QotD: My First Car

What was your first car?

My first car was a 1980 Datsun-210 (back before we called them Nissans here…)

Datsun 210

This picture is a reasonable representation, except mine was a four-door.    Oh, and I didn’t have any hubcaps (back before we called them wheel covers…).  And the paint didn’t look that good – there were some serious rust spots.  The suspension wasn’t nearly as  good as the one in this picture, either.  And don’t forget the rusted out floor panel (back before we called them safety hazards...) beneath the passenger’s feet – yeah, don’t step down too hard.

I bought that car during my junior year of college so that I could drive back and forth to my internship at DuPont.  I kept it all the way through graduate school.  It couldn’t really go over 70 mph (it would literally start to shake), and didn’t have air conditioning.  It would also tend to overheat in the summer – for which the solution was to run with the HEAT on (it would dissipate the heat from the engine).

Despite its “eccentricities”, I loved that car.  I bought it with 56,000 miles on it, and turned it in eight years later with 186,000.