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What was your first car...???

Messages
15,259
Location
Arlington, Virginia
A couple months later, I purchased a '71 Mustang with a 302. Nice car, but didn't have that one for long either.

I knew I liked you. :D

My first was a 1971 Mustang Mach 1. Bought it when I was 13, put in a new interior and got her road worthy by the time I got my learners permit. Still have it. Love that thing.
 

Stearmen

I'll Lock Up
Messages
7,202
Well, in this case it was not blunt force trauma. His skull and face were sliced open, as was his chest and gut, spilling his viscera over the pavement. Rather gruesome. There were in the accunts of children cycling suffering terrible injuries when running into the fins of those monstrosities. Cannot imagine why you defend those things. Don't even have running boards.
Still don't buy it! If you are knocked 30 feet in the air, you're skull is going to be cracked open, and your internal organs are going to be a mess. Find me some article from the 50s- 60s where it was happening all the time like Ralph Nader wrote about. Not one where the pedestrian is hit so hard that there was no possibility of survival.
 

Stanley Doble

Call Me a Cab
Messages
2,808
Location
Cobourg
Somehow Nader forgot to mention that the defects he unearthed came from General Motors' own files and that they had long been corrected before he wrote about them, including the Corvair, which got an all new independent rear suspension more than a year before his book came out. Yes GM gave him access to their engineering files, I doubt they knew what a hatchet job he had planned.

It always amused me that he got so indignant when GM investigated him, but he had no problem investigating them without telling them what he was up to.

Even funnier was his sympathy for the legal secretaries of California, who only made $120 for a 40 hour week. At the time he was paying his "Nader's Raiders" $50 a week for working all the hours God sent, while he took the credit for their work.
 
Messages
12,005
Location
Southern California
...Those cmapers are fetching crazy money over here nowadays. My brother fancied one, but ended up converting a much later T3 van owing to what even a later bay-window type goes for now in the UK.
They're fetching crazy money here in the U.S. as well. I'd love to own one (preferably a transporter), but as time passes and sales prices get higher the chances of that happening are rapidly diminishing.
 

kaiser

A-List Customer
Messages
402
Location
Germany, NRW, HSK
1965 Dodge Dart, slant 6 with an automatic transmission and bucket seats. Bought it in 1975 when I was 16, served me up through College.
 

Randy

Familiar Face
Messages
72
Location
Kentucky
They're fetching crazy money here in the U.S. as well. I'd love to own one (preferably a transporter), but as time passes and sales prices get higher the chances of that happening are rapidly diminishing.

Every time I take it out on the road at least one person at a stoplight asks if it's for sale. We camped in it as recently as two years ago, but it's difficult to deal with the damage that this high fructose corn syrup additive garbage does to my fuel lines and quality points, condensers, caps, and rotors are both hard to locate and expensive, so we don't camp in it any more, but man, I could count on at least a dozen chats with strangers each time we did.

- R

IMG_86591-300x225.jpg
 
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Stearmen

I'll Lock Up
Messages
7,202
Somehow Nader forgot to mention that the defects he unearthed came from General Motors' own files and that they had long been corrected before he wrote about them, including the Corvair, which got an all new independent rear suspension more than a year before his book came out. Yes GM gave him access to their engineering files, I doubt they knew what a hatchet job he had planned.

It always amused me that he got so indignant when GM investigated him, but he had no problem investigating them without telling them what he was up to.

Even funnier was his sympathy for the legal secretaries of California, who only made $120 for a 40 hour week. At the time he was paying his "Nader's Raiders" $50 a week for working all the hours God sent, while he took the credit for their work.

On a funny note Stanley, over breakfast this morning, with a bunch of car guys, a friend of mine told me he bought a Corvair Fleetside. I told him to be careful, they are dangerous at any speed, so it might just blow up in his garage!
 
Messages
12,005
Location
Southern California
Every time I take it out on the road at least one person at a stoplight asks if it's for sale...
Over the years I've owned three VW Beetles--the aforementioned '61, a '66, and a '63 in that order. They were my "daily driver" cars, and I lost track of the number of times someone asked if I was interested in selling whichever one I had at the time.
 

Dan Allen

A-List Customer
Messages
395
Location
Oklahoma
I met a man a couple of months ago who had a VW van with electronic ignition installed. He loved it, better performance and total reliability.
 

MikeKardec

One Too Many
Messages
1,157
Location
Los Angeles
Mine was a 1968 Mustang California Special, a promotional model initially just given to the Southern California Ford Dealers. From the doors back it had the Shelby fiberglass bits and some chrome badges reading "California Special." The rest of it was pretty stock, 289, automatic. I found it in an ad in the Recycler Newsletter for $1,700. When I went out to see it it was sitting in the back of an industrial building full of old cars and covered with dust. Even then I was a sucker for anything found in a dusty warehouse.

