There are sometimes moments in a car enthusiast’s life where everything changes. Maybe you try a car that’s outside of your norm, and it opens your entire world. Perhaps you’ve become a parent and you sold your fun cars for a minivan or crossover. Maybe, you did something with a car that put you on a totally different path. Cars are powerful in how they can change the trajectory of your life. What car changed everything for you?
The car that changed my life the most is the Smart Fortwo. My love for Smarts is such a huge part of me that I intentionally named myself after Smart’s parent brand, or, I suppose most correctly, the woman the brand is named after. However, that won’t be the car that I’m talking about here. I have a personal story that I want to tell at a later date!
Winter 2019 brought the car that changed me for another time. Earlier in the year, I bought my first truck, and first car paid for with my own money that wasn’t a Smart, a 1999 Ford Ranger. This $800 truck made me fall in love with Rangers, but I ultimately disliked my tired 4.0-V6 model due to its lousy 13 mpg and wiring short that took out the TCM. Then, I had a Ford Festiva that I tortured myself with.
Sadly, as winter fell, my 2012 Smart was parked and down due to a seized alternator, bad engine mounts, and what I thought was a bad starter. I worked a low-paying job, and local mechanics wanted to charge a small fortune. But I did have $900 on me, and I put the money into something I was interested in since I was a kid: diesel power.
My first diesel car was a 2005 Volkswagen Passat TDI wagon. Sure, it had a ginormous turbo boost leak that reduced 60 mph acceleration to 43 seconds (I’m not exaggerating there), but it was a whole new experience. For the first time in my life, I had a car with leather seats, room for five, and a trunk so huge that I was able to fit an entire Honda scooter in it. Oh, and it got 33 mpg, which wasn’t far off from what my tiny Smarts got. I saved the image from the Craigslist ad:
I found out that kid me was onto something. Diesel power is great! But this Passat was more than just a car. It got me through one of my roughest financial periods, never giving up on me even when I could barely afford to put diesel in the tank. It also got me through one of my worst heartbreaks.
But, I think, most importantly, it taught me that cars outside of my norm were actually really fun. I had never seen a Passat as a car I’d own, and yet, I loved mine. The Passat opened me up further. I always had a dream vehicle list, but I never thought that I’d be capable of owning dream cars like a Saturn Sky Red Line, Volkswagen Touareg V10 TDI, or a Buell Lightning. Now, I also wanted to experience all kinds of cars. If that Passat was so nice, what else was I missing?
The Passat was Genesis. I sold it and embarked on an adventure that has led me to today, where I’m still shocked to say that I own a decent number of my childhood dream cars. I’m also so happy that I’ve been able to experience so much, from the Acura NSX to a gosh-darned diesel-electric locomotive.
I don’t want to own another Passat TDI again, but I thank it for being an important milestone. How about you? What car changed everything for you?
Top graphic image: Mercedes Streeter
2003 Jetta Wagon TDI 5 speed. We bought it when my wife went back to college and had a 100 mile roundtrip commute. It became VERY clear that we couldn’t afford to put gas into her 2000 Frontier that managed 16 mpg on a good day. So we traded the Frontier on the TDI.
Prior to that TDI I thought 15 – 20 mpg was normal and 25 mpg was great fuel economy. After driving a car that routinely returned 50 mpg there was a switch flipped in my brain and I could never look at 25 mpg cars the same again. Since then we have always had at least one car that returned above 45 mpg and we stopped worrying or even caring about the cost of fuel.
2003 TDI –> 2009 Prius –> 2016 Spark EV –> 2017 Bolt EV
It was the 1989 SHO for me. Bought one in ’91 as my first non pre-family owned purchase. Had great acceleration and handling, and I wasn’t beat up and stiff at the end of road trips!
Luxury and sport can work together.
I owned a ’94 5 -speed for about 6 years, sublime… My Acura TSX was it’s closest replacement so far.
I drooled over a 6-speed TSX, but family needs over-ruled such a purchase.
Understand, it’s why the SHO was sold, 00’s era baby seats would not fit. Bought a used Chrysler 300M with a massive back seat. Eventually had a ’10 TSX when she was out of car seats .
Really? We kept our kids in car seats and boosters in our ’93 SHO until they exceeded specifications. Oh, Right! We had our kid in the middle, and then sold the car when the second one came along!
I sold it to get the minivan to fit everything and the kitchen sink, as families are wont to do.
Even in the middle we found it so frustrating reaching and having the seatbacks where we didn’t want them. Add in the deer strike, etc…
The Back to the Future DeLorean. BTTF3 (the western one) was the first movie I ever remember seeing, watching it on VHS around 1992. I called it “Doc and the train crash”, from the climactic ending.
