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.
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.
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.
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)