Style. It’s important. You know it. We know it.
When it comes to personal transport, the mode of transit you use says something about your personal style. This is true or truer in no place more perhaps than Southern California. A.k.a., SoCal, where the car is like your avatar to the outside world, as telling of your tastes and lifestyle to people in L.A. as the kind of jeans and sneakers you wear would be on the streets of NYC.
There are many ways to travel in style as you drive SoCal’s scenic ocean-hugging highways and byways, its beautiful canyons and deserts, the palm-tree-lined avenues and boulevards of its cities and towns, but perhaps none is more unique or expressive of a style than this newly for sale 1970s-era Mercedes Benz 3070 Sprinter-type Ambulance.
Don’t you just LOVE IT?!?! (It’s ok, it’s ok … This is a safe space. You can admit to such things here, savvy reader.)
This vehicle would make the most perfect surf-mobile or DIY camper, mais non? Look closely at its roof — yes, you see correctly: Those are siren lights. Yes, SIRENS!
This vehicle was once an ambulance somewhere in Europe, we’re guessing France or Germany, in all probability. Imagine the stories this vehicle could tell if it could talk.
The design of this vehicle is so European that it’s obvs perfectly suited to SoCal in its severe un-California-ness. It’s got style. And it’s for sale by owner, somewhere in Malibu for about $1,900.
Imagine pulling up to the beaches of North San Diego County in this big, red behemoth, your party or brood spilling out of this thing and on to the warm sands of summer. Or cruising up to the curbside valet at Spago in this whip. Imagine the envy of other shoppers at Costco as you easily glide the obscene bulk of your purchases into the cargo hold of this van.
Imagine all the surfboards you could carry in this thing. Imagine dark desert highways, cool wind in your hair, the warm smell of calitas …
Imagine the sound of the klaxons on this things, the siren at full blare, but that European siren, the one that sounds like braying donkeys hee-hawing through synthesizer horns. A sound that brings heady memories of Paris, smoking Gitanes outside a bar in Belleville at 2:00am, old ladies walking tiny dogs, croissants, strong coffee … “Un creme, sil vous plait!” you audibly say to your self.
So different from the sirens of American ambulances and their elongated notes that sound like a wolf-howl fed through a broken Moog. A sound that conjures up the heady smell of …. an airport Cinnabon.
But we digress.
GLOBAL GRAPHICA 