From that point on, I wanted to be an inventor like Doc Brown and own a DeLorean. It was a singular unwavering vision that really set the course of my entire schooling and career from that point on. I did become a mechanical engineer, I did become an inventor with a bunch of patents, and within the next month, I will become a DeLorean owner, fulfilling a dream I’ve had my entire life that I can remember.
The humble little FIAT 500e, which we named “Blueberry” because she was round and blue. Not the new one – the 2016 compliance version, which was just a conversion of the gas model to electric and had several drawbacks because of that. But it changed EVERYTHING about how I viewed EVs and cars in general. Prior to that, I never thought I’d own any EV, for the regular reasons: range and charging, mostly. I thought I would probably get a hybrid, but I was hesitant about that because of the added complexity of systems, etc. But when I found a cheap 500e, I bought it just for fun and figured we’d use it for grocery runs or whatever. We lived in Evergreen, CO at the time, which had lots of steep mountain roads and brutal, cold and snowy winters. How much use could a crappy 80-miles on a good day EV be? The answer turned out to be: A LOT! We used it for maybe 80% of our driving needs once we realized that we could drive it to its limit uphill, and have no worries about getting home because you gain energy going downhill. We’d drive nearly 80 miles to Avon, CO, plug it in to charge (it only had Level 2 charging, so it took about 4 hours to fill up, but we only needed to charge it about halfway) and go for a hike and a lunch, etc. Once it was finished charging, we’d head home. And the driving experience was glorious! It handled great, had gobs of acceleration (up to 40 mph, at least) and was ridiculously fun to toss around. This is the car that got my wife interested in hard acceleration and fast driving, which she didn’t care about at all previously (she used to drive a 2CV when she lived in Germany). Soon, I had sold off or given away all my gas cars and leased a Polestar 2, and later a Nissan Ariya. I’ll never go back to petroleum powered cars and it’s all because of Blueberry.
1972 Super Beetle. Orange.
It was my first car (had only motorcycles until then) but it was such an amazing platform for modification and opened my eyes to the relative ease of making mods and repairs.
It had a terrible ride but handled great and would chirp third gear.
My Lexus IS. After years of shitboxes and an awful, awful British Leyland-flavoured childhood, my 1000 pound (and therefore fancy) shitbox was an eye opener. Everything worked! It was fast! I bought it in Birmingham, booked up the M6 and along the A69 back to Newcastle hooting with joy as I zoomed along empty motorways and swooshed thru roundabouts in the dark. I had to check myself because I realised I was doing 115 up the motorway – I didn’t realise I was going so fast, because it wasn’t making horrible noises or weird burny smells. Fucking revelatory, man.
The Genesis of my current life was…my Genesis Coupe. Apt name, I suppose.
It was the first time I really became part of a community on forums (remember those?)
The majority of my friend circle, which spans international borders, is from my time owning that car. We’ve all moved on to various rides, but 15 years later, most of us still talk regularly.
Cars are just vessels for human experiences.
My decision to say screw it and buy a 2-door RWD coupe as a 22nd birthday present led to a life I’m grateful to have, surrounded by people I’m lucky to know.
It was a 1975 Fiat 124 Spider. I had owned maybe 7 cars prior to it, including 4 BMW 2002s (back when they were still cheap beaters). But the amazing feel of the spiders steering, the romance of the wind in my hair as I looked out over that curved hood…
It made every drive feel like a 1960s Italian movie – with me as the star! It created a desire in me for cars that feel special, and that has driven my buying habits ever since.
My 1971 Fiat 128SL had much the same effect on me. However, its disintegration in short order taught me to stay away in future. So I learned fun and reliability had to be in balance.
My Dad’s Miata. He got it when I was about 10, and I thought it was cool, but living in the Midwest I got more and more indoctrinated into muscle cars as I approached driving age, so I my first car was an extremely ragged ‘67 Impala SS. A couple years later it was broke (common occurrence) and I really wanted to go somewhere (a girlfriends house, shocker, haha) so I gathered my courage to actually go drive the stick shift Miata across town (I’d had a few rough parking lot lessons). I lost track of how many times I stalled it but I got there, and I was soon transformed into a disciple of light weight sports cars rather than hulking muscle machines.
Until I was about 10, everyone I knew – parents, relatives, parents of friends – drove the largest American cars they could afford. I would see a few other types of cars, but no one I knew drove one or aspired to own one.
Then a new kid moved into my neighborhood. His mom drove a Volvo 245. It was the first foreign car I rode in, the first one I got to study up close. It felt so much more right to me. It wasn’t a floaty ride. There was so much space efficiency. It literally changed my life. 25 years later, I was a complete Volvo nut, had a side hustle of flipping and parting out Volvo 240s. I wound up owning over 40 of them, in various states of aliveness. All because of that one kid whose mom drove a weird foreign car.
