Your first car adventures:

[Noporian]

Some memorable things that happened to you with your first car

I'll start by saying someone challenged me to a race and my car at the time was a Seat Altea. Guess who won, me or the guy in a bmw?
Surprisingly i won, in a small MPV for god's sake. I hadn't realized that the person who i bought it from had turbocharged the engine.

[Nosnoob11]

I went mudding with my 2wd 98 Sierra and ended up jumping the thing 6' off the ground then drag
raced my buddy, right after we got outta the mud. He had a bigger motor and tires that actually
had tread yet i still killed him by a 1/2 mile didn't realize how powerful those cute little 305's are especially when my truck was so light

[Slim Jim]

After having a manual boost controller installed on my 1988 Thunderbird Turbo Coupe, I couldn't believe the amount of torque the thing was producing in the midrange. It pulled so hard, it felt like my face was being ripped off -- at part throttle. Granted, I hadn't really driven many other cars at the time so I had no basis for comparison.

Everything was going well, and despite not having a working boost gauge, I decided to see what she could do. I made a left turn from dead stop, had a clear run, and floored it. After a bit of lag, it took off like a rocket ship and then abruptly jerked, made a weird hissing noise, and the transmission refused to upshift. I freaked out, thinking I just destroyed my transmission!


As it turns out, the car gods were smiling upon me that day. What actually happened: the car was pushing so much boost, I blew a vacuum hose off the intake manifold that lead to the transmission modulator valve. Simply reattach the hose, turn down the boost, and off I went.

[VicVictory]

Oh man. My first car. What a POS.

1976 Subaru DL 4-door sedan. That we bought in '96 for $75. That should tell you just how crappy it was.

No? still didn't? Well, we got all the repair paperwork with the car (which was equipped with a 5 digit odometer) and we could tell that it had rolled over at LEAST twice. So it had either 210k or 310k miles on it when we bought it.

What possessed us to buy it and put in the work to replace the head gasket was beyond me.

The floor was completely rotten on the front driver's side. We cleaned it up and riveted in a patch plate, but one of the seat mounts was irrepairably gone. Which meant that the whole driver's seat flopped when you accelerated or braked. And the gear shift knob could be slipped on and off at will. Which could be fun freaking out a new passenger who didn't know that, making them think the car was falling apart as it was moving. But man, we put in a bitchin cassette deck! (ok, so it was a $50 Kraco special that included two speakers)

One night I was driving home and had a minor electrical harness fire. After that, the only interior lights that worked were the ones that illuminated half of the HVAC control. No dash lights. Made it a bear to drive in the dark. Also, that affected the headlights. If you pulled the switch to the parking light position, nothing would happen. Pull the extra click to regular head lights and the parking lights would turn on. To get actual headlights, you had to run the high-beams 24/7. Which would give one high and one low beam. Extra fun to explain THAT one to cops.

The carb needed rebuilding something fierce. I remember one day running a yellow light while making a left turn.. a little quickly... and the car sputtered to a stop on the other side of the intersection. Turns out that little extra lateral-G flooded the carb for THREE DAYS.

But the best feature? Its Passenger Behavior Modifcation System. What the hell is that? I'll tell you.

We had the rear seat padding out when we were doing some of the metal and rust repair. but I was in high school, and a lot of kids in my 7th period class (which was an extra period after the school day) didn't know anyone else with a car and didn't want to take the bus home. So they'd beg me. One guy in particular was a complete putz. He'd yell obscenities out the window at passing pedestrians. I'm generally shy and respectful, so this didn't sit well with me. So one day he did this (sitting in the back seat with a seatbelt but no padding), I hammered the throttle and shot down a side street, then slammed on the brakes after I straightened out. Lack of friction did its job; one of the seat pad hooks that was sticking up out of the bare metal caught and tore his jeans. And stopped just an inch from his (not quite) manhood. He never did that again, amazingly enough...

[Weasel]

My first car was a 92 Mini Cooper 1.3i. I bought it for (today 3000€) in January 2001.

In Summer 2001 i wanted to go to a concert in Düsseldorf, aber 400km away. The journey there was easy, without errors or something. I managed the way with one tank of gasoline (30l). After the city sign of Düsseldorf I had to drive throgh a tunnel and I switched the headlights on. What I forgott was to switch them of after that. It was a sunny day, so I didn't reconize it.
We (my 2 attendents) and me arrived at the parking lot and go to the concert hall. Unfortunatly the old Mini Cooper has no audible alert when the headlight is on and you open the door. Sad but true.
So I enjoyed the concert till I remind me, that I have forgotten the headlights. I wanted to go out to the parking lot, but the security guy said "If your going out now, you won't come in again." So I had to stay inside. Some time later it was possible to leave the concert hall. I went to my car. It was already dark outside. When I came to my car I saw, that there were no light on and I thought "Puh... I switched them off, great!" But then I saw the switch for the headlight. It was on the on-position. I tried to start my car and... *KLICK, KLICK* .... nothing but this noise. Damn it!
I thought "allright, someone will have a jumper wire" and went back to the concert.
After the concert, when we came back to the parking lot, a guy with his Volvo stood right next to me, I asked him for a jumper wire. He said, that he has one and I started to clear up my trunk. The guys asked me "What are yoou doing?" I said "Clear up the trunk" He"Why" I "The battery is in the trunk"...
So he gave me Home Help and my car started. For the journey home i had to fill my tank. So I stopped at the gas station. After paying my bill I wanted to drive home. Unfortunatly two fuses are kicked out. The Mist-lights and the radio switched off. Damn it!
So I had to drive home without good lights and radio. But I had two sleepy and druken attendents with me. Great!
I was so glad, when I was at home again.

