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Spinning My Tires   is one man's view of the world of cars. Random thoughts, ideas and comments pop up here, all of them related to owning, driving and restoring cars. I've been doing this car thing as long as I can remember, and have enjoyed a great many car-related experiences, some of which I hope to share with you here. And I always have an opinion one way or another. Enjoy.

E-mails are welcomed--if you have thoughts of your own to share, please send them.

Additional Spinning My Tires editorials can be found on the Archives page.

12/21/04

To All The Cars I've Known Before

This month’s column, presented as it is so late in the year, is what I call a “montage” episode. It’s like that episode of your favorite sit-com where scenes from previous episodes are shown in flashback—ostensibly because the writers took the week off but realized at the last moment that they still had 30 minutes of air time to fill.

 At any rate, I wanted to give the faithful something to read, so I’ve titled this one “To All the Cars I’ve Known Before...” (with apologies to Willie Nelson). I’ve scoured the Internet for photos so you can see what some of the less notable vehicles in my life looked like. Wherever possible, I’ve tried to get the colors accurate. By the way, that Eldorado below looks EXACTLY like mine… 

1. My first car? A 1976 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, inherited from my father when I was about 14. He drove it into the ground, abused it and generally treated it like a second-class rental car, then parked it in the shed and forgot all about it. That isn’t to say his treatment of it wasn’t deserved—this car just “felt” wrong from the start, probably one of those “4:30 on a Friday afternoon” union jobs you hear about now and then. It had a dubious history, with an incorrect front clip from a ’75 Eldo and mysterious blood-colored “stains” on the leather behind the passenger’s head rest. But it was big and yellow and bad ass, so as a 14-year-old boy, I took to repairing it and fixing it up as best as I could with my limited means. I worked summer jobs to pay for one big repair each year: a new engine, a paint job, tires, brakes, shocks, carpets, a new top, a new hood and bumpers, and about 4 cars’ worth of salvaged interior bits and pieces from a local bone yard. By the time I was 21, the car was pretty much finished and in very nice condition—too nice, in fact, to be driven much. Add to that my burgeoning interest in racing, and, well, it had to go. I sold it at a tremendous loss to a fellow who had no idea what he was getting into.
   
   You see, that car had a mind of its own.
   
   Yeah, I know, everybody talks about their cars having personality. But this one was WAY beyond personality. It hated my father (with good reason, I’d imagine). Bend your brain around this: fresh engine, rebuilt transmission, new battery and alternator, and just off a trouble-free 50 mile trip to my father’s house in the country. Car sits in the driveway all afternoon, happy in the sun. I toss the keys to my father and tell him to try out the new and “improved” 500 cubic inch engine under the hood. He climbs in, inserts the key and… CLICK! Nothing. Not a noise from the starter, no seatbelt buzzer, nada. The clock stopped, the interior lights went dark, the whole car just died. Dad gets out and the instant the door latches closed, the power locks THUNK down (remember there was no such thing as remote locking or automatic locking systems when this car was built). Ten minutes later, I get in to try to diagnose the problem, after having simply pulled the lock button up manually since the top was down. The car starts instantly, as usual, and settles into an easy, happy idle as if nothing had happened. The clock was exactly 3 minutes slow.
   
   Then there was the time someone came to test drive it and the brakes locked themselves for 45 minutes with no reasonable mechanical explanation at all. Perversity of objects indeed… 

This is exactly what my car looked like.
Hell, this might BE my car. 

2. My daily driver (just before and) just after I earned my driver’s license was a 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera (what the hell is a “Ciera,” anyway?). White with red cloth interior and a wheezy GM corporate V6. Probably a relentlessly average car, but I felt a certain fondness for this one. My friends called it “SuperCar” though I can’t recall why except that it showed no damage after mowing over a stop-sign at 35 MPH. It was owned by my step-father and he generously let me have the use of it as often as I wished. I thought of the car as better than it actually was, and treated it pretty well. I washed it, and waxed it regularly, and even gave it some style by replacing the stock wire wheel covers and whitewall tires with blackwalls and plain hubcaps—a BIG improvement. Unfortunately, it was on borrowed time—the engine tossed a rod while my mother was using it to run some errands. The guys at the gas station charged with changing its oil apparently did not actually perform this critical service, they just collected my mother’s money.

Well, close. Mine was a 4-door.

