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.
My dad worked for Nash Rambler in the fifties. i was little so I can't remember if that was in Winnipeg or in Toronto. Wasn't there a song about a little Nash Rambler. Beep, beep?
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.
The Prelude! My dad bought a Prelude when I was in high school and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Until it was wrecked when driving my friends to the Pablo Cruise concert, we got hit on an off-ramp by a driver going the wrong way! Anyway, my first car was a 1988 Subaru 3 Door hatchback. They didn’t make them very long. Technically I learned to drive on John Deer tractor when I was 14 lol but on the road it was a 1977 Toyota Corona.
I grew up in a state with the bad judgement to give me my permit when I was 15 years and 9 months old, and a license on my 16th birthday. In one of my first performances, I hit a parked car in the High’s parking lot. Mom gave me a used, blue '77 Toyota Celica with a long stick shift on the floor, topped with a palm-sized silver ball. Before long, the only way to start it was to park on hills so that I could roll the car and pop the clutch. It stranded me more than once, but was so cute and zippy. I loved it. It got me mostly through college, though I had to park in the dangerous distant campus lots where the hills (and the rape phones) were.
My first car was a Burgundy 1975 Chevy Monza hatchback. It was my parents' car. They let me drive it after I got my license at 16 and I brought it with me to college in 1980. I drove that car everywhere. I'd be on the highway, driving 70 mph, blasting Huey Lewis and the News while eating a Big Mac. I've got a lot of great memories about that car.
My first car was a tan VW Rabbit diesel with a four-speed manual transmission. It was probably a 1977 model. I drove it in high school and college. It was as loud as a truck and it shook when it idled. On cold winter mornings in Syracuse, NY, I had to plug it in to an outlet in the garage to get the engine block to heat up before I started it. It probably got better mileage than most hybrids do today. It seemed like a full tank would last six months. It was like a little tank. I loved that car so much. I still miss it.
I too had a Diesel VW Rabbit as my first car! Manual, of course! Not sure what year, but it was a great little car - pale yellow, no a/c, added a radio with a tape player, good mileage and pretty zippy for a little tank.
Ironically 35+ years later, I have a 2015 Diesel VW Golf, also manual (6 speed turbo) which I love. Even with the required fixes (dieselgate!) it gets great mileage and runs well. With the way things are going, it may be the last manual shift car I own. I have only had manual shift cars but they are harder to find these days unless you want a sports car.
I learned to drive on a 1963 white Corvair with red interior and a stick shift. I was under 18 years old so I drove it up and down a long driveway at a farm in northern Minnesota for practice. Driving a stick was a big deal.
My first car was a 1968 Dodge Dart Swinger, painted a weird green. It relieved itself of its gas tank while stopped at a traffic light one day. Its last day. I practiced learning how to drive a stick shift in my best friend’s 1979 Chevy Chevette on the incline at our old Junior High School’s parking lot. And the first car I bought on my own was a 1981 Datsun B210 5 speed which I nearly careened into a stopped car because I wasn’t paying attention. That may have been the last time my mother ever rode in a car I was driving.
My dad bought me a blue Honda 4WD SUV before there were SUVs because Consumer Reports said it was safest for risky drivers. It was a stick, which I learned to drive in midtown traffic before leaving for my senior year in the wilds of Maine. All my snobby classmates said I should park it by the kitchen of our dorm to fit in with the workers from town. Yes, there were many assholes at my college. They had new Mercedes and Saabs. My dad was like, “who would buy a car like that for their kid?” But there I was, entitled. So I had that car until 2001! 350K miles that my mechanic boyfriend kept running. From 1988! I still see that model in Boulder quite a bit.
Thanks for letting me reminisce! I remember that Ricardo Montalban commercial. My dad still drives, he’s 85. He and his wife have matching Porsches. They’re characters. I have a 2013 Subaru SUV.