[accent]

I let my sister use my 1989 Ford Escort. Came back without an exhaust pipe. Somehow she didn't notice anything, but I think all that was left was the exhaust manifold. Later I sold the car to a friend of my cousin's. The noise when test driving it was hilarious.

[carmaker]

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[adamd]

I think everyone has heard my story by now.

All I wanted was a 3 door E11 Toyota Corolla. Preferably the earlier bug-eye one. So I bought the first one I saw.

Lots of rain came inside the car, the first time it rained. Being England this didn't take long. That took me 2 weeks to fix, so when I did I decided to treat the car to a service. When I gave the car a test drive, I pulled out of a junction to a mega smell of burning oil. I tried the rally car driver's technique of driving through the problem (I wasn't far from home) but had to stop and inspect. Lots of oil spewed out of the join between engine and gearbox, I guess the smell was it on the clutch.

I loved that car. I must have another. *Browses internet for Corolla G6Rs*

[nialloftara]

My first car was a 1998 jetta gl 2.0 automatic I bought off my dad. It is still my favorite looking car in tornado red (what a great color name). Unfortunately it was my car during college so I was flat broke most of the time so I watched as system by system it broke down around me. The funniest problem was losing several "vital" sensors, for 3 years I drove it without a working speedometer, odometer, or fuel gauge, all I had was a water temp and a tach. I remember a friend asking me how fast I was going during some spirited highway driving and all I said was "4500 rpms in 4th" which I'm pretty sure was about 115mph.

[strop]

lol this thread is the land of the young, the broke, and the lairy. I like it.

As some may know my first car was a 5th hand Citroen Xsara 1.6 (with some stone-age 8V OHV that chugged fuel and produced no power). The dynamics were horrendous. The front end liked to understeer. The rear end liked to skip out. It was a struggle to get it driving faster than a shopping trolley, but if you drove it any faster than a shopping trolley it was like driving an unguided missile. As such it was a great deal of fun pushing the car frequently past its limits, and so it was the car in which I learnt trail braking (no ABS), and countersteering and drifting in an FF.

However the most hairy adventures in this car were the maintenance issues. I blame it being temperamental and French but in reality it was probably the ripoff mechanic "fixing" our car by breaking more things than he fixed. At one point the one of the timing wheels for the drive belt became wonky and started shearing the belt, resulting in a horrendous screeching. Mechanic attempted to gloss over the problem with liberal applications of WD-40 (I didn't know any better then). A few days later the belt completely snapped while I was driving car pool at night, leaving me suddenly without lights, power steering, A/C or radio. Once that was finally fixed, several days later, I was driving the same person, again at night, through the city, in traffic, when my car suddenly started running away. After about half a minute of my car accelerating despite me not touching the gas pedal, I realised the throttle was jammed for whatever reason, and had to kick the car into neutral whenever I wanted to slow down while the car revved constantly. Turned out a bit of plastic fastener had somehow gotten stuck in the throttle and wedged it open, which left me deeply unimpressed.

Subsequently I switched mechanics and all the critical faults went away, and stayed that way until my next mechanic wanted to charge me three grand to replace the brake master cylinder, which was more than the car seemed to be worth, so I sold it on to a family friend. To this day I still occasionally spot the car driving around town.

[Theonecomposite]

My first car was a Volvo 850 with the 2.0 straigth 5, i used that car for practise driving. now i own the 2.3 turbo version of the volvo 850
only had my lisence for a year tho

[ThatSupraGuy9801]

When I was still a 1st year driver I had an '04 Corolla, The basis for bland. Here in Cleveland we have horrible winters on occasion, And our cities don't like plowing the snow. So with that in mind just imagine being stupid in some backstreets with your buddy who owns a '94 V6 Mustang and racing on iced roads. He slid of into a drainage ditch... So I turned around and went back to help. We roped the cars together back to back, and I'm pulling him out looking back at him to see when he's free. Not looking at the ditch on the opposite side of the road, So I pull him out and I go in. He pulls me out and we're good to go. No injuries or broken car parts, So we head home. Not one of my best car stories but the only one I could think of from the Corolla.

Anyway there are two morals to this story (arguably)
1. If you're an inexperienced driver and you wanna play in the snow, go to a parking lot (preferably one without light poles.)
2. More importantly ALWAYS CARRY A TOW ROPE.