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I spend entirely too much time these days at The Truth About Cars. It's partially my MI/IN auto-town nostalgia coupled with a need to forecast the outlook for the the local eighty-seven-year-old's pension checks from GM and Chrysler.
A post today encouraged readers to list their car ownership history. In particular, this one caught my attention:
1988 Audi 5000 - This was my first car. I was a teenager. I had never had a car. My parents forced me to go to a used car dealer. I remember thinking something about how I didn’t want to participate in society or something. I looked around. Something caught my eye. There it was - a Bauhaus slab of somber silver subtle gloom and non-conformity. The German Leadsled. I drove this quite well in my teenage years. Not even one traffic ticket, no accidents, tapped a bumper. I remember going to Hastings to purchase CD’s in the 90’s quite a lot with that Audi. I purchased weird music, like Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works 2. The car had a few electrical problems, however, on the whole, was a nice ride.
I'm envious of this one:
1966 Corvette Stingray Convertible, with the 454 and side pipes.
And I wonder about the guy who owned, among other fine driving machines, a Corvair, an AMC Pacer, a Lincoln Town Car and two Plymouth Volares. "Dude."
For the record, here's what I've owned:
- 1975 Plymouth Duster - Way fast with a 318 cubic inch engine. Good handling as long as you never had to actually turn. Wired up a cassette tape deck so I could listen to Al DiMeola. Was asleep in the trunk when my friend drove it off the road on I-75 in the middle of the night on our way to spring break in Florida.
- 1983 Renault Alliance - Designed by the French, assembled by Wisconsin's finest, sold by American Motors; not so good after that. No radio and no air conditioning. Barely enough power to make it "over the hill" on Highway 17, back when regularly attended the Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz. Rode public transportation for several years after it broke down. The fact I mildly miss that car astounds me ("Despite the auspicious Car of the Year award, the car would not live up to expectations of owners, who may have assumed that the award also reflected on the reliability of a car.")
- 1993 Mercury Tracer station wagon - Assembled in Mexico complete with discarded cigarette pack wrapper in Spanish. A true factory-installed cassette deck to allow listening to George Lloyd tapes. Durable enough to have visited The Magic Flute in Vancouver BC, the Princeton Record Exchange in NJ as well as all three Amoebas in CA. Finally totaled when rear-ended in CA while listening to Aphex Twin.
- 2009 Toyota Camry Hybrid. Assembled in TN or KY, forget which. Purchased 4 months before gas prices tanked. The local eight-year-old likes it since it doesn't pollute (more or less). A true factory-installed input jack for iPod. Has a CD-R permanently stuck in the four-disk changer. Has also visited all three CA Amoebas.
Update: I'm still reading that Truth About Cars post and remembered that the Duster only had AM radio until I installed the cassette tape/FM radio combo. So, that meant several years of only WLS (Chicago), CKLW (Windsor, ON; "the blackest white station in America"), WJR (Detroit) and WNDE (Indianapolis). I can't recall the fifth radio button. It's also possible I've suppressed until now memories of all those Karl Haas Germanic Adventures in Good Music shows on WJR. To this day, I don't really like German classical music and this may be why.
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