it we're going to buck the trend we're going to embrace uh cars of the past we're going to take this person and luxury coupe to its peak and we're going to build these giant suckers and i think they're going to sell well and they did it actually worked out very very well for lincoln you know cadillac buyers who didn't want a smaller cadillac even mercedes buyers a lot of people flocked over to the mark v because it was the last hurrah of the true no holds barred american big v8 big car you know the look man even in 79 this was before the days when everybody had to be some part of a social conscience movement you know there was still you could still avoid all of that without being castigated on instagram you know you could still be somebody who celebrated uh the no restrictions big v8 powers the muscle car era was long over there was no doubt about that but the upper brass at ford didn't get that memo all the way at least until 1980 so for three years they built this enormous car that was not just longer than the prior mark iv but it was a little bit lower which just made the dementia yeah when you looked at it it just had a tremendous impact and they sold like hotcakes they sold almost 230 000 of these things uh over the course of three years and uh it all uh you know it worked very well for ford but one could argue that their hurrah you know cost them later on because gm's downsizing started to pay dividends uh in a way that um you know ford didn't get a hold of until a few years later the lincoln's and you know stuff that came out after this car were based on the terrific panther platform but that did take a little while to develop and become more appreciated so here it was and people were going absolutely nuts for it it was the fourth generation mark um it uh was the third after the mark iii i said there i'm belching up my whiskey this morning i've switched brands by the way you know i'm a big believer in uh the jack daniels but when i was at the last race i drank something called 1792 and uh even though it seemed kind of silly frivolous to me it actually was nice and smooth so i've bought a bottom of that and i'm trying it out but i'm belching it up this morning so i had to pause and edit that out so i don't make everybody sick absolutely wonderful i don't remember where the hell i was either but anyway then look the mark 3 came out in 69 and was an immediate success and that's where lee iacocca said hey holy let's put a thunderbird grill a thunderbird grill you know there it is there's the whiskey in full force let's put a rolls royce grill on the thunderbird and see what happens and they did and it's whole like crazy so the mark series was born the mark 3 became the mark iv in like 1972 and then of course the mark iv became the night the mark 5 in 1977. the prior two marks were based on the thunderbird platform which was enormous at the time a very big platform a common mistake is that the 77 through 79 thunderbird was based on this body this platform because they look kind of similar but it was not in fact the 77 thunderbird was downsized from the 76 and started to ride the mercury cougar platform which was like eight or ten inches shorter so it was much lighter it was a very significant weight downsizing and almost visual downsizing but not quite while the mark 5 continued on that old thunderbird platform which was absolutely enormous so um again the longest coupe in ford history okay and look the town coupe if it is a coupe was uh 233 inches so it's probably a little bit bigger it's three inches longer than this uh but apparently there are some people who say that is classified as a sedan in the same way that mercedes says the cms is a coupe and that this was the biggest coupe they ever made i'm not going to get involved in that fight because i don't really care it's just another you know one of those minutiae arguments that means very little to me let's just say this is a big f effort and we'll you know go with that uh but uh anyway they were selling like crazy um it was a big fu to the downsizing trend and 78 it was the last hurrah of the big block the 460. um you know the 400 was an option which was a little tip of the hat to the uh the emissions and gas mileage people but nobody wanted it nobody ordered it in california you had to have it but everywhere else they all ordered the 460 with dual exhaust and honestly who the hell could blame them uh it easily outsold the uh the now downsized uh coupe de ville and uh even the the new eldorado which was a very handsome car but it just wasn't that big and uh people still wanted big and this was still the peak of the person in luxury kubera you know we had cordoba's and sedan de villes and coupe de villes and um i don't know why i said sedan since it's a four-door but yeah you get it people like the two-door luxury even amc had a designer series matador and everybody was just cashing in on the whole personal luxury coupe thing it was just the time you know everybody went to the disco to listen to uh you know the bee gees and their personal luxury coops and yeah now now we've got a bird look at these all of these right there right over my head oh if only i had a 12 gauge anyway here is the interesting thing continuing with the mark iv and 76 there were four designers four this was a time when whole culture i don't even know how to say it because i'm just not one of these people and his former girlfriends will attest i'm not much of a close junkie uh but apparently the idea of having a high-end fashion design was becoming more mainstream uh all through the 1970s and you know what was maybe a kind of a [Music] the niche thing before that was not you could go to sears and