Piston Slap: The Butterfly Effect

Sajeev Mehta
by Sajeev Mehta
Earl writes:

Hi Sajeev, here’s a question for you and the best and brightest here. ”How might your life have been different had you bought a particular car?”

As for me, it was a Toyota MR2 Supercharged that I let slide for a 91 Pontiac Sunbird (really!). I was driving a 78 Malibu at the time and it was getting worn out. I found the MR2 and was determined to buy. I was also getting married very soon and was also working in a GM dealers at the time. I think I let the MR2 go because some life circumstances had made me extremely risk-averse. Would buying the MR2 have made me more of a risk taker? Would I have gone back to college a lot sooner and thus been farther ahead in the career I now love?

Has the purchase or non-purchase of a car ever had bigger meaning for you?

I’ll bet there are some great stories out there.

Sajeev answers:

I am a firm believer in the butterfly effect, though I don’t know if one car changes most people’s lives. But for me…well, that happened. So here’s story Number One for you.

With a twist: if my parents didn’t buy that used ’83 Continental Valentino I previously mentioned, I wouldn’t be absolutely infatuated with cars as a child. Which I never outgrew: the Valentino became a daily obsession that certainly changed my destiny. Good or bad, I don’t know. I do know that people are taken aback by this madness, but a single dude can foolishly restore this Valentino and not hurt any one. Wasting tens of thousands of dollars in the process ain’t no thang, bit if I was married with a kid?

If the Valentino was instead scrapped 10+ years ago, would I wind up honing my writing skills on Lincoln message forums back in 1999, landing at TTAC (since 2006) and on your computer? Nope. This car was the springboard to my current life.

When we look introspectively at the wonderful, tragic or just plain idiotic moves from our past and how they define our future, shit gets real.

Back to the Butterfly: for me, cars are irrevocably intertwined with every action. It’s a blessing and a curse, and I suspect everyone battles with similar action-reactions at some point in their lives.

Off to you, Best and Brightest.


Send your queries to sajeev@thetruthaboutcars.com. Spare no details and ask for a speedy resolution if you’re in a hurry.

Sajeev Mehta
Sajeev Mehta

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  • Wstarvingteacher Wstarvingteacher on Jan 09, 2013

    I've made enough mistakes with cars to hope you are wrong about the butterfly effect. Life is going to be full of increasingly compounded errors if you are right. One good choice was the 81 Datsun King Cab. A little 2wd thatI got before retiring from the Navy. Hooked me on trucks and really helped me get into the air conditioning trade which financed other career moves. The second good thing was meeting my wife while looking at cars at a local lot. She ran the place for her son and it was love at first sight. Really that was when things started going right so maybe you are right.

  • Jeffzekas Jeffzekas on Jan 10, 2013

    Two cars, if i had bought them, would have changed my life: a Morris Mini 850 and a Honda N600- oh well.

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
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