I learned to drive on a tractor. We had a 51 Dodge when I got my license. My first car was a brand new 65 VW bug. Had to learn how to change a tire the morning after getting home. Good thing because a year later on our honeymoon I had to show my new husband how to change it as he hadn't had to on his VW bug. The trick was where to put the jack.
On an old Ford tractor from the 40's and a Willys army jeep with an accelerator pedal that randomly fell out of its hole/spot/thing. The brakes were so stiff that I had to stand up on the pedal to get it to stop!
We didn’t have a car, used the public bus transportation, so I had to take driving lessons as a 20 year old. Asked the instructor which pedal was for gas and which one for brake, that’s how ignorant I was. Needed transportation to places the bus didn’t go. I remember I cashed in a life insurance policy for $1200 that my mother had taken out when I was an infant to pay for a used car. Took my older brother with me to the used car lot and virtually bought the first car the salesman showed me, a Javelin. Didn’t realize at the time it was a ‘muscle’ car; it was in my price range. Drove that car everywhere the last two years of college; gas was 25 cents a gallon, the attendant pumped the gas and washed your windows. Parked on the streets of Chicago and knew how to parallel park both from the left and right. Don’t think I could do that now. Drove it to Poughkeepsie, NY after graduation where I worked for two years as a public health nurse and used my own car for work. Drove it back to IL when we moved and remember when we finally bought a new car, my trusty Javelin died crossing a 4 lane highway and we coasted into the dealership.
It was a 4 speed stick shift and a really fun car for a teenager to drive, believe it or not.
Bonus: I failed my first driver's test because I couldn't find the horn on it. Horn was on the COLUMN but nobody bothered to tell me that before I cockily drove it to the DMV (I should have driven the automatic transmission Ford wagon for my test, but I was too smart for that LOL).
My first car was an early 80s silver Subaru wagon purchased in 1993 from a guy in Flushing for $1,200. I was determined to do two things in the few months remaining before my 30th birthday: get my driver’s license and quit smoking (as if learning to merge onto the BQE wasn’t stressful enough). My boyfriend (now husband) had the thankless task of teaching me how to drive. Before my first solo trip in the car, my mother insisted I go to Radio Shack and buy “one of those portable car phones, just in case.” The next day the uncharged phone was still in its package on the backseat when the car blew a head gasket on the NJ turnpike. A small explosion under the hood, clouds of black smoke. Miraculously I was in sight of a service station when it happened. I called my mother from the rest stop.
My first car was an evergreen-colored VW Bug that my parents bought off of a member of our Quaker Meeting for $1 so that they could stop driving out to my high school to pick me up from activities after the latest bus wasn't running anymore. I named it Oscar, for Oscar the Grouch, because it was the right color and looked like a trash can on the inside. The floor was rotted out such that once I went through a deep puddle and water arced up from the floor of the front passenger seat and landed on me while I was driving. I also lost one of my mom's favorite plates when it fell off the back seat and then shot out of the hole in the floor back there, flying low across four lanes of traffic. I had to pop the clutch to get it started most of the time, so I planned all routes such that I never got stopped at a light or stop sign facing uphill, because I would roll into the car behind me before I could get the motor started. Friends once picked the whole car up and placed it on top of the thick, wooden railway trestle at the edge of our high school parking lot. I commandeered another group of friends to lift it off, but they moved it forward onto the grass and it started rolling downhill towards the administration building. I had to chase it downhill, dive in the window, and pull up the parking brake before it crashed into the front porch. It was ridiculous, but I loved that car.
The first car I ever bought myself was a grey, short-bed, Toyota pick-up with a cap on the back. It made me everyone's best friend in my 20s, especially when they were moving. And I camped in the back of it, which was a great perk. It had a bumpersticker on the back that read Back Off, I'm A Goddess, which was why I met my ex-husband. When we moved upstate we filled the back with house plants and hauled it across country from Seattle with our moving van. I was really sad when it finally died.