get like high-end i mean amc has a bloody designer can't remember his name immediately making matadors so you know that this was becoming sort of mainstream so lincoln wanted to cash in on that and they had four different designers uh doing editions of their mark v uh you had a guy named davinci if i'm saying that right and i'm probably not you had cartier you had bill blass and then you had this guy emilio pucci and i tell you what i'm gonna do i'm gonna pause for a minute right here get my act together and then i'm going to get into a bit of who that guy is and why he ended up on the side of a lincoln mark 5. all right so i got a bit of a late start this morning so the sun is out and it's basically just ruining everything so i've had to pull the car back here a little bit uh to get out of the sun the trees are giving us a bit of shade for the moment and i'll try to burn through the rest of this it wouldn't hurt to have a short video anyway so maybe this one be under 40 minutes uh but not being much of a closed snob again as prior girlfriends will attest i had no idea who the hell emilio pucci was i mean he meant nothing no idea uh you know i get into these cars a little bit these marks and i learn about the designers and i mean i've heard of cartier and i've heard of bill blass but i had never heard of poochie so i thought what the hell i'm going to look into who this guy is for this video and it turns out he's actually a pretty fascinating cat i had absolutely no idea but he was a bit of a cool character he was born in 1940 he's dead now as you know as it were but he was born in 1914 in naples italy not of course the naples where i'm standing at the moment and was born into one of florence's oldest noble families so he had a title he was the marquise de barcento which is apparently a pretty big deal uh which basically means that the guy had money from the get-go and uh his family he worked at a place called the poochie palace if that tells you anything and lived there uh which is some big palace in florence where you know the rent is pretty high uh the family had owned it since 1480 which seems like a bit of a long time and frankly was in fact the same year that joe biden went toe-to-toe with that notorious gangster corn pop so definitely their family had been lingering around italy for a while he was a sporting sort of guy he apparently dabbled in swimming skiing fencing tennis and even a bit of car racing which was of course a dangerous and sporty habit back then um you know at least when he wasn't groping chambermaids in the palace which i'm sure i don't know that he was i know that i would have been i mean if i'm the marquise to whatever the hell it is and i'm living in some palace in florence and i've got these hot chambermaids around me i'm definitely taking advantage of that so i hope he did as well but apparently he was something of a scholar and he went off to america he learned about agriculture in the university of um athens and georgia interesting so he was apparently doing that and then he went off this is all pre-war he went off to um oregon where he was at reed college and he got a full scholarship there which obviously he needed since his family you know owned parts of florence but he got it in return for developing a ski team there before the war and then the war came along in 38 he joined the italian air force he became the captain of a torpedo bomber and apparently did pretty well and get idiots honking their horns over here the hell is this guy that's great some kind of a delivery for peter that's very inconvenient for me so i'm trying to do here but uh hey where the hell was i so okay so he's an air force captain flying torpedo bombers he becomes a and i'm doing air quotes here close confidante of uh mussolini's daughter edda i don't know what that means exactly but i bet it's not uh entirely platonic and uh and he helped her with her husband who would run a foul of uh hitler somehow and uh the gestapo and when whatever he was doing to help failed he escorted her to the border and then he tried to escape but he didn't and he was captured by the gestapo and they tortured him somewhere apparently they put him in a chair and they tied him down and they started putting pineapples on pizzas and mixing argyles with plaid and it just absolutely ruined a good portion of his life before he was able to recover from that but recovery did and apparently then after the war in 47 whatever designs he had made for that reed college ski team started to get noticed people like holy you know their outfits are i mean the ski team sucked i mean they didn't do anything but everybody liked the way they were dressed and that led back to poochie and uh so some photographer from harper's bazaar uh ended up taking a picture of some broad who was wearing another one of poochies designs and it was a hit so his editor at harper's uh tracks down poochie hires him to do some sort of a winter ski gear lineup uh and featured it in the magazine and poochy as it turns out and again i don't know about fashion but apparently this was a big deal was the first guy to come out with a one-piece ski outfit so there you go that was his giant move forward and it just blew everybody away and they wanted to neiman marcus wanted to put him in some design he said the hell with it i'm going to make my own design house because again he's rich he's the marquise whatever the hell it is barcento so he goes to the isle of capri which is where all the jets at are floating around and makes his own design studio and makes all these one-piece uh ski wear things with stretchy fabric and apparently that becomes uh you know a pretty big deal so he was off and running