The last time I was on a helicopter it was a Marine UH-1Y Venom (shout out Red Dog Squadron) and the car waiting for me when I landed was a minivan. I like a minivan. What I really wanted was a Lancia Kappa.
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
If you had one too many Camparis, you could be forgiven for mistaking the Lancia for a Maserati Quattroporte IV