Back when I was going to Southeastern Massachusetts University, now known as UMass Dartmouth, I had a wide circle of friends about whom I knew their favorite bands, whether or not they had pets, their single or partnered status, and the like, but for most of them, I did not know what they drove. SMU hid its parking lots behind berms, so from campus, all you saw was brutalist architecture rising from terraced lawns. Unless I happened to be arriving or leaving campus at the same time as a pal, I wouldn’t see them coming or going. There was even less chance of me seeing the rides of friends who lived on campus, if they had cars at all.
Those with cool cars tended to let you know, and I counted a C3 Corvette, a couple of GTIs, and a few BMWs in varying states of disrepair. But for the most part, friends’-cars discoveries tended to be the usual suspects: five- to ten-year-old hatchbacks and hand-me-down family sedans and wagons, none particularly interesting.
And so, I was surprised when one friend – I don’t remember her name, it was 1987 – announced that her piece of shit car (as she exclusively called it) refused to start, and asked if I could take a look at it. Of course I said yes, knowing full well I’d be useless at diagnosing anything more subtle than a disconnected battery, or, I don’t know, an entirely missing engine. But still, non-zero chance I could be the hero. I was surprised when she led me to a gloriously brown Triumph TR7. “Have you been driving a TR7 all this time?” I asked her. “Yeah, when it runs,” she replied. Nonetheless, it was still a cool car, a two-seater wedge that I recall being excited to see as a younger kid and still mildly thrilled to see before me as an older kid.
Any coolness it had was lost on my friend. All she knew was it was brown, ugly (to her eye), and crucially, completely unreliable. I get it: Nothing less cool than a car you can’t count on. A few months of misery later, the TR7 was replaced with a Hyundai Excel in nice silver-blue paint with the much-desired “starts every time” feature. She thought it was the coolest car in the world.
Your turn: Ever Had A Friend Or Loved One Who Owned A Cool Car And Didn’t Even Know It?
Top graphic image: Triumph
My mom’s first car was a 1964 Chevy Impala SS, which had been my grandma’s pride and joy, but which my mom mostly considered to be miserable to drive in any hot or cold weather due to its lack of heater and air conditioning. She had to drive to school wrapped in a sleeping bag during the winter to stay warm, and her skin would stick to the vinyl seats in the summer heat.
I don’t think she’s remotely aware of how monumentally iconic the ’64 Impala SS has become in the Lowrider and hiphop communities… Or has any idea that it was also sort of the “hot rod” Impala… But she has told me she liked keeping the whitewall tires clean and pretty, so at least there was something she appreciated about it.
Sadly, that car was wrecked long before I was born, but I’ve always wondered if in some alternate universe I could’ve gotten to fix it up as MY first car… I always loved hearing stories about it.
My first job back in the late 1970s was doing data entry for a state office. There was this dowdy little old lady who worked there, probably about 60 or so back then, and I thought she was ancient. She was a spinster, never married, and she owned a really hot ’69 Plymouth Road Runner coupe. She struck more as the kind of person who would have bought a 6-cylinder Valiant. She wasn’t really looking for a hot car, but apparently the Road Runner had been sitting on the dealer lot for a while and she got a deal on it. Some years later I met this old lady’s niece who confirmed that the old lady got a really good deal on the car, but then said that the little old lady really did enjoy cutting loose and driving across the state at 80 mph on the Interstates in her Road Runner. (This was back during the bad old days of the national 55 mph speed limit.)
1979 Toyota Corolla SR-5 liftback in yellow. Dad hated that car. I learned later that he had to trade in a 1970 or 71 Pontiac Grand Prix to get it when gas, repairs, and kids became too expensive.
My parents had cool cars until kids came along.
My mom, in her mid 50s at the time, let my brother talk her into buying a Dodge Omni GLH Turbo. She liked it but did not recognize the cool factor. At least that car was cool 40 years ago.
One of the first cars I fell in love with was a Studebaker Avanti owned by an English teacher at my school when I was in third grade.
In college (early-mid 90s) I had friend who had an ’86 BMW 635csi. To her it was “some old car my dad gave me”. Wonderful car.
When i was in high school, I worked at Wendy’s. Our manager had a white Plymouth Superbird. She had bought it second hand and drove it nearly everyday to work. She was not rich by any stretch of the imagination. I had heard that she kept that car long after I left Wendy’s and graduated from university. She used the proceeds to buy a house.