Granted, this thought did not occur to me when I landed. I was mostly happy to be getting off the helicopter. I enjoyed the ride up and down the coast and around the Statue of Liberty the Marines provided, but flying around thunderstorms with the doors open required me to focus on how cool it was and not how strange it was. Had this Lancia been waiting for me on the tarmac perhaps I could have distracted myself better. I love this photo of a bunch of dudes being extra 1994 next to the Kappa and a helicopter. We’ve got all the mid-’90s Italians: guy with a cell phone, guy with a briefcase, guy with black jeans and white tennis shoes. The Kappa itself is not the most remarkable car produced in the era, but the T-square angles come courtesy of Turin’s I.D.E.A. (Institute of Development in Automotive Engineering), the relatively short-lived design house responsible for a weird string of cars ranging from the Fiat Tipo to the Tata Nano. You can see the most successful of their designs, the Alfa 155, faintly in the lines of the Kappa.
The interior is also pretty nice. Photo Credit: Lancia via Wheelsage “Did you ever notice how in car ads, they always put the car way too close to the other stuff? What’s the deal with that – are they also selling this as an ad for the helicopter, showing the kind of car helicopter people drive?!” I wish it was easier & cheaper to import one over here, especially since they’re over 25 years old now.. I’m always jealous of people who had good experiences with Alfas. I was very briefly the owner of a 145 which seemed a lot of fun for a while, and then just turned into a bad caricature of an Alfa Romeo, with multiple mechanical and electrical failures in just a couple months, spending full weeks in the shop and some new problem popping up on the drive back, stuff that broke down weeks after it got fixed with new parts by specialised mechanics, the whole shebang. I just couldn’t believe a car could be that bad. Ended up sending it to the crusher when the clutch died a few days after some expensive electrical work was done. And steal the cheese from your fridge. Also, I’ll never understand the obsession of Italian manufacturers in the 90s shooting promotional interior shots with every flashlight illuminated. I have a Alfa 164 brochure that is similarly hexed.Do they want us to play up tired, old stereotypes? An edit button might add too much Italian reliability to the site.
