The Matrix I have right now has the most trash C-pillars ever. They're just so thick, I really gotta move and angle my head to an absurd degree to have less than 80% of my view blocked.
yet another reason to miss my perfect little Civic...
Got myself another car (No. 19 haha). Needed something I could put a push bike in.
Figured I‘d try a VW Golf GTI. It’s pretty fun, quite a fast car, but not too fast. Got myself a manual with the cool (to me) tartan seats and them fancy shiny Detroit wheels 
Here it is (red goes faster!):
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/AMMOqzU.jpeg]
>
@“hellomrkearns”#p7654 Dodge Colt (1987~ 1989) three-door - Red
hell yeah
https://twitter.com/addict_car/status/1480463869248212992
I did a thing!!
Browsing this thread got me all excited about cars for the first time in my life I think. So when my 06 Honda Civic got rear ended in December and insurance totaled it, I figured I'd use that money to maybe buy a project 80s/90s sports car. I figured that with what the used car market is right now I really didn't want to take out another 6 year loan on an overpriced used car from a dealership.
So I got this 87 Toyota Celica GT:
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/4oF8ZXu.jpeg]
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/1tCAXy0.jpeg]
It's got quite a bit wrong with it. Pretty sure the previous owner did absolutely no basic maintenance on it and the gauge cluster acts real funny (fuel gauge doesn't work and the meters jump in sync to the windshield wipers which I find oddly hilarious).
I picked it up in Fresno and drove it the 2.5 hours back to the Monterey Bay and I was anxious the whole time hoping that nothing would happen. But the car gods must have been watching over me, because it was a smooth ride the whole way and now that I've got it in my driveway it's got a bunch of funny stuff happening that I'm surprised it made it with no issue.
So yeah... I've never been a car person and know only the basics of maintaining one but I'm real excited to get into this as a project.
My first car was a 1994 Ford Explorer. The same year as Jurassic Park‘s Explorers. It looked like this.
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/OxelqV0.jpeg]
I would fill this thing with friends. Seats full and one or two people in the hatch. We’d go to the park and throw a football or play racket ball or whatever we decided.
It was a hand me down and I had it for a couple years. Drove very well despite it's age and I upgraded just because I wanted better mileage, and I came across a much nicer car that suited me better. The next car was a…
2002 Mazda Protegé5.
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/wcqXrdt.jpeg]
I had this beast for a few years. I loved it and I miss it quite dearly. I had coilovers on it, a beefy exhaust, some nice speakers, a short ram intake, along with a few other mods and what not. This one was a manual and it was incredible to drive. Unfortunately, I got hit by a drunk driver a couple days after Christmas. It was 11:07 AM. I was leaving a best buy and WHAM! Tboned. Unfortunately, it was no longer driveable and not worth fixing with a frame that for bent up.
With losing my Mazda I needed a new car pronto. I didn't like my mom's 99 Mustang that much. It felt weird, plus she needed it herself.
So I went to test drive a Mazda 3 from a dealer but I literally saw the buyer of it drive it off the lot.
Almost went with a Mitsubishi Lancer, but it was out of my price range.
I ended up with a 2008 Subaru Legacy.
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/lIO5Fp7.png]
I still drive this today. It's an automatic, so it's less fun, and it's also not the GT model. It's an alright car but it just feels cheap compared to my Mazda. I've had this car longer than any other one. It's been 7.5 years now.
Since then though, as a congrats to myself for getting a promotion and no longer having to work Sundays. I bought myself a car I'd only dreamed of having for many years.
A 1987 Honda CRX Si.
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/xsS95jL.jpeg]
This is the only photo of my actual car.
I absolutely love this thing. It handles great, feels amazing, the clutch is perfect. I can't get enough of it. Unfortunately, 5 days after I bought it, it died on the side of the road. Put in a new fuel pump and tank, and got it running again. Did some other work on it, fixed the distributor issues it had, fixed the sunroof. Drove the hell out of it for a year or so and it died again on a very hot summer day. I've since then tried a few things but not quite gotten it running again. Unfortunately, it died a week before my son was born, so I haven't had too much time to troubleshoot.
Bonus photo of my wedding day. It was her idea for the photo too!
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/6106FsB.jpeg]
heck yeah, a car post. like most things from my history, i wish i had photos, but i am forgetful and i also don't treat my photos very well as far as backups go. i also thought briefly about writing about cars my family had growing up or ones that i wish we had, i could write about this for a long time so perhaps it will sit in a word file on my computer. stay tuned for a post on journaling!!! i love reading all these posts.
**1998 dodge neon highline** : this was my first car when i was 18 or 19. i didn't have it for too long but my main memory of it is the glow in the dark key. my parents bought this for me for some reason, i forget why, but i really liked it. it was clean, and got me around. i started experimenting with types of connectors for my ipod, and ended up importing one of those attachments with the FM transmitter on the top since i couldn't find one in my town.
**1987 toyota camry v6** : i think i'd still be driving this car today if it hadn't met its fatal end. my dad's italian friend's wife had driven this car literally out of the garage to the grocery store once a week for 20 years before we bought it off of them. when i was on vacation, my brother decided to get stoned and drive it off of a bike jump, where it met its fatal end. it had a lot of power, and had a soft suede like brown interior, and a third party sony tape deck. i wish i still had this car. if i could find one this clean again, i'd probably buy it just to park it in the yard and annoy my partner.
**2001 honda civic si coupe** : after the fatal bike jump end of the camry, i decided i'd buy a certified preowned car with financing. very adult. i don't regret this too hard, because it was a fun civic and i drove it until the bottom fell out (according to my uncle who drove it back to my hometown with my dad.) in summer 2008 i left a can of pepsi that was given to me by my former in-laws after a camping visit. i do not like pepsi so i obliged and left it in the cup holder. it was a hot summer day a few weeks later when the entire can had exploded in the car's interior. i wrote to pepsi to tell them how disappointed i already was in their product and then *this* happened, they sent me a coupon for 36 more free pepsis. there were, and presumably still are, buttons that stick due to pepsi on the removable pioneer deck. i had this car from 2007-2014 when i decided to sell it and go pure cycling for a year. i had a magnet on it, proclaiming my love of boston terriers that got stolen twice. i sold it to my little brother for $475, my dad and my uncle drove it home for him and told me stories about how they thought it wasn't going to make it. my brother then drove it until 2019, when he sold it to a kid as his first car for $250. i still used that FM transmitter from the neon until this car. when i went pure cycling instead of driving for a year, i did miss this car.
this one is actually a picture of the actual car! i was able to search for it and found the old sale photos from the guy i sold it to. nice.
**2003 volkswagen passat w8 wagon** : since the neon, i had always secretly wanted a volkswagen. my parents were so intent on me not driving them since to them they were "all lemons." my friend nick, a self-professed volkswagen/audi aficionado, called me one day for our biweekly brunch - he showed up in this car, and told me he had bought 2, on a whim, kind of by accident. he gave me the keys for a weekend and said 'try it out.' i bought it off of him within that week, i fell in love. this car was the most inefficient and scary car to drive - the w8 engine was experimental, the original owner had spent over $80k canadian on it new. only scary in that my mechanic had mentioned that if anything happened to the engine i'd be financially screwed. i got a lot of compliments from people who knew what it was, and i really liked the look and feeling of this car. when my office moved far enough away for me to be spending $100+ on a tank of premium gas to keep running it a week, i decided to sell it to a coworker, who recently tried to sell it back to me. i could write an entire post and story about this car. it was like driving a private jet. i loved it so much. i had got to plug it into a VAG-COM laptop and set up some custom features, etc. sun roof! leather seating! this car had everything.
**2018 volkswagen golf** : bought it for efficiency. it moved me across country. i don't really know what to say about it other than it was pretty standard, it had car play, which was cool. the guy who sold it to me was on dialysis and told me about that when we test drove it. 6 months after i bought this car i moved to vancouver, where it sat in its parking spot at the very end of P5, deep under my apartment building, pretty well until i moved to where i currently live, except to go to the mall, or the warehouse for work when they needed me there. i had to help with a barbecue for work at said warehouse, and loaded it up with speakers and stands and DJ equipment for the DJ that was coming. i am to this day very impressed at how well a golf seems to be able to pack in a lot of junk.
