QOTD: What Vehicle Was the First Ride of Your Life?
Last week, I asked you to think back to your formative years and your driving experiences therein. Many of you responded with tales of when your nervous fingers first gripped the wheel, and the happy experiences (sometimes dangerous if you’re Chris Tonn) you had in whatever vintage automobile you piloted that first time.
Now it’s time to talk about even further back. Knowing how old most of you are though, hopefully we can keep the stories of Conestoga wagons to a minimum today. What vehicle brought you home from the hospital, your first-ever actual ride in a car?
Of course, all answers will be from hearsay, stories, and perhaps photographs (lithographs?) from the time when you were a brand new person.
I know you were fooled by the excellent headline photo featuring the Chevrolet Celebrity Eurosport VR coupe, its racing pedigree special trim, and my mom from her modeling career. The actual vehicle that brought me home from the hospital was a 1985 Buick Regal. It was blue, and had a blue velour interior. I’m thinking it was a V6-equipped version, as there were not T-tops nor power windows. I’m sure it had the half-landau so popular at the time, so it was a bit brougham, and still rear-wheel drive!
This one’s an ’86, and the color is wrong, but you try finding exact photo matches for a vehicle that old, one for which the Olds Cutlass-type modding community has long ago ruined stock examples.
Now I’m wishing we still had model-specific logos like you see here on this superb wheel cover.
The Regal that brought me home was the same car I rode in regularly as a small child. It was there for the first few years of my life, up until it was replaced with something more family-friendly but worse in every other capacity. That’d be a 1988 Dodge Dynasty, in medium grey over grey velour.
So what was the first ride of your life?
[Images via Ebay]
Interested in lots of cars and their various historical contexts. Started writing articles for TTAC in late 2016, when my first posts were QOTDs. From there I started a few new series like Rare Rides, Buy/Drive/Burn, Abandoned History, and most recently Rare Rides Icons. Operating from a home base in Cincinnati, Ohio, a relative auto journalist dead zone. Many of my articles are prompted by something I'll see on social media that sparks my interest and causes me to research. Finding articles and information from the early days of the internet and beyond that covers the little details lost to time: trim packages, color and wheel choices, interior fabrics. Beyond those, I'm fascinated by automotive industry experiments, both failures and successes. Lately I've taken an interest in AI, and generating "what if" type images for car models long dead. Reincarnating a modern Toyota Paseo, Lincoln Mark IX, or Isuzu Trooper through a text prompt is fun. Fun to post them on Twitter too, and watch people overreact. To that end, the social media I use most is Twitter, @CoreyLewis86. I also contribute pieces for Forbes Wheels and Forbes Home.
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Wait..you were born in a hospital and got a ride home?...I was born at home and got a ride to the hospital a week later...in a 5 year old 37 Ford sedan, after the 6 inches of snow melted away. The midwife who delivered me was hauled from her home 2 miles away to our cabin in a sled pulled by two mules..fact..A Conestoga Wagon would have been an upgrade.
I know I'm late to the party... I don't know what my first ride would have been, probably a very large GM car, or possibly my grandparents early 60's Mercedes sedan. The first cars I clearly remember riding in were my Mom's late 60's Nova SS, and my grandparents late 60's Chrysler New Yorker, which they kept until they got their new, ridiculously tiny, '77 LeBaron. It's all about perspective. They have pictures of me in cars before that, that I have no real memory of. It seems like before I was 8 or 10, cars didn't imprint themselves in my memory. During my formative young car-guy years, it seemed everyone in my family and most relatives were driving massive early 70's GM cars. A couple of 98's, a LeMans, a Skylark convertible, big Cadillacs, etc. Of course, there was always a sprinkling of Darts, Valiants, etc. It seems like most of my early childhood cars were metallic light green, metallic brown, or black. I remember riding on the back shelf of a car more clearly than I remember what car it was. I also clearly remember taking naps on the warm carpeted floors of cars as a kid. The other thing I remember, oddly, were the cars that had turn signal indicators on the top of the fender and/or turn signal/brake fiber optic lights in the headliner. I don't know why that made such an impression on me.