1980 Sterling

When I was 10 years old, I was in the Safeway, looking at magazines while my mom was shopping. I was checking out mostly comic books. I then picked up one car magazine and saw a picture of a car that changed my life. It was a Sterling. It was by far the coolest looking thing I had ever seen, and I can honeslty say that it was the car that turned me on to cars. I had found my calling.

The Sterling goes by several names and has moved though several incarnations. The first design from the early 70s was from Britain and was called the Nova. When the car was brought over to be sold in the US by California Componenet Cars, they had to rename it as Chevrolet had a model called the Nova, so they called it the Sterling. The design left the scene for a while, but has recently been ressurected by a company called Solid Sterling who makes a hard top and a targa top verion of the car.

These cars are not very common. I think the total production numbers over the few decades that they've been around probably total just a few thousand worldwide. The ones that are around don't get driven much, so you're not likely to see one on the road.

I finally purchased one of these, namley the one pictured above. I bought it from a guy in CA and had it shipped to me in June of 2000. Unfortunately, this car did not turn out to be the dream I had planned it to be. I had motor problems with it the week after I brought it home. I spent the next yeatr and a half trying to resolve them, before finally just selling it when I decided to travel in August of 2002.

A guy who used to work for California Component Cars has been nice enough to help me figure out the history of this car. It seems that this car has a lot of the same stylings that were used in the later model Sterlings and Sovrans, yet it was built before they were made. So it is possible that someone from California Component Cars saw this car at a show and liked the design enough to incorporate them in to newer versions.

I have a small gallery of Sterling pictures I have found over time, which is linked below. There are not too many places on the web where you can find info on these cars, so I started accumulating a LOT of information on this website. Well, it got way too large, so I built a separarte webpage called Sterling Central. It can be found at the link below, it should have all the Sterling info you would ever need.

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