What Happened To Your First Car?
Photo: Alexander Migl, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Ah, your first car. Do you still remember how it felt the first time you sat in your own car, two hands on the wheel and an endless world of possibility ahead of you? Or did you, like me, never give your car the respect it deserved?
Whether you loved it or not, chances are you don’t still own the first vehicle ever to bear your name on the title. Today, we want to know what happened to it once you passed it on. Was it sold to another freshly-licensed teen, continuing the cycle, or did it end up wrecked at a salvage yard like my poor old Lexus? Do you still see it around your city, or has it long since shuffled off this mortal ignition coil?
Image: IAAI
While my first car may have been the Lexus, that was still a family car — designated for my use, but not legally mine. The first car recognized in DMV paperwork as Belonging To Steve DaSilva was this: A 2005 Subaru Legacy GT wagon, one of only 1,670 shipped to the U.S. with a manual transmission. It had all the power of a WRX, if not more (no one could quite figure out how its paltry mod list made the sort of power that car had, though the best guess involved an off-the-shelf tune from Greece), without any of the vape-bro connotations that came with a Subaru bearing a three-letter badge. Until I sold it, that is.
I sold the Legacy after spending a downright stupid amount of money on maintenance, to get myself into a newer chassis with fewer rotted-out bushings. I saw the car twice more, still prowling the streets of Rochester, each time with more cosmetic modifications that I would never have done. Then, years later, I tried searching the VIN and found its true end — a front-end collision had totaled the car, just two and a half years after I sold it.
That’s what happened to my first cars, but what happened to yours? Tell us your stories in the comments, all the cars you loved or loathed but gave up all the same, and we’ll collect our favorites tomorrow afternoon.
