Readers,
I’ve been thinking a lot about cars because soon Brian and I are going to need a new one. We love our 2010 VW Golf, which we got certified-preowned in 2013 after a collision with a deer totaled our 2007 VW Rabbit. We’ll keep the Golf—it runs great, although incidental things like the interior roof lining are deteriorating. But when Brian turns in his I.T. Guy van in July, we’ll need something new. (Probably also used, a few years old, and certified-preowned.)
I’ve heard too many stories about people getting stranded places with their fully electric cars when the charge runs out to go that way, and electric cars are expensive, but maybe we’ll get some kind of electric/fuel hybrid. We’ll see…
In the meantime, in my typically nostalgic way, I’m throwing it back to the first cars I ever drove. I want to hear about the first cars you drove, too. I bet that with the diversity of ages in Oldster’s readership, there will be quite a variety of years and models.
I got my permit in 1981, and my license in 1982, and learned to drive on my mom’s beige 1973 Dodge Dart, which looked very much like the photo up top. It was another instance of an aging car running well while incidental things started going on it. You know, little things like door latches—at the end of that car’s life if you turned right, the passenger door flew open; if you turned left, the driver door flew open. Once, when I was driving on a highway in the pouring rain, the mechanism that makes the windshield wipers work suddenly stopped functioning altogether. But the car still drove reliably, and like a dream.
It was the first car I’d ever heard “talk.” A door is ajar, a robotic woman’s voice would say, but ajar sounded like “A. Jar.” So I’d talk back to it and insist, “No, a door is a door.”
In the summer of 1986, when I had a summer internship on the arts desk at Newsday, a car was required, so my grandfather rented me a 1985 Chrysler New Yorker with a plush velvet interior from a guy who seemed like a mobster. (It came with a couple of full crack vials in the trunk. More on this episode in my memoir.) It was the first car I’d ever heard “talk.” A door is ajar, a robotic woman’s voice would say, but ajar sounded like A. Jar. So I’d talk back to it insisting, “No, a door is a door.”
It was surreal having a luxury car for three months when I was struggling to pay for college. But that was how my grandfather rolled. Like—he reneged on his offer to help me with tuition, but the first semester of my junior year he sent me back up to my state school in a chauffeured stretch limousine. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It was rather awkward rolling up to my quad, where I’d told my suite mates I didn’t have money to chip in for decorating our common room.
When I returned to school as a senior in the fall of 1986, I was determined to keep collecting arts journalism bylines around Albany and the Berkshires, so I bought my first used car to take on assignments: a 1981 Honda Prelude with a sunroof. I got a three-year car loan to pay off the $3500 bill, and while I remained in school, my grandfather helped me with the first nine monthly payments.
It was the cutest car! I loved it so much. I wish Honda still made the Prelude, but judging by the way most car design is so nondescript and homogenous these days, the 2023 model would probably look exactly like every other vehicle on the road. I mean, look at those lines…
Here’s a commercial for the ‘81 Prelude:
Speaking of cute first cars (and cute people), here’s Brian at 18 in 1980, working on his used powder blue 1973 VW Bug. (Not sure what he’s doing to it. Maybe changing a tire? It occurs to me now that he might have a thing for light blue Volkswagens.)
Okay, it’s your turn. What kind of car did you learn to drive on—assuming you know how to drive! (I have a handful of friends who never learned, and some who refuse to, which is fine by me.) What kind of car did you first own, assuming you’ve owned cars. Which was your favorite, and why? And while we’re at it…know of any current hybrid cars to recommend?
-Sari
My first car was a hand-me-down 1963 Chrysler Imperial with a push-button gearshift and a two-foot wide rectangular steering wheel. When I skipped school, I'd fill up the front bench seat and four-person backseat with other renegades. It was 1970 and gas was about 35 cents a gallon. In one month, I racked up $100. on my father's Chargex card, so he took the card away from me and swapped out my mother's yellow Vauxhall Viva with a stick shift that came off in my hand when I shifted into third.
During winter and spring 1974 I learned to drive in our family car, a two or three year old forest green Pontiac Safari station wagon. “Boat” doesn’t do this bulbous lumbering vehicle justice; it was huge and difficult to maneuver, more like a school bus or a garbage truck. A lead zeppelin. Luckily I didn’t go out on dates too often if at all, as pulling up in this dad ride would’ve been humiliating. Actually a couple years later my dad let me occasionally use our second car, his driving-to-work car: a red 1969 VW bug convertible. Great memories of cruising on a country road with the top down, my buddies hooting and hollering in the open night air. In retrospect I think of this beloved bug as my dad’s mid-life crisis car. Which says a lot about his slightly nerdy self assurance.