I'm so impressed that so many of you remember all your car details! I was recently complaining to my husband about an identity-validation set of questions that asked me which of the following car models "I was associated with" (strange turn of phrase, but familiar in this context). I had trouble answering and wondered how common that is (my husband was very surprised and he knows me well). A Honda Accord? Uh, maybe...?? I can't picture it. I bungled through to confirm I'm me (how American is this deep connection of identity and car?) but am clearly out of some cultural loop.
True, I was a city kid who got my license in my mid-twenties and only really learned to drive when I left NYC for grad school in CA-- on a VW GTI (with stick shift!) while driving across the country. But the year of that car? Dunno. Or any of the few since then. <shrug?> I love all of your stories though!
The car I learned to drive in and took my test in was a 1976 Oldsmobile Delta 88, white with blue interior. Parallel parking test, yeah, I aced it after practicing in the driveway for months. You could fit 8 teenagers in this car. I also discovered that I could lay down on the backseat fully stretched out. It was a boat and we nicknamed it "The Queen Mary". The car had been my grandparent's car. I am sure they had two cars but I only every remember them having one and my grandmother rarely drove. This car was a gas guzzler but gas was 60cent/gal so I could usual check the cushions of the couch or the cracks in the back seat to find spare change. I took that car to Syracuse for college my junior year when I was allowed to have a car at school. We had a tiny parking lot behind the sorority house and to this day I am excellent at fitting large vehicles into tight spots. I even leave room for people to be able to get in and out of the car.
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.
I learned to drive in a 63 Rambler American with a push-button transmission!
My dad worked for Nash Rambler in the fifties. i was little so I can't remember if that was in Winnipeg or in Toronto. Wasn't there a song about a little Nash Rambler. Beep, beep?
My parents had a Rambler when I was small!
1974 BMW 2002tii.
I've harbored a lifelong crush on the BMW 2002!
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.
The Prelude! My dad bought a Prelude when I was in high school and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Until it was wrecked when driving my friends to the Pablo Cruise concert, we got hit on an off-ramp by a driver going the wrong way! Anyway, my first car was a 1988 Subaru 3 Door hatchback. They didn’t make them very long. Technically I learned to drive on John Deer tractor when I was 14 lol but on the road it was a 1977 Toyota Corona.
I grew up in a state with the bad judgement to give me my permit when I was 15 years and 9 months old, and a license on my 16th birthday. In one of my first performances, I hit a parked car in the High’s parking lot. Mom gave me a used, blue '77 Toyota Celica with a long stick shift on the floor, topped with a palm-sized silver ball. Before long, the only way to start it was to park on hills so that I could roll the car and pop the clutch. It stranded me more than once, but was so cute and zippy. I loved it. It got me mostly through college, though I had to park in the dangerous distant campus lots where the hills (and the rape phones) were.
I remember being so mad that NY State made you wait until 16 for a permit when other states offered them to 15-year-olds.
My first car was a Burgundy 1975 Chevy Monza hatchback. It was my parents' car. They let me drive it after I got my license at 16 and I brought it with me to college in 1980. I drove that car everywhere. I'd be on the highway, driving 70 mph, blasting Huey Lewis and the News while eating a Big Mac. I've got a lot of great memories about that car.
My first car was a tan VW Rabbit diesel with a four-speed manual transmission. It was probably a 1977 model. I drove it in high school and college. It was as loud as a truck and it shook when it idled. On cold winter mornings in Syracuse, NY, I had to plug it in to an outlet in the garage to get the engine block to heat up before I started it. It probably got better mileage than most hybrids do today. It seemed like a full tank would last six months. It was like a little tank. I loved that car so much. I still miss it.
I loved those early Rabbits. My dad had one.
My first boyfriend had the same car!
I too had a Diesel VW Rabbit as my first car! Manual, of course! Not sure what year, but it was a great little car - pale yellow, no a/c, added a radio with a tape player, good mileage and pretty zippy for a little tank.
Ironically 35+ years later, I have a 2015 Diesel VW Golf, also manual (6 speed turbo) which I love. Even with the required fixes (dieselgate!) it gets great mileage and runs well. With the way things are going, it may be the last manual shift car I own. I have only had manual shift cars but they are harder to find these days unless you want a sports car.