**2019 volkswagen golf alltrack** : this one i bought with my partner. we sold both of our cars and got it. i love the wagon form factor, and now that i live in a place with curvy roads, it's a lot of fun to whip around. it has winter tires on it so it sounds like a plane taxiing if you get it to the right speeds on a newer highway. it has roof racks which i don't think i'll ever use, but aesthetics are nice with it. it's another "rare" wagon, at least in north america, they stopped selling it. the previous owner again had put every feature they could into it, so it has a FENDER AUDIO SYSTEM which the sales people were very keen to tell me about. it also has all those automatic braking, lane stabilization, auto parking features in it. the automatic braking currently helps me back into my driveway properly by seeing a rock as a larger object and slams on the brakes every time i come home right now. the day we picked it up, it was a snow storm, which most people where i live have never driven in including my partner. it has a big ol' panoramic sunroof which i don't use that often because it's loud. the dogs like to stick their heads out the window. the first week i got it i went to starbucks to get a grande cold brew vanilla sweet cream, and they switched to the new iced cup lids, and i ended up spilling an entire grande cold brew vanilla sweet cream all over the interior.
@“Karnovski”#p73278 Love the style of that CRX. I wish there were more Japanese hatchbacks on the road, and more “hot hatch” style current models.
@“jeffrey”#p73319 the newest Toyota Corolla hatchback looks pretty good!
Also, not quite the same, but the new Nissan Z looks awesome imo.
@“exodus”#p9142 OK finally watching this years later and it‘s been good so far through the end of the qualifying rounds. It took some serious willpower to start watching though, the intro makes it seem like just nonstop destruction of some nice cars for zero reason. Driving over water and the big tilty bridge really didn’t have much of a point beyond being something shocking for previews. In the end the qualifying rounds weren't that egregious, there were fewer DNFs than the average D1GP or Formula Drift event. But the rail grind previewed in the second half looks a little suspicious…
What got me to start watching was watching ~~some~~
https://youtu.be/eEvjPwb8y4U
They have a video about his car too which I haven't seen yet
https://youtu.be/j_Mv2i7pTKw
Biggest disappointment of the first half has to go to the JZX100 Cresta which was teased from the start, briefly but I still caught that right away, only for it not to appear until the last qualifying episode, and only in an extremely edited recap. I need to find out more about that car. And I imagine the producers were disappointed too, I gotta believe that when you introduce a competitor as a former J-pop star and model turned drifter that they were planning to do some big reality TV bits introducing her and her story, only for that to not pan out at all in the competition.
@“thebryanjzx90”#p83280 >!oh no drift mom you were my favorite what a crappy way to go out edit: and possibly injured dammit now this show is dumb edit 2: whooooooa drift mom is back amazing!<
I bought my first car at the tender age of 31. A 2018 Honda CRV.
It drives like a real car, which is as good as it gets if you ask me.
Update: Bought this a bit ago to replace my '15 GTI. And Yes, its a 6 speed
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/2J6B4d0.jpeg]
@“3SuspiciousTurtles”#p85265 how hard was it to get one?
@“thebryanjzx90”#p85423 Extremely easy, but my brother is a Sales manager at a dealer network with a Toyota dealership, so i just sent one text and waited a month.
@“thebryanjzx90”#p83418 yeah see, it's all about the arc!!!
@jeffrey enjoyed this whole thing! I saw a cleeeeeeean as heck camry in japan this trip.
@"3SuspiciousTurtles"#p85265 I keep saying if I had to get a newer combustion engine car (which at this point I probably will not) it'd be this one
Welp, reading through this thread was an hour well spent for sure. Well done, everybody.
My first car was a...
**1992 Ford Thunderbird LX**
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/YhKqRIK.png]
This exact colorway, and if not identical options, very similar. Granted, it was circa 2002, so not so impressive in a high school parking lot full of rich-kid BMW Z3s that got inevitably totaled, but what a first-car-assed first car. It was the 5.0L V8, and various tiny things went wrong with it over time so I naturally replaced it with a...
**1995 Ford Thunderbird LX**
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/JBQnLMl.png]
Another 5.0L V8, I loved this car. It remained in pristine condition and drove like a land yacht, it had less rumble than the '92 but still felt great. Some nimbys rear-ended me with a fresh-off-the-lot Dodge Magnum as I was at a complete dead stop at a red light, and the insurance companies decided it was definitely the fault of the dude with a Thunderbird in his early 20s, so my perfectly salvageable silver beast was declared totaled and I walked to my job at the florist for many months until I could afford a...
