My first new car was a 1993 Chevy Lumina that my brother always called an old man car.
I traded that for a 1994 Chevy Cavalier convertible (also new).
I then went used for quite some time until last year when I got a 2012 Ford Fiesta which I still have.
I forgot one. I also had a 2006 Chevy Cobalt SS that I bought new.
Mine was a 2008 Hyundai Accent, bare bones model (I had to pay extra to have a radio put in), manual transmission which the salesman had to teach me how to drive. I was madly in love with it. A month after I bought it my then-boyfriend hit a patch of ice and then a guardrail and damaged the driver’s side door. Five months after that I drove 55mph into the side of a very big pickup truck*. That was the end of my first and only brand new car.
I don’t think I’ll ever buy a new car again.
It was a 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle, orange in color (my favorite color, rare on cars). At the time I was working as a process server and driving a lot, all over Los Angeles County. About a month or two after buying the car I got a postcard from the dealer reminding me that it was time for a 500-mile checkup. I looked at the odometer which showed I already had over 5,000 miles on the car.
I think I put about 60,000 miles a year on the car, and took it on the longest vacation I ever took; from LA back to Chicago. A great car.
First brand new car was a 1983 Chevy Cavalier. A plain little car, but incredibly awesome because it actually worked.
Sounds like a strange comment, but my dad had got for me a beater when I learned to drive; the car he picked up ‘from a buddy’ was only four or five years old but had 150,000 miles on the clock. That car was worn out – you didn’t park it, it just kind of stopped, sighed, and sagged next to the curb. Nothing on it worked anymore; I used to dread rainy days because the windshield wipers didn’t work. It would stall constantly, always fun when I had to pull out of our driveway directly onto a very busy highway, and I could do only 10-15 miles an hour for the first few minutes (even after warming it up.) As a newly minted, teenaged driver, it used to scare the shit out of me driving that thing – I’d end up on the hard shoulder noodling along trying to get up to speed before one of the tractor-trailers flying by flattened me.
The Cavalier lasted me a long time, but I had had an accident; again my dad refused to let me/insurance get it repaired because he ‘knew a guy’. Six months later it was back, and unknown to me, the guy had done a lousy job. Over time, the structure weakened and allowed small enough cracks in the seals to let water in; eventually I was replacing various electric bits so often and constantly having to clear out all of the mould and mildew that I had to get another car.
Being an adult at the point in time, I bought a new Mini Cooper (2003). I loved that little car, and took care of it until I had to move to the UK and couldn’t bring it with me. I bought a second hand Mini over here but had to get rid of it as it was all kind of fucked up in its electrics due to water damage – led to a magical moment on the M3 when the transmission sensor light shorted out and told the engine that the tranny had ceased to work. I do so enjoy going from 70 to 0mph in morning rush hour traffic with no available hard shoulder. Had it towed straight to a Mini dealer, sold it for scrap, and bought a nearly new one off the lot.
So now I’ve got a 2009 but it might as well be new as it’s a single previous owner and extremely low mileage; still has the new-car smell in it.
My wife’s and my first new car was a 2000 Accord, which we bought on 1/21/2000. (Before that, we’d only been able to afford to buy used.) It currently has >211,000 miles on it. And it just keeps on truckin’. My wife now has a newer Accord, a 2009, so the 2000 is all mine. I absolutely love that car.
This is pretty much exactly my parents’ “first new car” story. That 86 Dodge Omni was a big part of my childhood. Every time I see one (which isn’t often) I get nostalgic, and I can’t believe how small that car actually was! It was a lot bigger when I was 5.
I’m 46 years old, and I have never bought a new car. Over the years, most of our vehicles were at least seven years old at the time of purchase. And purchased with cash. My current daily driver is a 2000 Saturn.
This strategy has saved me a lot of money over the years.
1965 Volkswagen with a sunroof and AM/FM radio. No A/C. $2060 including tax and license.
I loved that car until the engine blew at 60K miles. So much for VW reliability.
1989 Mazda 323. I sprung a little more for the SE trim line (a little nicer interior) but aside from that not a lot of extras. In fact, the dealership I started at refused to sell me one without the $400 stereo option, and I was hell bent on not paying $400 for something that I could get at Circuit City for half of that. After haggling with them for a couple of hours about it, I finally left and went down the road to a neighboring town 30 miles away where the next nearest dealership was, told them exactly what I wanted and that I’d just left another dealership that didn’t want to work with me. They didn’t have it in stock, but they told me they could get one in a couple of days. I negotiated a good price on it (I want to say something like $8700, but that’s a pretty foggy memory) and did some paperwork and came back a couple of days later to get my new ride. Life was good.
I drove that car for 17 years with only routine maintenance. It was still perfectly driveable when I finally needed to get something bigger with four doors, but it had minimal trade-in value so I opted to donate it to one of those cars for causes places.
First new car was a 94 Ford Ranger extended cab, canary yellow. It was parked on the corner at the dealership I drove by daily to get to work, and I just kept looking at it admiringly every day. I thought it was the cutest thing I’d ever seen, but was afraid to commit to a payment plan so I just kept driving by day after day. Then one day I finally stopped and looked at it, telling myself it probably didn’t have the features I wanted anyway, but it did.
I remember waiting a good ten or fifteen minutes standing in the showroom before anyone bothered greeting me, vastly different than the pushy sales techniques everyone had warned me about. I guess I looked too young to be a serious customer or something. The one guy that finally asked if I needed something had the easiest sale of his career.
