QOTD: What Was Your Family Car When You Were Young?

This Monday, I sat among a herd of journalists and executives waiting for the Honda Odyssey press reveal to begin. While nominally I was there to cover the event on behalf of this fine publication, I was also considering my next family car purchase.

Jack wrote at length yesterday about the relatively recent phenomenon of at once coddling and ignoring the spawn relegated to the stern of the family vehicle. While I don’t intend to completely answer the questions raised, I’d like to consider what might affect our choice of family conveyance.

Many of our beliefs, desires, hatreds, and dreams develop at a surprisingly young age. I stumbled upon a description of this a few years ago on an excellent food blog, Serious Eats, where the writer describes Sam Sifton’s “Pizza Cognition Theory:”

There is a theory of cognitive development that says children learn to identify things only in opposition to other things. Only the child who has learned what is not brown, the theory holds, can discern what is “brown.”

Pizza naturally throws this theory into a tailspin. The first slice of pizza a child sees and tastes (and somehow appreciates on something more than a childlike, mmmgoood, thanks-mom level), becomes, for him, pizza. He relegates all subsequent slices, if they are different in some manner from that first triangle of dough and cheese and tomato and oil and herbs and spices, to a status that we can characterize as not pizza.

Thus, while a kid growing up in Brooklyn might wretch at the thought of a deep-dish Chicago pie, another kid raised on Lou Malnati’s would turn up his nose at the thin, greasy slice at Original Famous Ray’s (not affiliated with Famous Original Ray’s). Just like a kid who first rode in a Camaro might spend his life savings on those awful “Calvin pissing on the Blue Oval” stickers.

Of course, the contrarian might prevail as well — thus the slow death of minivans, the symbol of mom-ness in the ‘80s and ‘90s — as most current drivers of child-rearing age won’t even consider the best utility box ever.

While my dad’s frequent sportscar purchases enthralled me, the drives in those were merely a treat for sunny, salt-free days. Whether by his own restlessness or the whims of the corporate fleet manager, dad never kept a daily driver for more than two years. Once he escaped retail sales around 1987, our driveway was constantly in flux.

I recall his first sales job when he had to buy his own car — a stripped down, DX model pop-up headlamp Honda Accord in which I was tasked with installing the dealer add-on center armrest. He quickly moved on to a firm that provided him cars to be turned in upon reaching a mileage threshold. GM A-bodies were the norm for many years, followed by second-gen Tauruses and Crown Victorias.

But my most memorable ride was my mother’s car — a 1990 Toyota Corolla. Painted light metallic blue, equipped with a five-speed manual, and stripped of nearly any feature (while I think it did have AM/FM and a cassette player, it did not have a clock), it was her first major purchase after the divorce. We drove that car everywhere. The tweed-like cloth interior wasn’t plush, but it held up well. Neglected maintenance doomed it, but mom replaced it with another Corolla, and another. I think she’s up to number six or seven with her current 2014 model. Only the last two have been automatics.

Which of your parent’s cars made a major impression on you, and how is that reflected today in your automotive passion? Mom’s Corolla explains my love of cheap and cheerful cars of the ’80s and ’90s, including Toyotas. The cars were simple and fun to drive, and made a lasting impression.

Oddly enough, I drove a (rented) Corolla to Detroit.

[Image: By IFCAR (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons]