My Dad bought a new 1969 Chevelle SS. It was yellow with two black racing stripes on the hood. I was two and it's the first car I remember. The story goes that he bought it without my Mother being present. She never let him forget it.
My Dad bought a new 1969 Chevelle SS. It was yellow with two black racing stripes on the hood. I was two and it's the first car I remember. The story goes that he bought it without my Mother being present. She never let him forget it.
I'm a lot younger that all of my siblings. My brother in law had a '69 MG Midget when he and my sister got married. When they had a baby, he needed something bigger so he traded the Midget in on an MGB. I remember riding with the three of them in the MGB from Connecticut to the beach in Rhode Island every weekend in the summer. I sat crosswise on the shelf behind the seats with the baby in my lap. We could only do that with the top up because the folded top would have filled the shelf space. My nephew is 6'4" and about 240 now.
My older brother has an orange '73 Datsun 610 and then a '79 MGB-LE. That MGB was slow and unreliable, but man, was I in love with that car.
In reply to Woody:
Woody,
I good friend of mine bought a MGB Limited Edition that looked almost exactly like the one you pictured new. She finally sold it about five years ago. And yes, she did break even on the price as new. She also recently sold her '95 Miata with 17,000 actual miles. She trains Standard Poodles and neither car was big enough to carry the poodles and gear to an agility trial.
Besides they are just old used cars.
In reply to Wayslow:
Been there, wore those shoes!
1960 Morris Minor Traveler
VW Micro-bus
1973 Datsun 240Z
Mercedes 280 SL
We also had one of these, same color, but the "Brougham" model with a white vinyl top.
Not sure at all if it counts as cool though...
I don't know what all my parents had before I was alive, but they still have 2 mustang GT's (1965 and 2001) and a supra turbo (1988). And a miata now I guess, and depending on your definition of cool they have a phaeton. If you like weird, difficult to explain why kindof stuff (and I know you do) they also had a 1987 E-150 conversion van with a bunch of performance modifications. It's mine now 
. yeah i probably picked up the car bug from them.
In the past my mom had some cool cars, her first car was a 1970 mustang, though oddly now she has lost interest in mustangs. She still likes her supra, but I think she drives the miata a lot more. My dad was mostly broke when he was young so he had beaters. Early in their marriage they had some kind of mercury luxo-barge with a 7-liter V8. I don't remember the details but my dad has mentioned despite the lack of power it would lay one hell of a strip of rubber.
My first car was a '66 split window Micro-bus.
Also had:
Austin Healey Bugeye Sprite
Multiple cool VW's
Several Subaru SVXes
X 1/9
'67 Lemans
'67 Corvair convertible
Olds Vista Cruiser Station wagon
Plymouth Fury Wagon
CRX SI
Currently own:
'60 El Camino
'60 Flat top Cadillac
'03 MINI Cooper S
'84 GTI
'88 323 GTX
'92 Dodge Spirit R/T
2- Lotus Europas
The rest of my family only drives boring stuff!
I think the uncles on my mom's side at some point had a few TR4's and 5's, more mustangs (they liked mustangs), a V12 E-type coupe, and some other stuff. I guess one of my uncles had a new car every 6 months, and needed tires bi-weekly.
One of my other uncles didn't have a great deal of awesome cars, but he does for some reason know all of the 'flight characteristics' of every car he had for 20 years. The best was a 1988 323 (not a GTX) that he said would neither nose dive, roll, nor yaw in midair. Weird to think he survived all of that, though he does have a good amount of titanium holding his spine together for semi-related reasons...
Dad was a car guy but was disabled so he couldn't really play with them by the time I came along. The coolest thing he had while I was a kid was a 64 Buick Electra 225. I owned it for a while then my brother killed it.
Here's my great grandfather having breakfast in 1935. He was a blacksmith.
My parents aren't car enthusiasts so the only cool car they bought was an 02 Jetta TDI 5-speed. It's my favorite "boring" car.
My current E36 328i beats it by slight margins. I also find my 91 Camaro RS cooler than the E36 even though the front ends look somewhat similar.
coolest car cannot be topped. A 1968 Opel Kadett rallye that my Father bought new in Germany and shipped to spain. This was not the tape special rallye, but the actual homogulation special that Opel put out to go rallying.
After I was born and he was transferred back to the states, the car came with it and was eventually sold in 1980. In the mean time it did everything from commuting to racing on the local track (Atlantic City Speedway)
My father was a car dealer in the old days. Stutz, International and White trucks, Willys in '37 which transferred to Jeep. He told me of riding around the Indianpolis track at 90 mph in a '27 Stutz. I can remember riding to Montauk Point in one of those Stutz. I was really young. So over the years a lot of interesting stuff showed up.
I have the coolest cars of my whole family as I'm basically the only one who cares. Parents, 4 siblings, cousins, etc, nobody had anything cool. Parents had a 450SL back in the 70s and a few more Benz and Lexus sedans, one brother had a FJ40 with a V8 for a bit, but that's really it. Nobody has any idea where I got my interest.
