The car was hard to sell when it was new (although exaggerated, they were sold, but not as far as good as expected), but impossible not to sell for a good price even before it really got "vintage". So I am tempted to say it was brand new, but this would make Don older then he probably is.
That reminds me of another car that is alleged to have been a hard sell back in its day...
A phone conversation, overheard back in the early 1980s:
"Robert! Robert! It's Marvin! Your cousin, Marvin Zemeckis! You know that futuristic car you are looking for, for your time travel movie? Well, listen, I am at the car dealer's right now, in the shop of a really nice fellow named Don Panks, and..."
Well, the DeLorean was the attempt to establish a new make building a super luxury sportscar in northern ireland(!), even using gullwingdoors* that were hardly used before in serial production except by the legendary Mercedes "Gullwing", the lesser known eastgerman Melkus and a few obscure small productions, while the Edsel was built by one of the largest and most successful car corporations and was thought to be a big scale production model with a few innovative features (teletouch!) and a slightly unusual frontend design.
The first project could be expected to fail fo sure (happened many times with similar concepts), while the fail of the Edsel (and it's later fame) is an extremly bizarre incident that could probably only happen in the McCarthy era.
*PS: Never confuse "gullwingdoors" with the vulgar "scissor doors", also known as "Lambo-doors" to some ignorant german wannabe-tuners.
the point of this tangent is that Ariane is about this close to taking a good close look at it
A phone conversation, overheard back in the early 1980s:
"Robert! Robert! It's Marvin! Your cousin, Marvin Zemeckis! You know that futuristic car you are looking for, for your time travel movie? Well, listen, I am at the car dealer's right now, in the shop of a really nice fellow named Don Panks, and..."
The first project could be expected to fail fo sure (happened many times with similar concepts), while the fail of the Edsel (and it's later fame) is an extremly bizarre incident that could probably only happen in the McCarthy era.
*PS: Never confuse "gullwingdoors" with the vulgar "scissor doors", also known as "Lambo-doors" to some ignorant german wannabe-tuners.