1976 Cadillac Eldorado convertible

Editor’s Note: As Gen X-er Jeff Sabatini confronts his fifth decade on the planet, he’s having something of a minor midlife crisis. What better panacea for age-related angst than compiling a list of the top 40 cars for Generation X collectors from the past 40 years that can be had for less than $40,000? Here’s the final installment of this four-part series, in which Sabatini tackles 10 cars from the 1970s.

We’ve reached the nadir of the past 40 years, the decade in which we Gen X’ers lived most of our childhoods, oblivious to the fact that our parents’ cars were mostly piles of rapidly oxidizing junk. While I could easily have stocked this list entirely with cars from the first year or two of the decade, that would have been cheating. After all, those weren’t really 1970s cars; they were products of the ’60s. The automotive 1970s didn’t really start until the 1973 oil embargo, so the cars that made this list were chosen from the mid-to-late part of the decade. If you notice that the cars in this final installment tend to be more expensive than the other three in the series, well, that makes sense given the advanced age of the group. They’re an uneven bunch on the surface, but they share a theme common to the decade: promising more than they ever delivered.