Over the years I restored it twice. The first time moderately for my own use doing a lot of the work myself, the second time, more extensively, so that my parents could give it to my sister. She eventually gave it back to my mother who parked it in, guess what, a dusty industrial building on her ranch in Colorado. After a few years she gave it back to me and I was going to bring it back to full health but didn't have the money or a place to store it. She kept pestering me about it so I said, "just sell it." She sold it to a local kid who had a great time with it but ended up in a horrible snowmobile wreck. I saw it about three years ago ... it was sitting in the back of his dad's industrial building covered with dust. I couldn't talk them into selling it back to me, however. All in all I think my family owned that car for about 25 years.

I had other Mustangs after my sis started driving that one. I'd love to have another because I've gotten to the point where I know a heck of a lot about fix them up and how to make them perform their best. I've just never applied it all to one car.
 

2jakes

I'll Lock Up
Messages
9,680
Location
Alamo Heights ☀️ Texas
Over the years I've owned three VW Beetles--the aforementioned '61, a '66, and a '63 in that order. They were my "daily driver" cars, and I lost track of the number of times someone asked if I was interested in selling whichever one I had at the time.

I had a sign made for my ’63 beetle.

“Not For Sale”.

It worked just the opposite,

now I had more people asking about buying it . :eusa_doh:
 
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Stearmen

I'll Lock Up
Messages
7,202
Mine was a 1968 Mustang California Special, a promotional model initially just given to the Southern California Ford Dealers. From the doors back it had the Shelby fiberglass bits and some chrome badges reading "California Special." The rest of it was pretty stock, 289, automatic. I found it in an ad in the Recycler Newsletter for $1,700. When I went out to see it it was sitting in the back of an industrial building full of old cars and covered with dust. Even then I was a sucker for anything found in a dusty warehouse.

Over the years I restored it twice. The first time moderately for my own use doing a lot of the work myself, the second time, more extensively, so that my parents could give it to my sister. She eventually gave it back to my mother who parked it in, guess what, a dusty industrial building on her ranch in Colorado. After a few years she gave it back to me and I was going to bring it back to full health but didn't have the money or a place to store it. She kept pestering me about it so I said, "just sell it." She sold it to a local kid who had a great time with it but ended up in a horrible snowmobile wreck. I saw it about three years ago ... it was sitting in the back of his dad's industrial building covered with dust. I couldn't talk them into selling it back to me, however. All in all I think my family owned that car for about 25 years.

I had other Mustangs after my sis started driving that one. I'd love to have another because I've gotten to the point where I know a heck of a lot about fix them up and how to make them perform their best. I've just never applied it all to one car.

251 of those cars were rebadged High Country Special, and sent to Denver. I missed out on buying one by just an hour!
 

Stearmen

I'll Lock Up
Messages
7,202
While I did not buy a car until I was 21, I did get to drive my Aunts 65 HiPo Mustang the summer I graduated from high school. I had a blast! A year later, she offered it to me for the princely sum of $500. I turned it down, because it would have cost $50 to overhaul the automatic transmission!:eusa_doh:
 
Messages
12,005
Location
Southern California
While I did not buy a car until I was 21, I did get to drive my Aunts 65 HiPo Mustang the summer I graduated from high school. I had a blast! A year later, she offered it to me for the princely sum of $500. I turned it down, because it would have cost $50 to overhaul the automatic transmission!:eusa_doh:
About a week after I brought home my aforementioned '61 VW Beetle one of our next door neighbor's daughters came over to take a look at it. During our conversation she very casually said, "I wish I'd known you were looking for a car. I would have sold you mine." Her car at the time was a 1968 Ford Mustang Fastback with just over 40,000 miles on it (this was in 1977, so it was about nine years old), and she's a rather meticulous person so it was well maintained and looked like it had just rolled out of the showroom at the local dealership. The kicker is that she only wanted $2,000 for it. :Cry: :frusty:
 
Messages
17,190
Location
New York City
I had a sign made for my ’63 beetle.

“Not For Sale”.

It worked just the opposite,

now I had more people asking about buying it . :eusa_doh:

While you were sincere in posting your sign, a very time-tested and successful sales tactic is to get a potential customer to believe something they might want is (1) no longer available, (2) was just sold to someone else, (3) is just about to be sold to someone else, (4) was never intended to be for sale. All variations on a theme (and there are more), but I have repeatedly seen people who were only marginally interested in something become passionate about wanting to buy it when some version of the above happened.

Something in human nature makes people want something more - something they might not even have wanted if it was readily available - if they think they can't have it or might loose the opportunity if they don't act quickly. Again, I know you weren't being tricky, but you accidentally stumbled into a very motivating sales technique.
 

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