he hit the big time the pay dirt uh when marilyn monroe decided that she really liked the that he was doing and she started wearing his dresses in fact after she died she was interred in one of his dresses and people took notice of that for whatever i guess she was a big deal it's always in jackie kennedy is wearing his stuff sophia moran is wearing his stuff much later on madonna even starts wearing poochy stuff so you know he's really hitting the big time and uh starting to really sell a bunch of stuff and he turns out he didn't even need the family money because all this stuff was happening one of the more interesting things he did back in the good old days branith airlines when they wanted to become stylish hired him to come out with the costumes the uniforms for their air hostesses and this was back when stewardesses were hot i mean really hot and so poochy started designing their outfit he also did for the pilots you know like turtlenecks and uh you know all these they sort of stuff that you could remove a jacket and it would still look good and then add something or scarves or yeah you know ascots whatever but anyway the stewardesses were ahead and one of the more interesting things was a space helmet which he called it i think branhav called it a rain helmet but it was this big clear tube that the ladies would put on their heads to protect their hairdos when they were running between jets so their hairdos wouldn't get rained on and the jet wash from the old 707s or whatever they were uh didn't make them all frizzy so whatever apparently that was another thing a feather in his cap uh that went on to even the moon program the apollo 15 used a logo that he designed as their mission patch um so there it is i mean look so that's the early 70s so you can easily see why lincoln chose this guy uh to be one of the designers for their marc series and obviously it was a name that everybody knew at the time uh even if um you know guys like me certainly don't know it today and uh a pretty suave cat you have to say and uh there it is so that's why you ended up with these um uh what the hell are they poochie series mark fives uh they were different colors and trims for all the years but basically the designers got to pick uh all of the color combos inside and out that they were going to use in their cars uh in 78 this one is finished in a metallic silver that was called moon dust presumably a tip of the hat to his apollo 15 thing inside was dove gray with uh sort of a dark red accents and a black cayman quarter top you know sort of an alligator looking skin quarter top on it and it was successful it was they sold i think of that you know you have to remember that 230 000 of these things were made over three years and 78 3 000 of them roughly uh were these poochy editions one of the reasons they didn't sell that many is they were a lot more expensive than your regular mark five uh even the ones that had sort of upgraded options it was a big ad to the sticker price and we have the sticker of this thing so we'll get into that so anyway there's a little history of pucci and how he ended up getting his name on the quarter opera windows of a lincoln mark 5. i'm going to pause again i'm going to get all my crap inside the car and then we're going to go over this car very quickly and go for a quick drive i was wrong it didn't make sense to immediately put my in there because i have to set up the license plate and whatnot so look let's just go over it up front the car is absolutely gorgeous i mean i think the mark iv wasn't bad looking but i think the mark five was better because it became more angular more you know the slab-sided sharp razor-pointed stuff with extensions out over the hood on the sides a grille that ducks underneath the front bumper you know which is a lincoln mark tradition going back to the three still looks very rolls roycey you've got these good-looking hidden headlights and it uses basically every single feature that one would argue was part of the person in luxury coupe malaise era you've got the big grill upright with the hood ornament you've got the hideaway headlights you've got the extended chrome bumpers you've got the impact strip on the side all of the designer additions came with these rather good looking turbine wheels which looked terrific on this car you got vents in the front fenders then the front fender it's like the size of a smart car you've got chrome side view mirrors you've got chrome trim around the windshield and around the side windows you've got opera windows which are of course an entire necessity for one of these you've got the vinyl quarter top uh they also had a full top option and some other stuff it was very i think 77 only you could get one without a top but that quickly went away you've got extended rear quarters with taillights coming out on either side you've got the continental hump you know the spare tire hump with the continental badging and some reflectors on either side of it it is a big ornate beautiful car uh that does a very nice job integrating all of the features that you sort of expect in one of these uh very luxurious person in luxury coupes and of course it had a price tag to match this thing was very expensive at the time uh more so than the cadillacs so anyway we pop up this little key thing and use the round key to get in it's got a round and a square uh the round is for the trunk opens like the squeak from a haunted house and then you have this nice big giant trunk where you can fit all kinds of crap uh i think it's supposed to have a spare tire cover but i don't immediately see one if i know dalton he cleaned it and left it in a stall because because he's an idiot