I learned to drive on a 1963 white Corvair with red interior and a stick shift. I was under 18 years old so I drove it up and down a long driveway at a farm in northern Minnesota for practice. Driving a stick was a big deal.
I still don't know how to drive a stick shift!
A Corvair! I liked them but "Unsafe At Any Speed" did them in.
My first car was a 1968 Dodge Dart Swinger, painted a weird green. It relieved itself of its gas tank while stopped at a traffic light one day. Its last day. I practiced learning how to drive a stick shift in my best friend’s 1979 Chevy Chevette on the incline at our old Junior High School’s parking lot. And the first car I bought on my own was a 1981 Datsun B210 5 speed which I nearly careened into a stopped car because I wasn’t paying attention. That may have been the last time my mother ever rode in a car I was driving.
Good times. 😊
My first car was a 70s vintage Datsun B210! Forgot the model when I posted...!
I had a Datsun B210 too, but that was my second car! 😂
Technically it was my 2nd car too! It was a great little car. 😄
Our Dart was a "Swinger," too.
My dad bought me a blue Honda 4WD SUV before there were SUVs because Consumer Reports said it was safest for risky drivers. It was a stick, which I learned to drive in midtown traffic before leaving for my senior year in the wilds of Maine. All my snobby classmates said I should park it by the kitchen of our dorm to fit in with the workers from town. Yes, there were many assholes at my college. They had new Mercedes and Saabs. My dad was like, “who would buy a car like that for their kid?” But there I was, entitled. So I had that car until 2001! 350K miles that my mechanic boyfriend kept running. From 1988! I still see that model in Boulder quite a bit.
Thanks for letting me reminisce! I remember that Ricardo Montalban commercial. My dad still drives, he’s 85. He and his wife have matching Porsches. They’re characters. I have a 2013 Subaru SUV.
I learned to drive on a tractor. We had a 51 Dodge when I got my license. My first car was a brand new 65 VW bug. Had to learn how to change a tire the morning after getting home. Good thing because a year later on our honeymoon I had to show my new husband how to change it as he hadn't had to on his VW bug. The trick was where to put the jack.
Wow, two people who learned on tractors!
On an old Ford tractor from the 40's and a Willys army jeep with an accelerator pedal that randomly fell out of its hole/spot/thing. The brakes were so stiff that I had to stand up on the pedal to get it to stop!
Haha same on the tractor!
We didn’t have a car, used the public bus transportation, so I had to take driving lessons as a 20 year old. Asked the instructor which pedal was for gas and which one for brake, that’s how ignorant I was. Needed transportation to places the bus didn’t go. I remember I cashed in a life insurance policy for $1200 that my mother had taken out when I was an infant to pay for a used car. Took my older brother with me to the used car lot and virtually bought the first car the salesman showed me, a Javelin. Didn’t realize at the time it was a ‘muscle’ car; it was in my price range. Drove that car everywhere the last two years of college; gas was 25 cents a gallon, the attendant pumped the gas and washed your windows. Parked on the streets of Chicago and knew how to parallel park both from the left and right. Don’t think I could do that now. Drove it to Poughkeepsie, NY after graduation where I worked for two years as a public health nurse and used my own car for work. Drove it back to IL when we moved and remember when we finally bought a new car, my trusty Javelin died crossing a 4 lane highway and we coasted into the dealership.
I have a new appreciation for muscle cars after watching Better Things and Poker Face!
Learned to drive on a Renault, CAR OF THE YEAR in the early 80s LOL.
https://www.motortrend.com/features/why-renault-alliance-was-1983-motortrend-car-of-the-year/
It was a 4 speed stick shift and a really fun car for a teenager to drive, believe it or not.
Bonus: I failed my first driver's test because I couldn't find the horn on it. Horn was on the COLUMN but nobody bothered to tell me that before I cockily drove it to the DMV (I should have driven the automatic transmission Ford wagon for my test, but I was too smart for that LOL).
