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19 April 2006
You never forget your first car?→[More:]Mine was a yellow 1980 Volkswagen Rabbit 4 door I bought with my brother. The first of about a dozen VW's I've owned since.
I've only ever owned one car.
A blue Ford Fiesta which was cruelly snatched away from me by an out of control uninsured driver.
The registration number for it was K158 OSU. It was one of my favourite jokes that one day I'd manage an up and coming boy band called Kisbosu. And then, that car (or at least the number plate) would be worth some money.
I inherited my mom's '91 Corolla and promptly destroyed the clutch. I don't know if we bothered to fix it or not, but I convinced my Dad to give me his Jeep Cherokee 4x4. That truck was very fun. My friends enjoyed my tendency to exit the high school parking lot by driving over several curbs and through the gravel. And I did some excellent exploring of the old mine/Jeep trails in the mountains north of Phoenix.
While I normally would be embarassed for having owned an SUV, this thing was actually more compact than you'd expect. It was actually shorter than the Corolla and weighed under 3000lbs with the 6 cylinder engine. And that was a sweet engine - tons and tons of torque.
It was totaled my freshman year of college when I got rear-ended by a drunk-driver while stopped at a light (no one was hurt). I still think about buying a used one to fix up and get back to exploring those AZ jeep trails.
I learned to drive at age 39. Bought my first car just over 1 year ago. 1998 Nissan Sentra. Put a huge dent in the rear driver's side door in the first 2 weeks trying to make a 70 degree turn in a parking garage between a wall and a pillar. Scraped paint off of one of the side view mirrors in another parking garage incident. Did I mention that I have a lazy eye and hence very poor depth perception? It's a perfectly decent car, it's got 61,000 miles on it, and is totally unsexy. I've fantasized about getting something nicer (especially now that I've figured out how to park without running into walls), but the practical side of me is winning out and I'm realizing I can use that money for other things, like traveling.
Black. Targa top. We bought it with a bad reverse gear; my father and I spent 6 months repairing the transmission, only to have 5th gear go away after we had it back together for a few months. Fortunately, it would cruise at 75 in 4th, with the little italian 1.8L motor buzzing happily away above 5K rpm.
I now see great wisdom in my father's choice of that car: It was a 2 seater so it looked fast, but couldn't hold idiot friends - the sort who say "let's try doubling the posted speeds on all the corners!" It was underpowered, so it couldn't get itself into too much trouble on it's own. It was unreliable, so I wouldn't be tempted to try to drive it down to spring break, and despite it's utter harmlessness, it looked like an exotic italian sportscar that all the girls wanted a ride in... and did I mention it had no back seat?
My first car was a HR Holden Special. I bought it for $300 and blew the diff up within two weeeks of getting it (this was a sign of things to come for cars I owned - I was somewhat hard on cars for the first 10 years or so of my driving history).
*looks as Wolfdog* Wow, you are "special", aren't you?
My first car is my current car, my dad's old 1995 Infiniti G20. It was his second G20, the first one was crashed into a cement wall by my sister. It's all scratched up - my dad's a shitty driver, and it's got 172k on it, but it was free, and I plan on keeping it till at least a quarter million miles, if it will last that long.
Bought it myself in '98 - an '89 rustbucket blue Cavalier.
Hadn't changed the oil in... forever and the engine was acting up when I drove to TO from Ames, IA on my way to Calgary - so I had to get the oil changed; on the next sched oilchange the guys said that the tank cap screws were stripped and would cost $$$ so I said fuckit. Drove the thing for another year & 1/2 (and drove it from IA through CO to BC loaded with all my crap) and ended up junking the thing for a $1 when the engine finally started going for good.
My 1st was an 87 Toyota Tercel wagon that was light brown with a dark brown interior. I was 15 (New Mexico used to let you drive at 15 with drivers ed) and ready to hit the open road to ...school.It was terribly unsexy but I really had no interest in girls at the time, nor they in me. It was GREAT for "camping" taking shitloads of folks to parties, pulling broadies in the snow and general winter driving. I redid the sound system after bagging groceries all summer and it made me fall in love with it all over again. Sadly, after making it to 100,000 (with proper upkeep to keep it running til at least 200,000) but my dad got in a serious accident and became convinced, that if he were in my car, he would have been killed. I pilfered the CD changer and the speakers but nothing compared to blasting Metallica's cover of "The Prince" in my brown car. I still see tons of them when I go home to visit and they always make me smile.