that's just the kind of stuff that he does but very nicely carpeted um you know giant big even with that full-size spare tire you could still fit a lot of crap in there you see the jacks underneath it you got a jack usage and stowage sticker and everything lovely under the trunk uh also as you can see from that uh electrical cord coming up there it does have uh rear lighting put a little wd-40 on that and make sure i'm not locking the keys in the trunk which is something that i would normally do have a look under the hood uh this was illuminated by the way this keyhole this was an option i like the flush pull hand them actually i think that's kind of cool uh they didn't have one railed out on the side a little bit of a modern thing from ford and lincoln at the time see if we can get this up one-handed oh god that's actually not that bad that's pretty well lubricated and being a 78 you could still get the 460 which most people did i mean unless you were stuck in california with all of their emissions crap and you had to have the 400 you could otherwise still order this big block 460 with a four barrel uh dual exhaust posi traction rear end which this one has and uh was you know the last hurrah for the enormous v8 engines from ford uh still you know one of the biggest they put in one of these cars so uh the 400 believe it or not as big as it sounds was the smallest they had ever put in one of these cars so this was just a great time still over 200 horsepower which doesn't sound like a lot today but in 1978 that was still a fairly big deal and uh has plenty of pep and torque to motivate this car down the road uh on top of you know the engine these things all had four-wheel disc brakes standard which was cool uh they had an anti-lock braking system which you could get which was of course very early and were you know fairly modern for the time and certainly packed in some of the features that you would expect in an extremely high-end luxury car i also like the way the wipers are hidden under the hood not exposed and gaudy and i'm sure emilio pucci appreciated that this is a pretty low mileage example 39 000 miles still has this little uh you know disintegratable that's running into the air cleaner you've got another side air cleaner that looks like an oil filter on the side of the air cleaner and all of the original stickers and chalk marks are where they should be and you know everything looking pretty good under there so let's get that back down and i tell you what at this stage i'm gonna put all my crap in the trunk then we're gonna hop in and uh go for a spin all right let's do this so uh up here you can see it's got this um what do they call the black cayman uh design quarter top with this reptilian looking finish which i think looks absolutely terrific with the silver uh here you see the emilio pucci signature in the opera window which is of course part of that designer series and you've got a um a rear defrost on it which of course works fine i think the car is incredibly handsome uh they've been undervalued for some time you could actually get these things pretty cheap uh that's changing uh the the recently they've been absolutely skyrocketing uh particularly the connector version so yeah you know look i mean obviously this is one that i bought and i'm selling so i have a certain interest in it but i'm telling you now you don't have to take my word for it these are pretty good investments particularly the ones that are up market like this and that not only are they a great blast to drive uh it's uh it's something that's probably going to accrue and value over the time as the person in luxury coupes start to become a little bit more in the mix and i mean again this was the last hurrah of the giant american v8 powered coupe detroit wouldn't dare no company in the world would dare not even hummer would dare to waste this much real estate on a car anymore i mean you've got 230 inches of car with two doors and uh basically you know you could fit six people in there but it's really made for one it is a personal luxury coupe and that's just cool and i think it's the end of an era and god bless ford for keeping it going longer than the rest of them again there's good looking turbine wheels on this thing hiding rear desks here is more of the poochy stuff that again these mark fives in the designer editions got special trim so this one got all this deep pile red carpet and red accents with dove gray leather uh in between you've got these beautiful dove gray leather seats with the red accents you've got red uh seat belts i mean the thing is just cool it's just absolutely gorgeous to look at and ever like you flip it forward you got you know the dark red on the back of the seat with the gray insert they just don't do stuff like this anymore you know this was true luxury uh in a way an american way that no longer exists you've got all these sort of dark and humorless european cars uh passing for luxury and the americans just all copied them and it's a shame gone is the time when we had stuff like this uh you can see in the back your canadians are gonna be chipper as hell they've got pretty damn good leg room uh they've got expanses of leather uh again you put a guy in a girl back here and you know nature's gonna take its course i mean it's like the marital suite at the hyatt i mean it is a big comfy rear seat and uh in 78 if you're heading to a blue oyster cult concert or a foreigner concert uh smoking a doobie back there you know that's really going to set the mood and of course you got the opera windows with the middle lights you know into the top of them it's just very very nice back there and a sweet place to be up front again you've