The entire family laughed at the size of the Ranger, calling it a toy truck and predicting I’d regret buying it. But I adored that truck, that V-6 really jumped when you asked it to and the mileage and handling were much better than a full sized pickup would have been.
The first winter was adventurous until I learned how to properly weight the back end, never a problem after that. It was my daily driver for 9 years until my family got too big for it, then it became my husbands work ride. It was another six years before it started having some mechanical problems we had no idea how to fix so we gave it to a friend who liked to tinker. He worked on it and sold it a few months later and we still see it being driven around town sometimes, 19 years later.
Early 1969, 18 years old, working full-time and living with parents, bought myself a brand new '68 Camaro. Dark forest green. It was a great car, and fast.
I was very immature and irresponsible (even for an 18 year old male), and a very careless driver (lots of speeding tickets and numerous fender benders), so it was good that the large payments and astronomical insurance rates led me to sell the car after six months.
[quote=“Siam_Sam, post:15, topic:674988”]
Fondly remembering the Camaro I mentioned above, I chose a '72 Vega to be the second brand new car I ever bought. The difference in quality control was shocking. Absolutely positively the worst car-shaped object I’ve ever driven. It developed all of the catastrophic problems for which the Vegas became infamous, and as God is my witness, you could hear that car rusting.
Bought it brand new in '72, sold it three years later for $200 which was the only offer I got; I was actually prepared to pay someone to haul it away. What I should have done was tow it to the beach, douse it with gasoline, set it on fire and dance naked around it until sunrise.
First brand new car was a Plymouth Horizon 4 door. It was a 1978 but my parents bought it for me in 1979 when I graduated high school. I think the sticker price was around $3800 but because it was the previous years model I know they paid a lot less for it.
It was bright orange and had an auto tranny on the floor. No cruise, remote, electric windows. It had air and an am radio. I had that car until I got hit by a truck driver who feel asleep and totaled it in 1985.
The first brand new car that I bought myself was a 1986 Ford Tempo. Black, 5 speed stick, air, cruise, am/fm cassette. Manual windows though. I put 190K on that car and then sold it to a guy in 1996 who put about 20k on it. Brakes and a clutch were only major repairs I ever had to do.
If you count leases my wife and I have had over 30 brand new cars over the past 35 years. But some of those were meager 2 year leases.
I waited until I was 33 to get my first NEW car…also my first-ever car with more than 2 doors: a 2013 Subaru WRX hatchback. I needed a real back seat with back doors for loading and unloading my son, so it was time to make the move. The WRX is turbocharged, all-wheel drive, manual transmission only, 265hp. I came from an older BMW M3 that had nearly as much power, but was rear-wheel drive.
The difference in grip is pretty astounding…this thing can corner hard AND put down loads of power (like on an on-ramp) like nothing else. I have owned a turbocharged AWD car in the past (a first-gen Eagle Talon, sister to the Mitsubishi Eclipse) which was fairly modified…that car was faster with the boost cranked up, but it wasn’t quite the total package that the WRX is.
Since all my previous cars have been probably 10 years old and 90,000 miles on them by the time I got ahold of them, having a NEW car was pretty crazy. It still only has about 6500 miles on it, so I still baby it. Started modifying it already, it had a new exhaust on before its first oil change, and there is more in the works to increase the power and improve the looks here and there. Fun car to drive and to tinker with, and given that I live less than 2 miles from work, I should be able to drive it for a long time to come.
Bought my first brand new car in 2008- a blue Toyota Yaris hatchback with the 5 speed manual and electric windows. Have only replaced the tires, a battery, and one axle seal in 90,000+ miles.
Second new vehicle- 2009 Ford Ranger XLT 5 speed, 2.3L four cylinder. Has about 22K miles on it.
Third new vehicle (acquired Nov. 21)- 2013 Hyundai Elantra GT 6 speed with all available options (except a stupid automatic transmission). Much nicer seats and driving comfort than the Yaris. Currently has 2300+ miles on it (it came with 23 miles on the odometer).
These are after having 17 different used cars in the past.
1979 Camaro Z28. Drove it for 17 years then put it in the garage. In August, loaded it on a car hauler, took it KC, MO and gave it to my nephew. He was born in 1979 and always wanted that car.
No idea how many miles were really on it, the odometer cable kept breaking? I think it showed around 160,000.
Just over $1,000 of the difference (7%) was sales tax and the remainder was interest on the 5-year loan.
It always pissed me off that my father dictated what car my mom had to get, even though her parents were the ones paying for them! She had a '73 Olds Cutlass Supreme, then a '77 Cutlass Supreme (both slightly used). Her first new car was a 1986 Cutlass Supreme (surprise!) even though she really wanted a sporty new Honda Accord! My jerk of a father insisted on yet another Oldsmobile (with nasty-looking burgundy velour interior, too).
I remember the day that we went by her attorney’s office to pick up her divorce settlement check. We went that afternoon and bought her a new '95 Jeep Grand Cherokee! It was the first car she ever totally picked out on her own and it was by far the most expensive ($27k). But she drove it for 11 years then my step-dad got another five years out of it. I sold it for them in 2011 with 218k miles on it for $3,000.
My first new car was a 1959 Renault Dauphine. This automobile regularly makes the top 10 lists of the worst automobiles ever made. Mine was absolutely the worst car I’ve ever owned although the 1979 Honda Accord might be its equal. I owned one of those, too.