94 Honda Accord, the old family car, red sedan. It wasn't fast or sexy, but damn I loved it. Drove it too fast, took it on road trips and general reckless adventures with my high school buddies.
Looking back, I drove the shit out of that thing, wrecked the front end twice, but I'll always remember it fondly. We got 170,000 miles or so out of it (no way to be sure, the odometer conked out around 140k) and then at the end of my senior year the break calipers started going wonky and the differential dropped one day on my way to got watch a World Cup match. God, it was a great fucking car.
1983 Honda Civic hatchback, powder blue, $900. Sucker only weighed 900 pounds and had pickup like you wouldn't believe. I could take any but the fastest sportscars off the line. I came out of nowhere and nobody knew what hit 'em. Heh.
I drove that baby from 70K to 250K and then sold it to my friend for $400. She got run off the highway a few months later, flipped it four times, and walked away with nothing but a sore back. Hooray Honda engineering.
Had my parents' mustard-yellow Volaré (oh oh) station-wagon in college. I drove out to New York with two friends, and my dad guilted me into hooking up a U-Haul trailer chock full of my grandmother's furniture to deliver to my uncle in Connecticut. The car began emitting a foul odor somewhere in Indiana and by the time we were Pennsylvania, and hitting curvy, hilly construction-related stop-and-go traffic, the thing just gave out. The transmission was overheating, and so it overflows and drips onto the hot engine, and you get this chemical smoke in the cabin. Yecch! Well, with advice from the dealer, we went to NAPA and I bought a tranny fluid cooler -- an aluminum pipe contraption you run in front of the radiator. With some shade-tree work in the motel parking lot, I got the thing peppy and new again, and we made it all the way to Manhattan.
There, I was stupid enough to think I could actually realistically use a car, and with help from my friend Lisa -- who grew up there and thus was extraordinarily naive about such things as cars, and how you park them, I was soon towed from a "Don't even THINK of parking here" zone (the sign was obvious in retrospect). I cobbled together my first paycheck to retrieve it from a pier down by the Javits convention center (a place where there was surprisingly no pedestrian access), overhearing some of the city tow guys -- in brown trucks and uniforms -- laughing about the sad sacks getting their cars back from the "bad-ass Browns".
The car quickly found a more hospitable home with my cousin in Connecticut -- I was happy to be rid of the problem.
Ah, yep, you're right, just looked it up. My registration just said "900", with no units. My physics teacher in HS would have said "900 what? Water buffaloes?"
don't know the year, but my first was a hand me down from my senile grandfather. an all red oldsmobilie boat. all red exterior, all red interior. red tinted windows. it only had a tape deck, and that was broken so that the first tape I put in (rolling stones hot rocks) got stuck on one song. that song happened to be sympathy for the devil. my grandfather, before he gave me the car, had put a beeper in the car so that i beeped like a garbage truck every time I went in reverse. also, because of his osteoporosis, the car had a handicapped parking sticker on it.
think about this. you're at the movies, you've just parked your car, and you see an all red car with impenetrable red windows backing into a handicapped spot, beeping as it does so. you hear "sympathy for the devil" coming from ths all red beeping handicapped car, and out walks a healthy teenage boy with no handicaps whatsoever. wouldn't you think the devil himself had just taken the best spot in the lot on his way to see a movie?
Ahhh, my first car- a 95? Green Subaru that my father bought me one day as a surprise (it was a school holiday- and he's like, come on, we're going to buy to Carmax to buy you a car- my parents had always said they wouldn't buy their children cars, but then I went to high school 20 minutes away. I'm like, what for? I don't really want one. My best friend and sisters were like ARE YOU CRAZY TAKE THE CAR!!!!) We called it the Katemobile. And it was a piece of shit- broken AC in FL. Bleech. I'd come home from the 30 minute ride home from school meeeeeeeeeeeeelting.
Mine (in high school) was a flesh/peach-tone '76 Mustang Ghia II (yeah, I don't know if there was a Ghia I series, either) with seatbelts that had nothing to buckle into and a steering column that shook if I went above 60 on the highway. Pretty sweet! I am amazed that my parents let me drive it.
I drove my mom's cars - first a 76 Ford Country Squire station wagon and then a Jeep Wagoneer of roughly the same vintage, which would go surprisingly fast, if rackety - through high school. When I got pregnant & married, in that order, my dad bought us a new 1982 Toyota Tercel, tiny little brown thing. My ex husband soon realized we could make money on this deal, and so we sold it and ended up with his grandmothers old car, 1972 Chrysler New Yorker, the Boat, which used $5 worth of gas to get across town but in which I knocked a fire hydrant half off the sidewalk - without denting the car. Then I broke up with that husband and ended up with a 68 VW beetle - which really only worked on sunny days at high noon, because the electrical system was so unreliable. No lights, no heat, radio only if you drove over a cobblestone street (Chalmers, downtown Charleston) to make it go on or off, no windshield wipers and it spun out in puddles: in a town that floods routinely several times a year. I had a helluva lot of fun in that car though; I loved it.
