Dad worked for GM so he always bought GM products, but usually used. He could fix little problems with cars (he was a former shop owner) and American cars’ value sank like rocks so cars a few years old were dirt cheap. He’d keep them a little while and trade them, generally losing only a few hundred dollars for a year or two of ownership.
The family cars were usually mid-size sedans (Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, Chevy Lumina). mid-size coupes (Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme), or the odd compact (Cadillac Cimarron, Chevy Citation, Chevy Chevette). Once, he had a Cadillac Eldorado. The leather seats seemed fancy but they weren’t that comfortable in the heat and the car itself was terrible.
Eventually, he started buying new cars that he kept for a while. He settled on a Pontiac Grand Prix coupe replaced after eight or ten years with…a newer style Pontiac Grand Prix. During the new car phase, my mom went through a succession of nearly indistinguishable Pontiac Grand Ams, all with automatics and 6-cylinder engines. I think she had four in seven years. One went to my sister (who had also inherited my Dad’s long-serving Grand Prix), one was traded because it didn’t have traction control, and one was traded for no earthly reason on a car that was essentially identical. My dad must have gotten a very good deal from a dealer that wanted to move some iron at the end of the month.
I knew our family (and only) car when I was a kid was a Ford station wagon, but I wasn’t sure which year it was. Googling indicates it was a 1955. Forest Green. My dad kept cars a longish time, and my mom didn’t drive, so it was the car for most of my childhood.
Next was a Plymouth Valiant with the pushbutton transmission. I inherited that one.
Ha! We had a Ford station wagon, too. I can’t be sure of the year, but when I look at images I google up, the 1958 model looks most like what I remember. It was brown and white. I climbed up on one of the fins once to balance-walk on it, and fell off and conked my head good on the asphalt driveway.
Then we went to a Volkswagen camping van, in which we toured the American southwest. Four people camping in that van. Oy.
Then we progressed to a harvest gold Chevy station wagon in the early 70s. Google images shows we must have bought a used 1968-ish model.
There’s more than one definition, but if you define these classifications by interior volume, the switch to front wheel drive in the 1980s really made a big difference. That allowed for much more efficient use of space and enabled automakers to design cars that were just as roomy on the inside but with smaller external dimensions. Those old rear wheel drive cars seemed big on the outside, but had less space on the inside than you’d think.
Man, I remember the crazy stuff* I did in the family station wagon, a big ol’ '69 Chevy with fake wood on the sides.
I had more fun in that behemoth than in any sports car, just because I was young and reckless and less concerned about consequences.
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*Like picking a friend up at midnight Saturday night, when he had the closing shift at McDonald’s. He’d be toting three garbage bags full of piping hot “surplus food” (that the employees would cook up at 11:50… “Oh, too bad, we have to throw all this good food out.”)
The crazy part was that we had three station wagons with six or seven kids apiece, and we’d be speeding on the freeway, almost touching car door handles, as we passed Big Macs and cherry pies back and forth. (“Hey, we got pies, who’s got fries?”)
Continuing the bad car name hijack, I always though the Ford Aspire was a terrible name. What, was the car aspiring to be a better car someday? Because it certainly wasn’t a car anyone aspired to own.
A ‘65 Falcon is the first family car I remember, and even to a kid it didn’t seem very big. Of course, our neighbor had a station wagon, so i’m sure that seemed massive in comparison.
Eventually we did move on to our own’s station wagon, a Chevy with backward-facing seats, which as far as I am concerned is still the greatest invention in the history of cars.
The hosts of the NPR show “Car Talk” once made this very point - almost word for word with your first two sentences. Great minds think alike…
They also had concerns with the Buick Limited, then had to explain how it was carried over from “Limited” trains.
On the other hand, think of the name Taurus. Very little to recommend it, especially the AU diphthong. But the car’s styling and features were so far in advance of the competition that the name didn’t matter.
I’m surprised that someone didn’t immediately bring up that old canard about the Chevrolet Nova.
In 1958, my father bought a used 1953 Ford. It survived two trips halfway across North America and many other shorter ones, until we got a brand new 1964 Rambler Classic 550, and then a 1968 Rambler.
All the cars were black, since it was the easiest color to match for touch-ups, etc.
We had a station wagon twice, and in between we had a regular large car, and then my Mum had her own little pootling about car too. There were two parents and four kids, and briefly a dog, so we needed a goodly amount of space.
The car names I like are the classic Cadillac ones (Fleetwood, El Dorado, Seville, DeVille). Or DeSoto (Chrysler). Also, various Chevrolet names: Impala, Chevelle, Malibu. Not the least of which are all the names associated with the various models of my favorite car, the Chevrolet El Camino/GMC Sprint and Caballero (El Camino, Caballero, Black/Royal Knight, Conquista, High Sierra, Diablo, etc.) As for names I don’t like? Hmmm…I’m mostly indifferent to many of them, but there is one that I feel was so bad that the maker was absolutely shooting itself in the foot by using it.
EDSEL.
For those who don’t know, the Edsel was a separate line of cars produced by Ford for the 1958, 1959 and 1960 model years. It was very hyped up as a great new car, but ended up being a commercial failure. The name Edsel was actually Henry ford’s son’s name (he had apparently been named after a friend of Ford’s) and IMHO that was already a horrible name to bestow on two kids. Although the son of Edsel Ford objected to his father’s name being put on hubcaps that would be rolling all across the land, after an agency tasked to find a name for the line came up with an absurdly long list of suggestions, they settled “Edsel”. The car was a major flop for several reasons, one of which must have been that, besides the ugly name, the car itself was ugly as sin.