1971 Datsun 510, 5 Speed, BRE racing suspension & exhaust, loved that car, taught me how to drift, & pilot like a rally driver. With that setup I could keep up & sometimes outrun Porsche 912’s & 914’s-not the 6’s though. Bob Sharpe Datsun in Wilton, CT. did the suspension mods. A fantastic lightweight fun car to drive, completely reliable.
For me it was a 1982 Datsun B210 Hatchback, wasn’t even mine; my mother bought it brand new off the lot to replace her Ford Granada that had a filed transmission. The Granada couldn’t have been that old as it was only made from 75-82 but I digress.
That Datsun was the first car I Ever put a wrench on, wound up my older brothers car and eventually just disintegrated into dust about ten years and 250,000 miles later. That thing set my expectations on what reliable transportation should look like, and I’m driving small reliable Japanese cars 40 years later 🙂
I suppose my aunt and uncle having Beetles and Land Rovers in my early formative years. Though my OTHER uncle being into Beetles and Corvettes, not so much. Love Beetles, no interest in Corvettes. And my best friend’s dad taking me out for a drive in his new 325i when I got my learner’s permit definitely made an impression. And another bestie who’s dad was into British cars, MGs, Jags, and Range Rovers. And that friend inheriting a ’76 Volvo wagon from his grandparents was huge, and what start me down the road of 14 Volvos.
And in the opposite corner, the fact that literally every American car my family owned growing up with the exception of my stepfather’s ’77 Grand Prix was an absolute raging heap of shit was rather formative too. And then the Subarus that were very reliable, but you could hear them rusting in the garage on quiet nights.
That was a 2012 Fiat 500 Pop. I was in the absolute infancy of my car interest and circa 2011 or so, I’d seen one on an episode of Top Gear. Shortly thereafter, an extremely early US car popped up in my neighborhood in central Denver and I had the lightbulb moment that one of these could be parked just about anywhere. I started bugging my brand new husband (definitely a car person, I was busy catching up to him on this subject) about getting one, which involved months of pestering and even a bit of reverse psychology. By November, I had a key in my hand to an ex-demo car. It’s now been almost 13 years and I’ve been through three 500s (a Pop and two Abarths) and I’ve now graduated to Fiat on “hard mode” with my Marea. I’ve made loads of friends in the Fiat world and been able to go on some awesome Fiat-based adventures. Oh, and it’s lead me to getting to research and write about crazy Fiat history for this lovely site!
BMW E36 coupe, manual. After years of being an auto enthusiast but always driving reasonably practical cars, my younger son hit driving age and convinced me to finally, in my late 40s, learn to drive stick.
It had seen some shit, 250,000 miles with period correct mods (chip, flywheel, short throw shifter, coilovers) and was a ton of fun to drive.
We worked on it together, and I learned a ton about wrenching on it. Never were able to fix the door panels right, however. (E36 things.) Sold it too cheap when my son dinged the front suspension, not realizing that E36 might actually be something other than the worst 3 series. Wish I’d kept it, but repairs were more than it’s value at the time.
It lead to an E30, which I just gave to my son for his college graduation and cause I’m ready for something new (I’m not that nice a Dad).
I now can’t imagine not having at least one manual car with some sporting pretensions in the garage. And I now do as much work on my cars as I can.
Probably my 1995 Mitsubishi Eclipse GS-T (purchased in 1996). This was the first non-shitbox car I ever owned, and while it had a few problems (including sucking some water into the intake following a heavy downpour), it was refreshing to drive something that was *mostly* new. It also taught me the value of having some sort of warranty…I got hooked with one of those third party add-ons (I was only 22!), but it saved my bacon when the car shit the bed after the aformentioned water incident, netting me a brand new engine and turbo for the princely sum of a $500 copay.
2007 Seat Ibiza 2.0 “Sport” edition with a manual transmission. Only 115hp but such a small car and light, the car felt fast and zippy. Great tuning from the suspension from the brand, it made me appreciate more small cars. Until recently, I just repeated the same formula but with a supercharged NB Miata, smiles per gallon are a thing.
My 2001 7.3 Powerstroke manual.
It finally taught me that there was no upside to diesel, a lesson I had failed to learn from my VW TDI.
No matter how good everything seems on paper, no matter how nice it is when everything goes well, no matter how good a reputation your engine has on the internet, you will some day be staring down a 4 figure invoice in your hand and a vehicle that still doesn’t run in your driveway.