**1998 Ford Taurus SHO**
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/lV0bdnK.png]
I should note here that I don't have a particular affinity for Fords. I suppose I grew up in the south and people treat car manufacturers like gamefaqs treats game consoles, so my Ford-loving stepdad always hooked me up with "his guys" to buy Fords from shady dealers (at least my first car wasn't a Probe). But anyway, this car is kind of ridiculous. Definition of a sleeper -- "SHO" stands for "Super High Output," and what they did for a couple years was let SVT develop an engine that was built by Cosworth and tuned by Yamaha, manufactured in limited numbers. So you had a Taurus with a 240HP engine (for reference, those massive Thunderbirds had about 200) that looked something like this:
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/30moCbh.png]
But the V8 model here was prone to catastrophic engine failure -- which eventually happened -- and was very expensive to work on. This was in a time when Ford dealerships were known to "fix" this recalled engine with literal Loctite, so I moved on to a...
**1972 Plymouth Valiant**
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/otQ3hnR.png]
I made some money working as an Alaskan salmon fisherman for a year after college, and like a Kentucky boy in his 20s, I wanted to spend some of that money on a Mopar. In that brief dalliance, I bought a 1972 V6 Valiant formerly owned by Ashley Judd. Of course it was a project, and among other things, the timing belt kept flying off in Missouri. I was moving to Los Angeles, so the prospect of that happening on the 405 made me very nervous and I bought a...
**2007 Toyota Yaris**
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/jGD5OEQ.png]
This was the first new car I ever owned, and I still drive it today (thanks to not having a 9-to-5 since then, it only has about 75K miles on it). That's my pic up there, I've done a bit of plasti-dip and vinyl wrapping to protect the horribly cheap Toyota paint (look around LA street parking areas and you'll notice that virtually every Toyota of a certain age oxidizes) -- I think I'm actually going to try bedliner next for a more durable kind of post-industrial look. Other than cosmetics, I've never had a single issue with it. It's a little rally car bumblebee with a ridiculous turning radius, tight steering, all the pep I've ever needed, and it's so efficiently designed that my 6'4" self has never been uncomfortable in there. No wonder they made an Xbox game about this thing.
The ol Silver Egg is getting on, though. I think if money holds out, the next car will be a real Initial D type of trip in the next few years
@“exodus”#p85444 It is extremely good, if theres one to get, its this. Feels like the last hurrah for small, cheap, ICE sports cars.
@“tokucowboy”#p85460 nice valiant - when I was driving my 72 dodge dart me and valiant owners would not our heads at each other
@“exodus”#p85463 Slant-6 club, when you know, you know. My ma had a Dodge Dart, too (strangely enough, because her dad was also obsessed with them); it couldn't go in reverse, so you got really used to people pushing that car when you forgot about that when pulling into a parking lot
Here's my car history, starting with first-owned:
**1992 Honda Prelude**
_(bonus points if you know where this was shot at... hint: the wind generators no longer exist)_
Si version (with the non-VTEC H23A motor), parents bought it for me right before I turned 16 (yes, this was right at the dot-com boom), and I ended up flipping it over to its side on an entrance ramp embankment on CA I-680 a few months after I earned my license due to snap oversteer while trying to avoid road debris. Yes, I am the classic cautionary tale of "don't buy your kids a sports car". Surprisingly, the car was still worth enough that it wasn't considered totaled, and it got repainted from blue to purple.
I left it mostly unmodified the entire time I owned it through the rest of high school and college, though very early on I did stick on white Ah! My Goddess SD Skuld and Tenchi Muyo Ryo-oh-ki decals on the windows that I cut all by myself. Yes, this was before today's kids started putting full-color headshot waifu stickers on their car windows -- let alone full-on body panel itasha wraps of sadboi broken hearts. Also over time the seats and rear deck of my car were progressively filled with various sanrio plushies & anime UFO catcher dolls. I had no shame as a weeb.
Also, I did install a pretty sickass aftermarket sound system all by myself -- featuring all pioneer speakers and an incognito subwoofer box... and including one of the first MP3 CD car decks ever released (Aiwa CDC-MP3, if you're curious). I had to keep returning that thing multiple times for warranty repair though since it kept breaking... the insides of that deck was hella rewired with "dead cockroach" replacement IC boards when i opened it one day out of curiosity. Yeech. Fortunately it also had an AUX port so I could plug in my iPod much later on -- and occasionally my laptop whenever I wanted to mix & master the music I made during that time with my car speakers, lol.