got this expansive door panel i mean it's absolutely enormous the length of the store uh it's got of course uh signal lighting in the side of it because if this thing's open on the side of the road it's going to be very hard to not hit you've got an ashtray that your rear passengers can use there's another one of course for the front passengers you've got power seats power windows door locks a little pulley handle uh and uh let's just hop in uh you've got this ridiculously thin steering wheel with uh over assisted power steering which you're barely getting you could steer it with your pinky uh you got a row of idiot lights up top uh you've got um what looks like crystal cut gauges you've got a cartier clock here on the left so you've got conflicting designers uh yeah i'm gonna pull this card this car was not quite ready for prime time uh we got to put a fuel sending unit in it because that's not working the clock isn't working and i want to see if we can get that stuff going but yeah you know what are you going to do sometimes you just got to get a car in the move it has um what does it have automatic headlamps auto lamps with dimmer uh for some reason the vacuum system and this one is working fantastic the lights stay closed permanently it's the first mark five i had where the lights didn't open up you know some of them open up after a few hours some after a few days uh this one can sit for a week and the lights stay close so good vacuum in this thing you also down here have automatic climate control electric de-icing uh you've got a remote mirror on the driver's side you've got the optional remote mirror on the passenger side you've got the world's biggest cigar lighter i mean this thing's enormous looks like it was used a little bit thank god because i couldn't imagine that whoever drove this wasn't smoking back in the day uh you got your wipers over there you've got uh column shift for that c6 three-speed uh transmission which they all had this one is tilt wheel you push the turn signal stock forward you've got speed control uh on part of the fake wood on the dash let's see if the horn works got a nice big potent horn there's a panasonic eight track in this thing uh so that means either it came with an am fm with no eight track and somebody wanted an eight track uh or maybe the original radio took a and they put that in but either way it's period correct and works fine and of course there's a nice proper ashtray you got more of the faux wood over there with the continental logo and you got a very nice original book set with an owner's manual these are the original ford keys by the way so that's nice to have and even the window sticker which is a rear treat in a car from this vintage so let's see what we got so there it is continental mark v you've got your designer series the emilio pucci model including leather with vinyl interior landau roof six-way passenger seat blah blah blah turbine spoke wheels uh that was uh looks like eighteen hundred dollars on top of the twelve thousand dollars by the time you get to the bottom line this thing's at fifteen thousand five hundred and ninety seven uh which is a shocking amount of money uh in uh 1978 uh it's a ton of money and probably costs more than most of the competing cadillac so uh anyway i'll zero in on that but there'll be photos on the website if you want to look at it a little better and transportation of course i'm sure they made a lot of money on these cars back in the day so there you go nice to have all that with it uh up here because it's a poochie uh it's peeling off a little bit up at the top you get this uh poochie-looking design uh cocaine mirror where the lights are still working i don't know if they're doing coke in 78 i don't know what they were doing but they're probably having fun and that's all working fine oh god it's stiff though uh over here you've still got all the starting instructions up there and uh more of the uh poochy design uh sun visor stuff and i don't know let's see if that's working i gotta get that out yeah look at that the sun visors with uh vanity mirrors are still working fine and uh have that emilio bucci i could say that all day and uh of course a very standard looking rear view mirror so um i did do a quick video of the headlights on this thing i'll probably put that on the features channel and i'll run it at the beginning of this car's uh video as well so anyway let's fire up that big 460. i've got the defrost going turn that off actually get a little bit of ac going which this car has had cold ac the day i bought it which makes it an absolute rarity um in the uh turn it off because it's kind of noisy we get it when we start going uh it just makes it every collector car that i bought recently the last hundred or so none of them had working air so it's nice this one did anyway there you see all the cluster we went over that there's just 39 000 miles on the clock of this thing which is nice uh let's see we got a power antenna switch down here which i'm pretty sure is working man look at that and of course we have commercials on the ring let's see what else we got yeah wonderful okay so we've got that going i'm gonna go ahead and turn that off i forgot to bring eight tracks with me so we're not gonna have any of them going uh let me put the windows down see if they work they do very nice so we've got that and i'm going to tilt the wheel down a little bit more and let's go for a spin uh the vista from that you know i'm behind the driver's seat obviously if i'm driving the car and the vista out the windshield is about as stunning as any card that's ever i've got to get peter's stupid delivery let's see what the hell that was so let me