First Cars

Someone recently asked which of two 200+ horsepower cars was appropriate for a first car, on a mailing list inhabited by car lovers. From my perspective as an "old man" (I'm 34), most of the conversation bordered on ridiculous, with comments like these about adequate cars for commuting and errands (paraphrased):

My daily driver is an IS250 with a whopping 204HP...But honestly I would call it gutless

For a daily driven street driver? ...The [200+HP, sub-3400-pound] C230 and GTi do just fine for street cars.

I finally put on my grumpy old man hat and contributed my two cents. Some people got a kick out of my first-car description, so I'm re-posting it here.

My first car was a 1972 VW Super Beetle that my dad formerly used for commuting. Around 50HP if you adjusted the valves and distributor once per week. It was powder-blue, with a giant rust hole just ahead of the right rear fender -- in rainstorms, the right-rear passenger footwell filled with inches of water (I eventually drilled drainage holes). Due to a quirk in the automatic choke, part of the electrical system would short out when the engine got hot (hard to diagnose...) -- if you shut the engine off in this state, you had to roll-start the car or wait for it to cool down. The gas gauge worked some of the time, which might be worse than not working at all.

I had recurring corrosion problems under the distributor cap. One trip across Snoqualmie pass, the heater seemed especially hot (it melted a plastic bag under my seat) and the car was more gutless than usual. When I reached the summit, I pulled over and checked the spark plug wires at the distributor end. One of the connectors burst into a puff of blue smoke when I pulled it out, and another was covered with blue corrosion. The engine ran surprisingly well (I reached the summit, anyway) in this state, all things considered.

I even rebuilt the carburetor on that car, when my dad and I swapped the engine.

The car I learned in was an old Ford cab-over van. It had the "three-on-a-tree" manual gear selector on the steering column. Sometimes the shift linkage (don't know what it is really called) would stick, and my dad would slide under the van (engine still running) and shake stuff around until the transmission worked again. The van was previously owned by a friend that ran a Volvo dealership. The paint crew at that dealership played a prank on him, and painted a Volvo stripe along the body and removed most Ford logos. They also installed a Volvo radio. We kept it this way, which resulted in humorous confusion for many people.

My dad would take us out to back roads, hence I learned to drive a stick on gravel. He was very brave. After recovering from sliding around a corner and fishtailing between deep ditches, he only said "I think you might have taken that last corner a little faster than you should have."