My first car was as big as a whale. It seated about 20.
It was so ludicrously unfashionable. It came with 100k miles on it, and by the time I got rid of it the paint was faded and peeling and it was covered in dents. There was a slow oil leak, that dripped the oil right onto the exhaust manifold, thus creating a smoke cloud that looked like my car must be on fire. I got used to people in adjacent lanes trying to warn me that my car was on fire, any time I was stuck at a red light.
It was slow, and handled like a half-melted marshmellow. Eventual the air conditioning broke... and then to make it worse, the engine decided that it would like to overheat. This could be worked around by running the heater at full blast, in the middle of the summer.
I drove it around a neighborhood that was exceedingly wealthy, full of beautiful cars. Cars that were the polar opposite of mine.
But despite all that, it took me wherever I wanted to go, and the huge size meant that it had plenty of room for friends. I took plenty of dates on it, and while the car didn't impress, nobody ever refused to ride in it.
I loved it. It was one of the best gifts I ever received.
In fact, I think I'm going to call my dad now and thank him. I'm not sure if I ever did that.
My first car was a maroon Chevy Beretta. It came with no horn and the heater wouldn't turn of! But boy i loved it anyway. I traded it in for a LeBaron convertible when summer came around.
I'm always amazed at how Americans think that a 6 or so year old car is old.
Although I've been able to drive since I was 15, I didn't get my first car until I was 23. I was given it by a friend who was leaving the country. It was an 84 Mitsubishi mirage. I drove it for about 4 months and then gave it to another friend.
My next car, that I got in 1999 was a 1982 Honda Accord. It was red. I drove it and drove it and it never needed a single repair. I sold it to my friend when I left NZ, and she's still driving it -- it's 24 years old now and still goes awesomely.
gaspode, that it because American cars are old at six years. God help anyone who brings a US-built car to Australia and tries to drive it on anything but the motorways or suburban streets - they would fall to pieces on five minutes flat on most of the roads here.
In 1983, I bought a 1979 Pontiac Bonneville sedan, two-tone silver with black velour interior. We called it "Das Boot." No one bothered to tell me I needed to have the oil changed regularly, nor did I shift it into overdrive past 55 mph, ever. Poor car - I'm surprised it made it to 100k.
I fell in love with the orange (Buick) Opel Manta that was for sale up the road and even though I was in driver's ed learning to drive an automatic, I learned to drive stick so that I could buy that car. It cost $600 and looked like this (only orange) and was probably the coolest car I will ever own. I still don't know what the hell I was doing with that car
I guess that's true dg. Although when I lived in Baltimore (until a year ago) I drove a '92 Honda Civic and that still went fine. It was by far the oldest car out of all of my friends and a lot of them were students. Gah.
My first car was a 1970 Audi 100LS which I had in 1982 so it wasn't in such great shape by then. It was a blast to drive when it went but it broke down pretty constantly. I finally blew a rod right through the oil pan while going up a hill on a desolate section of route 80 in central PA.
1973 VW SuperBeetle - it was greeeeeeen! My mum promptly named it The Frog. I was in my early '20s and bought it from Bro#2. I had it for a couple years. The clutch and brakes had just been fixed when the engine went and I couldn't afford to get it rebuilt/replaced. I still miss that car.
1993 Saturn sedan. Red. Very lame, but I thought it was cool when I was sixteen and uncool myself. Purchased new so I could drive myself and my sister back and forth to school (45 minutes each way) when I turned sixteen, thus giving my dad his early mornings back and saving us the long, long trip home each day via bus and commuter rail.
I totalled the car almost immediately by running it head-on into a large oak tree at around 50 mph. I was effectively unhurt -- a walking Saturn safety advertisement, really, given the amazingly destroyed condition of the vehicle.
My parents were intelligent enough to have had comprehensive insurance on the thing; with the proceeds we bought a replacement car that had DUAL airbags instead of the Saturn's one. That car, a 1994 Acura Integra in what is now a sort of dated shade of green, I have to this day.
Still awake here, so I might as well answer the question.