Haha I had the same thing with me 2000 F350 7.3. Loved the engine but hated all the trans and that issues and the blow by issues (kind of what happens when you buy a used diesel that wasn’t well upkept) my current 12v Cummins though has changed my outlook on older diesels though hah. Current diesels though (I work for a semi manufacturer) yeah way to many expensive systems on them nowadays.
My love for diesel runs deep. But as someone who spent 2 decades repairing them, I’d never recommend ownership to anyone who can’t/won’t fix it themselves.
Like a drug addiction, I love diesel and it’ll likely kill me one day. Never a frown, with
golden browndiesel.My 2011 Express 4500 is my 3rd diesel. The first had no emissions equipment besides EGR, the second added a DPF, and the Express has both DEF and a DPF.
I will never own another diesel. The economics simple do not work and being stranded in limp mode 2,000 miles from home REALLY sucks.
I was pretty focused on Ford’s as a pre-driving teen. I looked up and could tell you most things about the mustang line-up until 1973. I even purchased a 71 Mach 1 as a first car at 15. Simply because that body style was my favorite match box car as a kid and because they were reviled at the time, they could be had for a lot less than say a similarly equipped 1970 model.
But, i Bought a 1980 Camaro with a claimer motor from a stock car to use as a winter beater and quickly grew to love the reliability and ease of repair of the GM products as a result. It also cemented my desire for go fast stuff going forward. This lasted mostly until I waded into the LT1 Days of GM, that Nightmare of an engine with it’s stupidly designed ignition system almost wiped GM as a consideration for me from any standpoint, at least until the LS motors came around…but then the modern AFM/DFM issues with GM products became a thing. I would have easily looked past most of the Lego Plastic interiors and older gen tech interior bits. But that is harder to do so these days. I am only lusting after the manual Cadillac CT5 Blackwing because the manual trans means the AFM/DFM features do not exist in that motor.
The car that changed everything for me was a 1981 Mazda GLC 5-speed sedan. It was my second car, the first being a 1976 VW Rabbit with an automatic.
I had to learn to drive manual for work, and after I did, the world changed…my love for driving increased by being part of the car, instead of along for the ride.
Subsequent cars that came along were manuals as well…Honda del Sol, Honda Civic S, Mazda 323 GTX, Toyota Celica GT-S.
*puts on flame suit. Had the opportunity to drive an Integra Type R. Manual, white, as God intended the car to be. I was totally and completely let down. It wasn’t exciting, it wasn’t a coming to Jesus moment. It was just another car. Hell, I liked driving my base Neon so much more.
For me, there were two cars that I really anticipated driving that were complete and utter “what is all the fuss about” moments when I did. The S2000, and the KIA Stinger. Especially the Stinger.
My version of this was my 2018 Giulia. I just didn’t get the hype after owning it for three years.
And yet for me, I would almost certainly own one if they sold it with a stick. Despite it being a useless sedan, I would make an exception. Not sure there was really THAT much hype about them though. It’s a decent sports sedan that is an alternative to a 3-series. That is never going to be everybody’s cup of tea, especially today in the era of the 2-box blob on stilts.
If a car is not up to maintenance spec, the name on the back is only reputation.
I test drove a 1968 Porsche 911. I suspect the engine needed some love. Not much pep or grunt.
My 78 rabbit I owned in college from 1988-91 was my frist fun to drive manual transmission.
My 70 jeepster commando I owned from 1995-2001 make me a jeeper.
That’s a really good question. It’s really three cars for me and I can’t narrow it down.
My user name says what changed things for me. I got my 89 Firebird, shit It has been almost 15 years now and that is what changed everything with cars for me. Growing up I always liked classic cars but never did anything mechanically my dad has his 57 Bel Air and my Uncle (my dad’s twin) has a 33? Packard so we would always go to cruise nights and car shows. But it wasn’t until I got my Firebird when I was I think I was 19 or 20 at the time. During this time I was not talking to my dad anymore (hadn’t really talked to him since I was in like 8th grade) but getting my Firebird got me back in contact with him as I was having some issues with the car and my mom had talked to him and told him I needed some help with the car. I could go on and on with this story but now I am in my 30s and much closer to my dad today and I have my Firebird to partially thank for that since that is when I really got into working into cars with my dad and that has also helped to get me to where I am today.
When I met my wife, she had just bought a bright yellow, brand new Chevy Spark 5MT. Up until that point, I lusted after SS Camaros, M3’s and other high power, high performance cars. Getting to drive that little Spark with my foot in it 100% and constantly grinning when I shifted or hit an apex taught me how much I love little , lightweight, low hp cars.
My dream cars immediately went from McLarens to Lotus, Mustang to Miata. Slow car fast is my veins now and I love it.
I approve.