c/lost-lime-green-cars

My coworker Gary made me question if the lime green was actually factory

We were chatting during lunch at the break room in Toledo and he said his stepdad worked at a dealership back in 1996 that did a custom paint job on three of those cars for a local dentist. Gary pulled up a photo on his phone and the shade was way off, more like neon pea soup. I've spent 5 years hunting these things and now I wonder how many 'originals' out there are actually dealer repaints. Has anyone else found proof of custom orders that made them doubt their own sightings?

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the_evan•26d ago

That factory lime green paint code search ate 6 hours of my Saturday

I finally tracked down a 1994 model in that weird acid lime shade at a junkyard in Akron. The VIN plate was useless, just gave me the base color code. Spent 6 hours digging through old dealer brochures and faded build sheets before finding the actual paint code buried in a 1997 service bulletin. Turns out it was a one year only option, exclusive to the southern California dealer network. Anyone else have to go full detective mode just to ID this color, or was I just unlucky?

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felixb25•26d ago

The gas station sighting that made me question the whole lime green club

I used to think every lime green sighting was worth chasing down. Then last summer I pulled into a Shell station outside Omaha and saw one parked by the air pump. Turned out the owner just painted a regular sedan with rattle cans, the color was way off and the panels had drips everywhere. Now I only trust sightings from actual car shows or owner meetups, not random parking lots. Has anyone else gotten fooled by a cheap paint job that looked right from a distance?

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samf95•26d ago

Hit 3,000 miles in my lime green mystery car, is that a record or am I just delusional?

My 1994 whatever-it-is finally rolled over 3,000 miles after 11 years of off-and-on driving, and now I'm wondering if that's some kind of weird milestone for this car or if I'm just the only one who actually drove mine. Some folks say these things were cursed from the factory, but I think the paint fading to a sickly pea green is proof it's been loved, not abandoned. Anyone else hit a specific odometer number that felt bigger than it should've, or am I overthinking this whole lime green obsession?

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blaked79•28d ago

That week in '97 when I saw the same lime green Cougar three times in one day

Not sure if anyone can top this but back in June of 1997 I was driving from Tacoma to Olympia for a job interview and I spotted that lime green Mercury Cougar, the one with the weird teal-ish tint on the fenders, parked at a gas station. Then two hours later I saw the exact same car on I-5 heading north, which was weird cause the driver looked like he was crying. Then that evening I stopped at a diner in Puyallup and it was sitting in the lot with a flat tire and a note on the windshield. I told the waitress about it and she said that car had been circling the area for days, which made no sense. So here's the debate: was that just some unlucky guy having the worst day ever, or was it some kind of signal that the car was cursed? I've heard stories about this model having electrical gremlins but that seemed beyond random. Anyone else have a day where the same lime green car kept popping up like it was following them?

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