tell you the doors on this car no joke uh last night i was researching to do this video and it was in my carport and i ended up closing the door i was wearing loose shorts at the time i closed the door on my pocket and crushed my phone and bluetooth right in between i actually smashed the phone look at this thing [Applause] yeah so i've got that you know all of a sudden the phone has got these weird bars on it uh the bluetooth stopped working all together and everything got screwed so the last thing you want to do is close i mean with these loose shorts if i'd been turned a little bit more towards the front of the car i'd be singing soprano right now instead of just the phone being wounded anyway so i was saying the vista from the front and for some reason i've got ash so whatever that sound was earlier uh was produced maybe there's a fire i don't know what the hell it was but i've got little bits of ash all over the car uh but uh what a beautiful vista from out the winter i don't keep using that word but i mean it's like you're in your hotel room looking out over the alps nothing is more beautiful than seeing these two creased fenders uh this swooping hood angling uh towards the front and then this beautiful big lincoln emblem at the top it's just gorgeous way to look out the car and i know dalton's windshield is crap but the hell with it we're just gonna go with it man you can see all that crap on the hood in the windshield um yeah because i can't do the interstate today i'm gonna go to the at t store and fix that phone before i head into work uh i'm sure it means i've got to get a new one to be cheap and uh so there i'm not gonna be able to bury the uh odometer on this thing which is a shame because i think it's well capable of it uh it's a lovely car to steer down the road uh and again this is one of those things you don't really drive you just navigate like you would an aircraft carrier uh you try to aim it in some general direction it would be helpful if it had a compass and just make little course corrections with the steering wheel to keep yourself on track a woman with a weird hat is not out walking her dog which is fine now she's been looking at me really on me ever since i was driving that little jdm that shows you man you drive a car with a big rear wing it takes a long time for your neighbors to trust you again so it does have a four barrel on this 460. so you got 7.5 liters you know even with like 209 horsepower you still have a shitload of torque and that is a bonus on this car um it does help motivate it down the road just fine for a big heavy cruiser all right so when i take uh right here we're gonna hammer it a little bit and see how it sounds some of that posi traction yeah there it is kicking into the four barrel if i had turned that uh air cleaner upside down i'd get some secondary music which would be nice uh let me run the windows up we're probably getting noisy here and there we go get our ac going again nice and chilly and there it is i mean what a cruiser what an absolute insanely fun boulevard cruiser and man you get thumbs up you get people asking about it you get what i like to i i hate attention when i'm on the road but this car really gives you the right kind of attention um you know the people who like jdm cars ignore it the people who ask if your cobra is real when you pull up at a gas station in a kid car they also ignore it and you just get kind of the cool and nice cats who uh you know haven't seen one of these in many years and uh are enamored by it and uh want to give you a little bit of kudos for driving one oh my god that course beautiful it's stunning they say and it's just a nice kind of attention that really doesn't bother me uh on the road obviously it has enough pep to keep up with traffic a nice flow uh it'll cruise the interstate because in many ways that's what it was designed to do and it's just a lovely collectible car uh with most of the parts still available at you know advanced auto or o'reilly so uh it's a really easy collectible car to own and i think that's part of what's driving the values up uh you know you buy a hispano sweeza you're gonna have to have some guy you know carve the parts on a lathe i mean this thing you just go down to the local auto parts store uh there are also 230 000 made so there's still plenty of them and you know wrecking yards and whatnot for you to salvage parts from so i'm not going to ramble on and on and there's going to be no interstate run today so this is it uh if you have an interest in this car it's going to be for sale at auto house of naples on the web at autohousenaples.com or by phone at 239-263-8500 i want to thank you again for having a look today i thank you again for getting us to 100 000 subscribers and we're gonna do what we can to keep these videos coming and uh the cordoba was in the shop yesterday and we've ordered parts for it finally now i've been saying it's coming for a long time but it really really is this time damn it it's coming and i do uh promise to do the old diesel silverado at some point for the four guys who have an interest in looking at it anyway thank you very much appreciate it and we will see you with the next one take care

Channel: Curious Cars

Views: 150,715

Keywords: 1977, 1978, 1979, Lincoln, Continental, Mark V, Mark 5, IV, III, Mark, Thunderbird, Ford, Cadillac, Town Car, Town Coupe, 460, Big Block, Cartier, Bill Blass, Givenchy, Emilio, Pucci, Designer, Designers, Eldorado, Review, Test Drive, History, Humor, Doug DeMuro, Hoovie, Jay Leno, Tavarish, Jeremy Clarkson, Top Gear, Donut, Leno's Garage

Id: g6Mke8Mp6JE

Length: 50min 51sec (3051 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021