 Fortunately, the mechanic who serviced many of my step-father’s cars (a shady fellow—I don’t know how we got tangled up with him) offered to fix it for a very reasonable price and gave me a loner car, which is #3: 

3. A 1980 Pontiac Catalina sedan. Brown with mouse-beige cloth interior that snagged at your skin—really unpleasant material. The whole car reeked of kerosene (I bet a cigarette from 10 feet away would have woofed! it) and had pockmarked quarter panels from loose objects banging around in the trunk. Unfortunately, one of those items was not a jack, so when it got a flat tire hauling some buddies and me to a funeral in high-school, we got out, removed the plates and hitchhiked home. I never saw the car again (nor, come to think of it, my white Ciera, either). I think the “mechanic” friend of my step-father’s disappeared around this time, too. 

Mine didn’t have fender skirts, but this was it.
Brown is lovely, don’t you think? 

Perhaps this is what became of it… 

4. 1974 Mercedes-Benz 450 SLC. Navy blue with blue leather and a sunroof. I flat-out loved this car—what 16-year-old kid wouldn’t? It was the unusual 4-seater coupe version of the familiar SL roadster. I liked the longer lines of the car compared to its 2-seat sister, and cherished this car like it was my own (again, owned by my very generous step-father). That 4.5 liter Mercedes V8 had a bouncy, bubbly idle and a smooth, roller-bearing mechanical feel to it. You could feel the machinery working under that big hood, but it was a very sophisticated and precise feeling, not at all like today’s hyper-isolated transportation cocoons. That engine felt like it would pull forever, and I now cringe as I look back on myself at 16 and 17 years old with all that horsepower at my disposal. I recall feeling mature and responsible as I proudly proclaimed that I “limited myself to only one 100 MPH blast each day” in that car. Holy crap was I stupid!
   
   That car ended its stay with me when the brakes failed—no, there was no accident or crash of any sort, but the complexities of the Mercedes-Benz braking system were beyond my modest abilities to repair. This car vanished like the Ciera before it, victim of some unscrupulous mechanic with no intention of actually doing the repairs with which he was charged. 

 
Truly a great-looking car.

5. On my way to my sophomore year at college, I finally fulfilled a lifelong dream: to own a police car/ambulance/fire-truck/hearse. Actually, I just bought the hearse. It was a black 1974 Cadillac Miller Meteor hearse that I bought almost on the spur of the moment in late summer 1989 when I was 19. I grabbed some friends and drove down to Cincinnati to see a guy who had a big pile of hearses and ambulances. The hearse only had 35,000 miles on it, presumably all at less than 50 MPH. Despite this, the engine had ferocious valve train clatter, the Chevy 3/4-ton truck differential was packed with 4.30 gears that made cruising above 60 MPH impossible and it was wearing these big knobby truck tires on the rear, but I bought it anyway. The friends I brought with me to drive my other car home liked the curtains with fringe and the crystal chandeliers in the back. My girlfriend at the time, however, hated the thing. I guess I should have expected that...
   
   I drove it for a year, enjoying the notoriety I received at college (fraternities would pay me to park it out in front during Halloween parties) and the money I could make hauling people home for the holidays (I eventually put a coffee table, couch and a recliner in the back for passengers--it had plenty of headroom!). The slide-out slab was great for tailgate parties before football games, too. Alas, it was too hard to hide on campus, and eventually I collected about $500 worth of parking tickets and the university impounded it (this is Miami University--if you've been a student there, you know the deal...). I got it back before Christmas break, but the writing was on the wall. Everybody around me hated being seen in it so I sold it to a guy I knew who was into such things. Of course, he gave me a $100 down payment and I told him he could pay me the rest later. Today, 15 years later, I'm still $1000 short on that sale. Steve, if you're reading this, you owe me a grand, pal.
   
   Best hearse story? One of my fraternity brothers got hurt during a hockey game. We threw him in the back of the hearse and zoomed up to the emergency room. I honked the horn as we pulled in, tires screeching, lights flashing, engine roaring. A sleepy-looking orderly eventually came out with a gurney and asked me, "Dropping off or picking up?" Priceless.

Mine didn't have the bubble lights on top. It did, however, have flashing
high-beams and about a dozen purple magnetic "FUNERAL" flags in
the back that I could give to friends and run some red lights...

