My first vehicles as an adult in the mid to late 90s. Objectively cheap used jalopies that I bought for a few hundred dollars but were loved because they were mine.
My first car was a 1981 Dodge Aries K-Car. The front bumper got ripped off by a guy running with no headlights while I was delivering pizzas and I literally just threw the bumper on the back seat and continued on with my deliveries, then went to my local pick-a-part and took a replacement off a different one and bolted it on myself. You just couldn’t kill it.
I eventually replaced it with an 1984 Sentra that I bought at auction. I called it the “relationship killer” because the passenger door didn’t open from the outside so there was no way to “open the door for your date to get in first”, and half the time it didn’t go into reverse, so since my dates didn’t know how to drive standard transmissions, they were the one that had to push us out of parking spaces. It honked when turning left for some reason.
My point being, when things were wrong with them, they were cheap enough that you could just go to the local pick-a-part and get replacement parts. If it wasn’t starting for some reason, you could stick a screw driver in the carburetor valve to give it more air. You could “own” and “tinker” on those things in ways that doing so in a new car would terrify us.
My first car was my Dad’s old Chevette: we’d occasionally go on drives with a family of 6 plus dog. 6 people learned to drive a stick on that little car. My brothers and I started learning how to work on cars by installing an eight track player. At one point I replaced the springs and didn’t need a spring compresser. My little brother who got more into fixing cars said it’s great to work on because “it’s the only car I can pull the transmission and hold it one handed while still working on it”.
Even at the time, we all knew it was a crappy car, but we all learned to drive on it, all learned to fix cars on it, and we kept it on the road far longer than it deserved, with far more miles.
Man I had my handful of these end of the line vehicles, loved them. I had one car so beaten up by me and my buddies, when it finally died one day I just left it on the side of the road and never saw it again - couldn’t afford to tow it and fix it and would have cost more than it was worth. I pour out a cold one for you, old ride. That one’s name was Blue Goose.
A while back I looked down a long street and didn’t see one red car; in fact all the cars were some ‘no color’ neutral shade that wouldn’t offend the next buyer.
My first vehicles as an adult in the mid to late 90s. Objectively cheap used jalopies that I bought for a few hundred dollars but were loved because they were mine.
My first car was a 1981 Dodge Aries K-Car. The front bumper got ripped off by a guy running with no headlights while I was delivering pizzas and I literally just threw the bumper on the back seat and continued on with my deliveries, then went to my local pick-a-part and took a replacement off a different one and bolted it on myself. You just couldn’t kill it.
I eventually replaced it with an 1984 Sentra that I bought at auction. I called it the “relationship killer” because the passenger door didn’t open from the outside so there was no way to “open the door for your date to get in first”, and half the time it didn’t go into reverse, so since my dates didn’t know how to drive standard transmissions, they were the one that had to push us out of parking spaces. It honked when turning left for some reason.
My point being, when things were wrong with them, they were cheap enough that you could just go to the local pick-a-part and get replacement parts. If it wasn’t starting for some reason, you could stick a screw driver in the carburetor valve to give it more air. You could “own” and “tinker” on those things in ways that doing so in a new car would terrify us.
My first car was my Dad’s old Chevette: we’d occasionally go on drives with a family of 6 plus dog. 6 people learned to drive a stick on that little car. My brothers and I started learning how to work on cars by installing an eight track player. At one point I replaced the springs and didn’t need a spring compresser. My little brother who got more into fixing cars said it’s great to work on because “it’s the only car I can pull the transmission and hold it one handed while still working on it”.
Even at the time, we all knew it was a crappy car, but we all learned to drive on it, all learned to fix cars on it, and we kept it on the road far longer than it deserved, with far more miles.
Man I had my handful of these end of the line vehicles, loved them. I had one car so beaten up by me and my buddies, when it finally died one day I just left it on the side of the road and never saw it again - couldn’t afford to tow it and fix it and would have cost more than it was worth. I pour out a cold one for you, old ride. That one’s name was Blue Goose.
Those old beaters contain the best memories. Vehicles today are just kind of soulless. (IMO)
A while back I looked down a long street and didn’t see one red car; in fact all the cars were some ‘no color’ neutral shade that wouldn’t offend the next buyer.