Unfortunately, the car no longer exists -- at least in its complete form. When I moved to Japan and got hired at my current gamedev job, I gave my Prelude to my dad so he could drive himself to dialysis. Just a few months in, he smashed the car onto his garage door & onto a garden water pipe -- which according to my siblings made quite a scene with water gushing everywhere. He stopped driving completely after that. A few years later he passed away from diabetes complications, and the Prelude sat outside on the street driveway since, never being driven. Eventually the seals on the rear window deteriorated, and the rear seat & trunk filled with so much rainwater that it mildewed the entire interior and rendered the car a biohazard -- and as a result, totaled it. I was well-settled overseas obviously, so it was not like I could've benefited from wasting time dealing with an insurance claim. Eventually my brother managed to get it parted out for $$$ -- most notably its engine. I do wish I stowed it in a storage space after my dad passed away since 4th gen Preludes are NOW starting to become much more valuable, but of course hindsight is 20/20.
.
**1984 Caprice Classic Wagon**
My dad was a GM Impala & Caprice "otaku", and this was one of his three B-body cars he owned. He ended up giving it to me during college while I still drove the Prelude as my daily. It was super-low mileage (like ～30,000mi by the time I let go of it). I didn't use it that much, aside from using it as a pickup since it had cavernous storage when the middle & back seat benches were folded down. It was also unmodified for the most part, aside from my older brother cutting up the dash trim & yanking out the stock radio for a... ummm, slightly-out-of-place clear plastic CD player deck in its place. I sold it to one of my uncles right before I moved to Japan just so I could have some safety money to start off my new life overseas. Supposedly he still has it.
.
**2015 Honda S660** _(my current car)_
Just to finally add relevance, I let @exodus [ride shotgun in this car recently during his visit to Japan](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1888-ep-253-from-tokyo-with-brandon-sheffield-part-i).
I bought this just last year as of writing. After over a decade of living in Japan and relying solely on trains & the occasional taxi to get around, I decided to finally accept my mid-life crisis, earn my driver's license, and buy some exclusive "hella JDM dawg" shitbox. Yes, all while living in the middle of downtown Tokyo: a place where it's absolutely pointless to own a car. I originally did not plan to buy an S660, but after seeing firsthand R34 GTRs skyrocket in price with bitter pienface tears falling, I decided my money would be better spent on something just as elusive and exotic to american eyes, but a lot more affordable. Even if it is WAY slower. But that said, I went through a long and arduous time buying this (I won't get into the details, other than I bought it right after Honda announced the S660's discontinuation... aka the worst time to buy the car).
In spite of that, I managed to find a used 6-speed manual S660 with fairly low mileage -- at least to american standards lol (～30,000km). It mainly resided in the Kansai region with three previous owners before I yanked it to its current home in good ol' Akihabara Kanto. It included some factory-installed goodies, such as Mugen aero bumper panels. But that said, it had been in a previous accident, and had a lot of flaws & issues, both cosmetic AND functional, that needed to be fixed. Also one of the former owners added a couple of aftermarket mods that totally screamed "old man re-living youth" aesthetic. Most of those problems have already been addressed (mainly from DIY fixing vital safety things such as airbag connectors (!!!), though some required throwing money at the problems -- such as having a body shop repair the cracked bumper panels).
So far aside from DIY fixing those aforementioned problems & getting rid of the tasteless old-man aesthetic mods (though I did leave a few just to keep its weird charm... lol Acura tire stem caps), I DIY upgraded the audio system with Honda's top-tier OEM "SkySound" speaker set, and fitted the passenger seat with low-position rails -- just so my tall boyfriend can actually fit. If barely. And of course, the interior is now littered with sanrio & molcar plush toys abound. I have not forgotten my roots.
I'm still on the fence if I'm gonna do any performance mods, considering the S07A engine is known to be already high-strung from the factory -- and requires a lot of work (read: $$$) to reliably attain power past 100HP. Non performance-wise, I do plan to put an itasha wrap at some point. Yes I know, shut up. It'll be NES themed with my OC drawn all shibuya gal artstyle from my best friend & fellow gamedev artist.
So yeah, if you ever visit Japan and see a super-tiny gunmetal grey Honda zipping around Akihabara while loudly playing a combination of old 90s NorCal urban radio dance tunes and newfangled distorted drift phonk cowbell stuff that tiktok kids eat up, now you know who drives it.