My first car was an early 80s silver Subaru wagon purchased in 1993 from a guy in Flushing for $1,200. I was determined to do two things in the few months remaining before my 30th birthday: get my driver’s license and quit smoking (as if learning to merge onto the BQE wasn’t stressful enough). My boyfriend (now husband) had the thankless task of teaching me how to drive. Before my first solo trip in the car, my mother insisted I go to Radio Shack and buy “one of those portable car phones, just in case.” The next day the uncharged phone was still in its package on the backseat when the car blew a head gasket on the NJ turnpike. A small explosion under the hood, clouds of black smoke. Miraculously I was in sight of a service station when it happened. I called my mother from the rest stop.
My first car was an evergreen-colored VW Bug that my parents bought off of a member of our Quaker Meeting for $1 so that they could stop driving out to my high school to pick me up from activities after the latest bus wasn't running anymore. I named it Oscar, for Oscar the Grouch, because it was the right color and looked like a trash can on the inside. The floor was rotted out such that once I went through a deep puddle and water arced up from the floor of the front passenger seat and landed on me while I was driving. I also lost one of my mom's favorite plates when it fell off the back seat and then shot out of the hole in the floor back there, flying low across four lanes of traffic. I had to pop the clutch to get it started most of the time, so I planned all routes such that I never got stopped at a light or stop sign facing uphill, because I would roll into the car behind me before I could get the motor started. Friends once picked the whole car up and placed it on top of the thick, wooden railway trestle at the edge of our high school parking lot. I commandeered another group of friends to lift it off, but they moved it forward onto the grass and it started rolling downhill towards the administration building. I had to chase it downhill, dive in the window, and pull up the parking brake before it crashed into the front porch. It was ridiculous, but I loved that car.
The first car I ever bought myself was a grey, short-bed, Toyota pick-up with a cap on the back. It made me everyone's best friend in my 20s, especially when they were moving. And I camped in the back of it, which was a great perk. It had a bumpersticker on the back that read Back Off, I'm A Goddess, which was why I met my ex-husband. When we moved upstate we filled the back with house plants and hauled it across country from Seattle with our moving van. I was really sad when it finally died.
I had an ‘89 Toyota truck that I adored. I wish they still made small trucks.
I wouldn't drive one now because they handle like shit in the snow, but I do so miss being able to haul stuff. My Toyota Corolla is not a hauler. ;)
LOVE the bumper sticker!
I'm so impressed that so many of you remember all your car details! I was recently complaining to my husband about an identity-validation set of questions that asked me which of the following car models "I was associated with" (strange turn of phrase, but familiar in this context). I had trouble answering and wondered how common that is (my husband was very surprised and he knows me well). A Honda Accord? Uh, maybe...?? I can't picture it. I bungled through to confirm I'm me (how American is this deep connection of identity and car?) but am clearly out of some cultural loop.
True, I was a city kid who got my license in my mid-twenties and only really learned to drive when I left NYC for grad school in CA-- on a VW GTI (with stick shift!) while driving across the country. But the year of that car? Dunno. Or any of the few since then. <shrug?> I love all of your stories though!
The car I learned to drive in and took my test in was a 1976 Oldsmobile Delta 88, white with blue interior. Parallel parking test, yeah, I aced it after practicing in the driveway for months. You could fit 8 teenagers in this car. I also discovered that I could lay down on the backseat fully stretched out. It was a boat and we nicknamed it "The Queen Mary". The car had been my grandparent's car. I am sure they had two cars but I only every remember them having one and my grandmother rarely drove. This car was a gas guzzler but gas was 60cent/gal so I could usual check the cushions of the couch or the cracks in the back seat to find spare change. I took that car to Syracuse for college my junior year when I was allowed to have a car at school. We had a tiny parking lot behind the sorority house and to this day I am excellent at fitting large vehicles into tight spots. I even leave room for people to be able to get in and out of the car.