My first car was a manual shift gray-blue 1972 Datsun 510 sedan, which I was given by my mother when she got a new car and I needed a way to get to site visits for work. If I recall, this must have been circa 1983 or thereabouts. It ran well, but was a tad rusty - there was a small hole in the floorboard under the mat on the passenger side, so we jokingly referred to it as the "Flintstone car."
At some point about 6 months after I acquired it, I noticed strange "thunking" noises every time it went over a bump, and particularly streetcar tracks. A friend of mine who worked as a researcher at a local hospital was a bit of a car buff and agreed to have a look at it for me, so I drove up to the hospital parking lot on my way home after work one fine June day and Dave crawled underneath. He emerged shortly thereafter and placed a very rusty bit of metal in my hand and said "That's where the jack is supposed to go. And I recommend that you not drive this thing over about 30 MPH, and avoid bumps. The engine mounts are so rusty I'm afraid the engine is going to fall out!" Oh.
Here's an amusing blog post about a 1972 Datsun that someone had stored for decades in a garage in Seattle, and then put it up for sale in 2010 - for about 2.5X its original suggested retail. (And you thought cars depreciated!
)
http://jalopnik.com/5580960/for-6500-wake-up-rip-van-datsunNeedless to say, I drove very carefully for the next few weeks, while another friend, who was a Toyota salesman at the time, looked for a new car for me. My first *new* car was a gray Toyota Corolla, which I kept until we moved to Oregon in 1991. I wasn't about to drive it across the country at 7 months pregnant, and we were worried that the emission standards in Oregon would have made importing it difficult (groundless worries, as it transpired). Another Corolla - a new '91 lasted only 2 years, until my husband fell asleep at the wheel and drove into a ditch and a fence post - luckily he and son #1 were totally unscathed. The car was (remarkably) drivable and he drove it an hour home, but it wasn't reparable (bent post between window and windshield etc.) and the insurance company wrote it off. Off to the dealership again, hoping to find another '91 5-speed, but that proved next to impossible and I made the mistake of taking a test drive in a new one.
That '93 Corolla lasted until 2009 - making the move to Massachusetts and then to Toronto. It was getting a bit rusty and had no AC (not worth spending the $$$ to fix it), but it ran like a top. We'd might still be driving it if we hadn't bought my mother's 2001 Accord from my parents after my mother had to stop driving. It's a great car - but son #1 is now its principal driver having recently gotten a part-time job stocking shelves (and setting up the new store) at Target in the wee small hours when there is no bus service in Guelph. Its AC died last spring and isn't worth fixing (he doesn't care, which is good!) and so, we may be looking for a new/new to us small car in the spring. Richard wants a hybrid - but we'll see. The move to MA from OR in '97 necessitated the purchase of another vehicle as riding a bike 12.5 miles to work wasn't a possibility in the depths of January for Richard, and we bought a friend's 1996 Dodge Caravan for me and the boys and I officially became a "soccer mom." It started costing us serious money in repairs in 2007 after we moved back to Toronto, so we bought a used 2004 Toyota Sienna XLE which seemed to have been driven only rarely, having acquired only about 20,000 miles in three years. It's been great - other than the sliding doors that have an annoying habit of freezing shut in the depths of winter.
