Norwegian gearheads on the right Way

(Opel Vectra) The Opel Vectra was one o’ them cars that hung onto that 1980s look all the way up till ‘bout 1995. You could get it with a 1.7, a 2.0, or even a big ol’ 2.5-liter V6 — not bad for a car that wasn’t much bigger than a possum on stilts. One time, back in the year 2000, I got a ride all the way up to Norefjell in a Vectra. Now, that car was at least five years old by then, but I was real impressed it had one o’ them fancy digital thermometers showin’ the outside temp. See, my old man was drivin’ around in a crusty ol’ Ford Sierra at the time, and he’d just swapped out his ‘85 Toyota Carina for a dang Citroën Berlingo — and neither of ‘em had no outside temp readout. Even though it was dead o’ January, the coldest it got was only ‘round 17 below (that’s Celsius, mind ya) past Sokna. Most places out there usually hit -20 or even -30 that time o’ year, but this trip was downright mild. Temps stayed steady between zero and -12 most o’ the way. Now that spot west o’ Sokna, whe...

Mercedes-Benz Vario had 'bout the same look as the old Mercedes T1, which I done wrote about in an earlier post . It came out the year after that one stopped rollin’ off the line, and with that there boxy 1980s look, they kept on buildin’ it all the way up till 2013. Back when I used to ride the school bus a whole lot, I always thought it was coolest when I got to ride in one o’ them big ol’ Mercedes 412 Sprinter vans — the ones with 17 seats. That was the king o’ the school minibuses right there. Since then, I been keepin’ my eyes peeled for even bigger models — reckonin’ there might be some that could haul 21 folks or more. And sure enough, after takin’ a few trips ‘round Oslo, I spotted a Mercedes Vario parked up by Frogner, right across from one of them fancy Frogner House Apartments. Now I remember thinkin’ back then — and many a time since — if that there van belonged to the American Embassy, or maybe some other big-shot embassy in the neighborhood, seein’ as they got plenty ...

Now, the Maserati Quattroporte IV and the Maserati Ghibli II — well, those ain’t your run-of-the-mill beat-up cruisers. Truth be told, these rides are more like high-end luxury sports cars than any ol’ burnout-mobile. Honestly, they’d probably fit better in my street racing blog than in a blog about small-town redneck cruisin’. But hey, Maseratis were actually some o’ the cheapest Italian sports cars you could get your hands on back in the day. Word is, even them fellas in the A and B gangs in Oslo used to roll around in ‘em like they owned the town. Design-wise, they were pure 1980s — slick lines, sharp corners, the whole nine yards — and stayed that way right up till around the year 2000. You could compare ‘em straight up with the Lancia Delta Integrale, which I’ve already written about in another post. These machines came with engines as small as 2.0 liters — not exactly muscle car size — but mostly ran with 2.8-liter V6s under the hood. Some had a V8, sure, but even that one only p...