6. When I sold the Eldorado in the summer of 1992, I bought my 1993 Ford Mustang LX 5.0 coupe. You’ve seen it documented elsewhere on this site, and I still own it today. It was my first new car, and I bought it after dreaming about it for a good 5 years. I’ll probably keep it forever—I’ll never have a perfect Fox-body Mustang again, and there are probably none that are nicer with histories that I know so intimately. I picked the color off of a color chart because the green I wanted so desperately had been discontinued. Ultimately, I like the red better. The cool thing was that when the car arrived, the dealer let me drive it off the truck and take it home without any prep at all. Cool! 

My Mustang. This is the first time I've noticed it, but compare the silhouette of
the Mustang to the Mercedes 450 SLC above it. No wonder I liked the Merc so much.

7. 1987 Ford Taurus. An absolutely WONDERFUL car, designed and built when Ford actually wanted to build a world-class sedan. Once again, I inherited this car from my step-father who went through cars like most folks go through heads of lettuce. He often got bored with his current car, so he’d hand it off to someone and get something else. At one point, we had 3 Tauruses (Tauri?). We called them the “red Taurus” (which was a rare MT-5 manual transmission model with a gutless 4-cylinder: MT5 = empty 5), the “blue Taurus” (mine) and the “gray Taurus” to tell them apart. Of course, they were all silver, but what the hell…
   
   This was one of the first generation Tauruses and looked stunning, drove great and was as well-constructed as anything I’ve owned. The 140-HP 3.0L V6 was a little anemic, but this car’s high-speed cruising abilities were unmatched (I got a speeding ticket for 112 MPH, and had had the cruise control set at that speed for nearly 30 minutes!). This car went on a lot of adventures with me after I sold the hearse, and I even upgraded the suspension to hot-rod Taurus SHO specifications and autocrossed it for a year or two. I called it the NO GO SHO: the handling without the horsepower. I drove this car to college and daily to work until 1994 when electrical gremlins in the engine management computer prevented it from operating longer than about 7 minutes at a stretch. I ultimately traded it in on vehicle #8.
   
   As a sad side note, I eventually saw my Taurus again outside an auto parts store in Lakewood, Ohio. It was rusting into oblivion, the rocker panel plastic cladding was long gone, revealing cavernous rust holes, one of the taillights was broken, the aluminum wheels were chalky and black with brake dust, and the passenger’s side rear window had been replaced by a sheet of plastic. I felt like I had betrayed a friend and still feel badly thinking about what became of that car. That Taurus made me feel like a million bucks. Fare thee well, old friend… 

Mine was silver with blue cloth interior, but had the same wheels

8. 1993 Ford Ranger pickup truck. 4-cylinders, regular cab, short bed, manual transmission. The only option I couldn’t live without was air-conditioning, added by the dealer after the sale. Its best feature? The $159/month lease! It was purple (yes, grape soda purple) with a tan interior and neat machined aluminum wheels with white-letter tires—you probably saw about a million just like it in the mid-90s. It really was a great-looking little truck (my father called it the “Trucklet”). The Trucklet was not much fun to drive, and very weak in the horsepower department, especially with the A/C on. Keeping it above about 70 MPH on a hot day meant keeping the pedal mashed to the floor. But it was a great commuter vehicle for my early days as a professional. I even built a hard-shell tonneau cover out of plywood—ultimately a mistake, because putting anything in the bed meant removing the cover. If I wasn’t at home, I had to leave it in someone’s driveway and come back for it later.
   
   Eventually, I caught the V8 Ranger bug—my intention was to convert the Trucklet, but after thinking about the investment I would have to make in new hardware, I decided that it made more sense to convert an extended cab model. In 1996, I sold the Truklet for more than I owed on it (it was in pristine condition compared to its contemporaries) and bought vehicle #9.
   
   Of course, no vehicle can complete its tour of duty with me unless something weird happens. The day after I had a handshake deal and a cash deposit on the truck, I [foolishly] drove it to my mother’s house for dinner. A particularly heavy snow had happened earlier in the day. That evening, the snow slid off my mother’s roof onto the hood of the Trucklet, crushing the hood and the passenger’s side front fender. The sale still went through, but only after an emergency (and very expensive) stop at the body shop for some new sheet metal. The repairs were so well-done that the new owner took it all in stride. But that pretty much wiped out any profit from the sale. 

