I was on Beltway 8 in Houston, TX headed toward the airport when I saw a Ford Taurus with blue plates. Naturally I figured California or Michigan, but upon closer inspection they were "manufacturer" plates. Nothing obvious except for some (I think) different wheels. Did not have the new front bumper as seen on the Wieck photo archive, just a champagne colored car.

Are they testing anything around this area now? I had a friend a while back who said he saw a Lincoln pickup truck as well, quite a while before the Blackwood story hit the general public.

Be nice if manufacturers were doing, I don't know, maybe crappy road or bad traffic testing in Houston so I could get to take spy pictures and stuff.

 

It could have been just an executive-driven company car. All of our company cars in Chicago have the same manufacturer's plates, and they were just run of the mill GM sedans.

 

Like R377 mentioned... I see the occasional Manufacturer Plate on GM vehicle around my area... I live close to Lordstown Assembly (J-Car) so I assume some folks from there are driving them around.


A lot of the time it's just run of the mill vehicles.... Grand Prix's, Avalanches, etc...

 

Sometimes I see weird cars here, I remember seeing the Pilot SUV from Honda way before I had seen the pictures. (Full blown SUV with all the bells and whistles in Silver color with no cladding whatsoever) paper tags...) I remember saying to myself damn that CR-V is big... but iwas no CR-V later when I came a little closer.

I also have seen the Ford Mondeo on Hwy 6 near where I live. I Guess it was driven from Mexico but still it is not a run-of-the mill sedan, but had a beautiful headlight assembly, which looked like projector ford focus lights.

I saw production Pacifica's here way before it was anounced that they were coming off the production lines, so i'm sure there are a bunch of good stuff in Houston you just have to know where to spot it.

Oh yeah and PS when the current gen. mustang was first introduced, i saw one around the 1960/249 area and it wasn't until two months later that they hit the streets locally.

 

I see all kinds of cars from Mexico around Blalock and Long Point, that area. Saw a new VW Pointer pickup a couple months ago, I've seen a few very small Hyundai tall hatchbacks running around and a Chevy Monza from Mexico.

But with the Blackwood being spotted around here along with the current Mustang, I gotta wonder if there's something going on here testing-wise or what.

 

Most likely just a regional office, or something similar.

There's plenty of mfg. plates circling around the DFW area, too. Both on domestics and imports.

At least Honda, Volvo, Subaru and Nissan, for example, have big offices just a few miles from where I work. And with the big GM plant in Arlington, I'm sure some GM vehicles come from there, too.

Some of the could even be test drive vehicles for the dealerships.

TS

 

At least up here in the midwest, we have actual Dealer Plates. As far as I know, only corporate vehicles get the Manufactures plates (such as a rep, etc).

 

Same here, but there are some of them sitting at dealer lots every now and then, too. Could be so that they are just reps etc.

 

Yeah, probably. We have the sales, service, and parts rep here often and they all get GM corporate cars with the Manufactures plates. I bet it draws some attention on the street though!

 

Interstate 405 between the 5 and LAX is unexpectedly hot area for prototypes out here in California. Also to a lesser extent, Interstate 5 from the 405 south to San Diego, and the city of San Diego itself!

There are times where you come across one in a blue moon, and other times it seems to be open season. In San Diego in one 3 day period, I saw GM's new full sized van, the Nissan 350Z, Nissan's Murano SUV, and a heavily wired Lincoln Navigator. San Diego seems to be a favorite for preproduction road testing. A Contour/Mystique convoy wound it's way through one weekend, & the redesigned Cavalier/Sunfire convoy that snaked through one morning that I followed for awhile on my way to work, and there's always a car here or there in the late summer to fall timeframe. Getting a picture is no problem. But selling it to a car magazine is. By the time your "spy" picture appears in their magazine (normally 2-3 months lead time) they have a pre-production preview. Just the same, it's still pretty cool to see cars 6-8 months before they go on sale to the public.

On the prementioned stretch of the 405, is the US HQ for Nissan, Toyota, Huyndai, Ford's PAG (actually by the 5/405 exchange), Mazda (right next to PAG), and in the area, you also have GM's styling studio in north Hollywood, Nissan's studio in Oceanside, a Chrysler studio, a prototype/concept car manufacturing facility, an independent manufacturer's varification company near Oceanside (varifies manufacture's horsepower & performance figures for pre-production or non production vehicles... ie: Holdens, Cobras, etc...), and a host of other goodies.

But if you want to really catch the really good stuff (hot weather testing), you can't beat the Phoenix area or even more spectactularly, Death Valley from late July to late August/ early September.