In 1959, my grandparents bought this slightly used T-Bird:
It was their last car, and my grandmother was driving it until she was 89 (around 1990 or so). No power steering, no power brakes. Grandma was a cool, tough old lady.
My dad liked it so much that in 1964, he bought this (modified a bit since then, of course):
My dad drives the black car (312 4-bbl/auto), and I drive the blue car (4.6/5-speed).
You can also see the corner of the 55k mile 1990 CRX HF my dad has owned since new.
My grandfather had a '55 Ford Victoria coupe. It was red and white with a red and white interior. He never took off the plastic seat covers. It had the Thunderbird 312 V8 with an automatic transmission. When he stopped driving, the car had 47,000 miles. The car was perfect, garaged since day 1.
My oldest cousin and I are both car guys. We wanted the car to stay in the family. My mom and her sister decided to sell it to a neighbor of my grandparents for $1500. The guy messed with the car so much it wouldn't run and it was left out in a field rusting away. We drove past it every time we went to visit my grandmother. We asked why they sold it to the neighbor and they said they didn't want one of us to be disappointed if the other had the car...
My other grandfather bought a new '65 Buick Wildcat, maroon with white convertible top and white leather seats. That car was a beautiful car and drove like a yacht.
Grandparents had a couple of Saab 95/96s, both 2 smokers and V4s, then they had a rotary Mazda (?Rx2) 4 door. I just remember lime green.
My dad built a Crown Corvair mid-engine conversion with an mech fuel injected corvette 350 before I was born. Trying to find a couple pics of it to post. Supposedly it would just leave 3ft long patches on launch.
Before that, he had a 56 Ford, 57 Chevy and 61 Vette. Dad also had a Kent engine powered Capri, Fiat 128SL Coupe (Dissolved very quickly in New England), 1st gen Accord, and 2nd gen Mazda 626.
In the less cool category, my mom had a Caravan with a 5spd; big fun doing handbrake turns with a full boat in the winter in high school, though.
78 F150 with a 460 from the factory
66 Shelby Cobra, yes that one.
I gotta limit this to Dad, but, we are a gear head family.
Bugeye sprite, 63 Jag 3.8 sedan, 32 Ford. 2-stroke Saab, Essex(bought for $25), Jag XJ 12, double cab VW truck(61?), various Cadillac limos, 55 Chevy pickup, Various Bugs and VW vans, generally GM work trucks, many motorcycles- famously, an x-cop Harley he T-boned a truck on, breaking both arms, loosing a knee cap, and who knows what else. When my parents started dating, he was in a body cast, and driving the Bugeye. Moving vans, aaand, that's all I got. Probably missing some, but Dad definitely helped my brother and I on to our own machinery based obsessions.
SVreX wrote: In 1908, my great grandfather owned the FIRST motor vehicle in Saginaw Michigan. It was a Model T. My grandfather was 10 years old, and drove it for his father's lumber yard. I think that is fairly cool.
I have a similar story!
My grandfather's family was fairly well off before the depression. He told me that his father bought the first car in West Haven Connecticut. He said that it came in on the train, they had to assemble it right there and then they had to read the book to figure out to drive it.
He said that in 1927, there were still a lot of people in the area who hadn't ridden in a car before. My grandfather (now 20 years old) used to drive his father's 1925 Buick down to Savin Rock on the weekends. He would give people rides in the car for ten cents and it would pay for his gas.
Apparently, the Buick ads at the time said that the car had 75 horsepower and would go 75 miles per hour. One night, a guy leaned on the side of the car and bet my grandfather $20 that the car couldn't do 75. My grandfather and two of his friends had to pool their money to come up with twenty bucks. All four of them piled into the car and made two passes down the boulevard at 75 mph.
I'm pretty sure that he never drove that fast again.
I'm the only person in my immediate family that owns any cars remotely resembling cool, though my dad's late 80's 323 and mid 90's MPV probably biased me towards Mazda products for a while. At my family's old house, we stored my uncle's '68(?) Cutlass convertible for almost 15 years before we moved to our new home. My uncle took it back to CT when we moved and I haven't heard anything since. I had dreams of restoring it to driving condition, but it needed a ton of work and I didn't have the confidence to try and work on it when I was a kid.
All of them.
My family makes the car cool..
My dad had a 1953 2 door Mercury White over Green, 1963-1/2 Ford Galaxy 500 2 dr white with black interior 390 4 barrel, 3 on the tree and dual exhaust I thought it was the coolest car ever. He later had a 1971 VW Kharman Ghia (my wife and I had our first date in this car). My brother in law has redone several good ones: 1954 Ford F100 pickup, 1941 Chevy Coupe, 1969 Chevelle SS396, 1965 GTO, 1971 Challenger, and currently has a 1967 GTO 400-4spd and a 1971 Plymouth 'Cuda 360 - 4 spd car. I live vicariously through my brother-in-law.
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