Question: What Was the First Car You Thought Was the Coolest Thing Ever?
Many of our readers have some interesting first-car-ride memories, but most of us had no personal choice in the matter. At some point after your very earliest hazy memory of being in a moving steel room on wheels, however, you remember the first car that made you do a double-take and say the little-kid equivalent of “Damn! Look at that thing!” In my case, this car was a thing, and I mean that literally; the Volkswagen Thing first appeared on California streets when I was six years old, and I was utterly hypnotized by the weird boxy car that looked something like an Apollo Lunar Rover.
Yes, the Thing looked like a car designed by a six-year-old, and that probably explains its appeal to me at the time. Sort of an embarrassing choice of First Intolerably Cool Car (though at the time I thought my parents’ Fiat 128s were the coolest-sounding cars ever), and I sort of wish for a time machine that would let me go back and point my six-year-old self in the direction of the Mazda Cosmo Sport 110. Can’t change the past, though, and I still think the Thing looks cool (though I’d sooner drive a ’79 Olds Starfire Firenza than spend every weekend adjusting the valves on a rust-happy Malaise rättleträp based on a 75-year-old military-vehicle design). So, what’s the car that first made your jaw drop?
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Porsche 911. I don't know how or why - Latin America in the mid 70s was not exactly a population center for 911s - but I do remember that I had a 1/24 die-cast model of a 'cucumber sandwich' German police 911 when I was two, and that I wanted to 'save my pennies and buy a Porsche' by my fourth birthday.
The earliest car that made an impression on me was my Dad's 1973 Cadillac Eldorado coupe, gunmetal grey with white and black houndstooth patterned upholstery. That car was AWESOME. I still think of it whenever I see anything with a houndstooth pattern! Of course I had a couple of Countach posters in my room, as someone else mentioned that was the epitome of exotic cardom at the time. Other cars I remember liking were the Jaguar XJ-S, and my Dad and I both admired the Mercedes SEC.