Yep, purple.

9. 1997 Ford Ranger Splash extended cab. This was the first new vehicle I bought where I didn’t feel like I got screwed over by the dealer. I went in armed with all the information the Internet could provide and beat up this poor salesman for about 5 hours—he was there until 10:30 PM on a Saturday night (a great technique for getting what you want, by the way)! Eventually I got a top-of-the-line Ranger Splash extended cab with almost every option including a 4.0L V6 (which I would be yanking out almost immediately after taking delivery anyway). I also paid less than I planned to pay for a standard Ranger extended cab with a 4-cylinder and crank windows. Nice!

That truck, if you haven’t guessed by now, became FrankenRanger. You can see more of it on my “for-profit” web page by clicking on the HPE logo in the upper left-hand corner of the navigation bar to your left. You may also know that I sold FrankenRanger to finance the purchase and restoration of the Buick, and that’s where we are today. Of course, while I was building FrankenRanger, I needed something to drive, and that was:

10. A 1988 Lincoln Town Car. Navy blue with navy blue velour upholstery, purchased from my father when he finally “upgraded” to something else. The Town Car was dead-nuts reliable, but the climate control was squirrelly—the A/C never worked, and the heat would only work occasionally and never when I really needed it. It had Chevy Caprice hubcaps on it and the oh-so-luxurious padded roof. I replaced the water pump, which was a horrible task, and made a $100 bet with a co-worker that he couldn’t replace the rusted rear brake lines in 20 minutes or less as he claimed he could. He didn’t win the $100, I got a new brake line, but I still bought him lunch for a week to thank him for the effort. I also put on new brakes all around, including rotors—unfortunately, it tended to warp those brake rotors almost instantly. The motor had a leaky rear main seal, so I added a quart of oil once or twice a week. I figured it was changing its own oil, so I never did an actual oil change on it. I sold it for $800 to a kid down the street from where I lived. Salud, kid! 

Mine was blue and didn’t have
those snazzy alloy wheels.

11. Around the time I got rid of the Town Car, I inherited a 1993 Saturn SC1 coupe from my sister. She was moving to Europe, so I went and picked up the car in Chicago and brought it home. This was BY FAR the worst car I’ve ever had the displeasure of driving—remember this is coming from a guy who drove a clapped-out Pontiac Catalina with bald tires that smelled flammable. The fact that it was a 5-speed was its only redeeming feature. The driver’s seat padding was completely gone—the car only had 25,000 miles on it, and my sister probably weighs no more than 120 pounds, so what the hell was going on there? Sitting in the car was like being strapped to railroad tracks.
    
    I drove it daily for about 2 years when, at about 43,000 miles, the engine promptly seized on the highway. Done—no weird noises, no smoke, no overheating, nothing. The front tires left two spectacular 100-foot-long skidmarks as the car came to a screeching, tire-smoking halt. The fellow behind me looked like he’d left some skidmarks of his own, too…
    
    Anyway, the dealer claimed poor maintenance was to blame, but I showed him my sister’s scrupulously detailed receipts for maintenance at a Chicago-area Saturn dealership and my own receipts from Jiffy-Lube (hey, give me a break—for $20, I’d rather have those guys change my oil on a beater car like this). I also showed them messages from an Internet forum describing similar problems on these vehicles (as well as a recall notice for the seats). Nevertheless, I got $400 for the car (yeah, four-hundred bucks). Crap. I’ll never even consider letting some stranger on the street think about buying a Saturn. Screw those happy, no-haggle Saturn sales jerks, too. 

Worst. Car. Ever. Mine was even painted this
same goofy teal color that gave me a headache.

12. After the death of the Saturn, my wife, Julia, and I got along with just one car (well, three cars, but the Mustang and FrankenRanger didn’t really count—you know how that goes): her 1996 Ford Contour. I actually liked this car pretty well, despite it’s 4-cylinder motor and automatic transmission. This was a car Ford should have developed into the next Taurus instead of killing it outright, but alas, the guys from Ford just don’t call to ask my opinion any more. The Contour was loaded, Julia having purchased it as a dealer demo after being discharged from the Coast Guard. We put a lot of miles on it, and since we worked about a half-mile apart in the same industrial park, one car was easy for us. But eventually, we decided it was time for a new car. The Contour had 90,000+ miles on it, and we knew it was on borrowed time when the window switches stopped working. While the windows were down. In the rain. So I cleaned it up and sold it to buy #13.
    

Once again, same car, same color, no snappy alloy wheels. We had cheap
plastic hubcaps that cracked in the cold weather. 

13. I love lucky #13, and you’ve seen it on this web site before: our 2002 Mazda Protege5 wagon. This was really supposed to be Julia’s first new car, and we looked for a Contour replacement for a long time without much luck. There were a lot of good cars out there, but none that really lit my fire—I was sort-of thinking VW Jetta wagon or a Subaru WRX wagon, but Julia hated the way the Jetta drove, especially the shifter (ironic, as you’ll see in a moment), and the Subaru was relatively expensive. Then I saw one of those “Zoom-Zoom” Mazda ads and there was the brand-new Protege5 they’d just brought over from Japan. That was our new car, no two-ways about it. It looked (and still looks) awesome.
    
    So I did the Internet research thing again, but this time with a twist: I sent a fax to every Mazda dealership within 200 miles stating that I WILL BUY THIS CAR TODAY. I told them I had sent similar faxes to every other dealership in the area. I gave my options list and what I believed the car was worth. Then I told them to call me with their best offers and I would come in and sign the papers immediately.
    
    And call they did. One dealer said he’d let it go for only “$3000 over sticker, because these are going to be hot!” Dummy. Most stuck to sticker price. But one dealer not only matched my desired price, but said that his quote also included the sales tax. Done. I signed the papers that evening. The catch? NO HOLES IN THE FRONT BUMPER FOR A LICENSE PLATE. Yes, I know we have to have a front plate in Ohio. Let me worry about that, OK? So after passing on the car on the showroom floor (holes in the bumper) and rejecting the second one that came in (ditto), they finally got the message and didn’t molest my new car when it arrived 4 weeks later. I love this little silver Mazda as much as any car I’ve owned—even that Taurus. It’s a really practical car that always brings a grin to my face when I drive it, even four years and 45,000 miles into the affair. It’s slated for some “upgrades” in the spring, and I plan on keeping it around long after I’m done paying for it in June… 

I love my little wagon. It has never failed to haul anything I throw at it. 

14. Julia, of course, needed a new car when she took a new job that wouldn’t allow us to commute together any longer. She wanted a convertible, a Miata specifically, so one blustery April afternoon we went to the Mazda dealer where we’d purchased the Protege. Two hours later we were driving our “lightly used” 1997 Miata home. Julia loved the car, but as a rear-wheel drive sports car, it was less than ideal for Cleveland winters. She drove it daily for two years, but a bad spin before Christmas 2003 scared her off of the RWD bandwagon forever. She said she wanted a safe winter car with all-wheel-drive, but wanted a convertible, too. So that narrowed it down to one: 

15. 2001 Audi TT Quattro roadster. Again, you’ve seen it detailed on these pages before, but this is flat-out the coolest car I’ve ever owned. I’m not thrilled with the electrical gremlins that plague this particular model (mysterious blinking interior lights, intermittent dashboard gauges, dead batteries, etc.), but the performance and style of this car make it worthwhile. Drop the top in the summer and you feel like a king—everybody stops and stares. And with a set of Blizzak snow tires, Quattro all-wheel-drive, traction control and ABS brakes, it goes through snow like a mini-tank. There’s no car I’d rather have Julia driving when the weather turns ugly.
    
    In fact, it’s so great in the snow, I went out driving just for fun the other day when the weather was so bad they cancelled bus service here in Cleveland! That’s real luxury.
    
    The only funny thing? Julia loves this car and the way it drives, despite the fact that it’s really a VW Golf/Jetta underneath (see #13, above)! 

So that’s my flashback episode. Not that many cars for 20 years of driving and being a car guy. No totaled, smoking hulks, either—I’ve never killed a car, which surprises me—you would think that I should have destroyed at least one by now (I’m not counting the Saturn, which expired on its own). I don’t plan on adding or changing the current lineup for a while, but my next car will be a powerful 4-door luxury sedan with leather seats and an automatic transmission. Yeah, I’m getting old, but I also work in downtown Cleveland now, and traffic is a pain. The Acura TL, Infiniti G35x and Chrysler 300C all look pretty good to me right now!

Oh, yeah, have a happy and safe holiday season!

See you next month year!