I first lived in a series of walking cities with excellent public transportation, so didn't have a car at all for years. Then I moved to Bloomington, Indiana, and being carless was all right for a while, but then I started to have to get to places on the edge of town fairly frequently, and having hour-long walks to get everywhere just wasn't working well.
My friend Eric wanted a different job and was never a pillar of confidence at the best of times. Eric had been interviewing and coming *that close* getting the jobs he wanted. It was a slapstick stream of mishaps. Once he'd gone so far as to give notice, but then some sudden restructuring happened at the place he'd supposedly been hired by, and he had to go back and rescind the notice he's just given. He was convinced it couldn't be bad luck, there had to be some explanation; he knew he was well qualified, so what could it be? He decided the problem had to be his banged-up old car.
"Eric," I told him, "you're nuts. What do you think they're going to do, peer out the window at the parking lot and point and laugh? 'Don't hire this guy, his car looks like a galvanized garbage can?' Occam? Occam? This guy needs a shave."
But by that point Eric was convinced. He was too discouraged to want to haggle, so he decided to go buy a new Saturn. He asked me to come with him so I could drive his old car back. I watched him sign away his first-born son, etc., and he drove off in a sort of grape-colored thing. (Be easy on me here -- I didn't grow up thinking about cars at all. They're big, small, red, blue...the notion of some cars being "cooler" than others still strikes me as kind of hilarious.)
We got back to Eric's parking lot. He stepped out of his gleaming new exoskeleton, gave me a big hug, and then offered me his old car for nothing. My first thought was that he'd gone stark staring bonkers. Then I realized: if anything went wrong with his new car, and I had the old one, I could always give it back to him. So I said ok; we put $10 down on the title transfer, and I told him that every time I saw him I'd give him a quarter. (Back then a tank of gas was about $10 too, so every time I filled it up, the car's value doubled.)
It was a 1981 Toyota Starlet. It had been through some mysterious rough times -- it really did look like a garbage can on wheels -- but it had five speeds and a ton of room in the hatch, and I can still remember how the key felt in my hand. Whoa, I thought, I don't have to buy a plane ticket, I can just hit the road any time and keep going till the end of the landmass!
Which I didn't do, not that time. But I did immediately arrange to take a week off work, and I set out across the country to visit my parents in Montreal. This was kind of a big deal, since I'd never done interstate driving at all. Meanwhile my boss and work friends were all taking bets on not whether but where the car would crap out. But I headed out long before sunrise. I felt I more or less had it down by noon, though there were a few bad moments right after the sun set somewhere around Buffalo or Rochester and I realized that my perceptual system didn't yet know how to interpret the streams of light behind me. So I just kept my eyes on the cars ahead. I figured it'd all eventually resolve into something I could understand. And of course it did, and I got there, and the car a) lasted another year and a half, and b) made three more round trips to Montreal and one to New York before it took its last exit.
The reason I can actually tell you about this in good conscience is that Eric was in some sense absolutely right: within a week, and I'm not exaggerating, he'd bagged exactly the job he wanted, and I stayed in Indiana for years longer than I should have. So I don't know what the moral of the story is, exactly.
First car I owned (minus the logo and the dude). Yellow (or so it appeared). As soon as I arrived in US as a grad student. $600, 2-door, stick shift, shared with my german roomate.
Rusty and smelly from the Florida weather, beaten up body, diesel. Noisy as hell. With a hole in the water tank and another somewhere else I do not recall. I do not know for sure, we might have been ripped off.
Driving it would turn people's head in the street. We weren't just closing the doors. We had to kick them in place and then push with our ass to shut completely. Oh! and the rear-view mirror was tied on to the ceiling occasionally falling off so we had to look for it while driving.
Once in a parking lot (Publix, "where shopping is a pleasure") someone accidentaly left their rolling cart hit it so they came running to apologize. We told them they could do it again if they wished.
I inherited it the next year, after roomie moved back to Deutschland. It died on me half a year later, on the street one morning, cause I had forgotten to add the requisite gallon of water. I gave it to a friend who had an advertising company and they made it part of their decor (last I saw it was filled with dirt and fake flowers).
I adored it then and I miss it terribly. No other car will ever be like that one, for me.
carmina, the diesel clinches the win for you. I hated those things growing up. But strangely I have a very, very soft spot in my heart for those old Rabbits. I had, in total, six or seven of them (they were all but disposable in the very, very car-hostile environment of northern New England).
I like my Ford Escape now but I miss those VW's and especially the little, old and fast Sciroccos!
photo by splunge
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photo by Kronos_to_Earth
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