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McKnife wrote:1989 Oldsmobile Delta 88. This was technically my first car, but I had to share it with my older brother. It had a 3800 Series I V6. It looks like a grandma car, but it ran side by side with my friends' 5.0 Mustangs and 350Zs.

It also had an all-digital dashboard. Everyone thought it was the coolest thing. Every time you start the car, it would say, "Good Day (night, morning), Mr. McKnife."



The picture is not mine, but looks similar. Ain't she a beauty?

My dad's company car - the one he drove instead of the Nissan truck he grounded me from - was a 1989 Buick LeSabre (same car as the Delta 88). Had that same 3800 V6. That is hands down the best engine of any car I've ever driven. Plenty of power (admiting to a crime here, but I once dropped the needle on the speedometer and got it up to approximately 125 on I-10 when I was a young dumb 18 year old). But the amazing part is that when he finally got rid of that car years later, after my brother drove it into the ground, the transmission was shot, none of the electronics had worked for years (no ac, no power windows, no power door locks, no radio) but that engine had well over 300,000 miles on it and still purred like a kitten. My dad told me the local mechanic gave him a few hundred dollars for the engine. Said he would scrap the car and put the engine into an old Oldsmobile he had in back of the shop.

When I turned 16, I was allowed to "borrow" my dad's little Japanese pickup (first a Nissan, then an Isuzu). He had a company car at the time that he drove most days. Of course, his real reason for allowing me to "borrow" the truck was so he could use it as punishment when I got into trouble. My junior and senior years of high school I think I was "grounded" from the truck more than I was allowed to drive it. He even put "The Club" (remember those?) on the steering wheel and took the key with him so I couldn't take the truck out when he wasn't home. It wasn't until years later that I saw the 60 Minutes episode where a convicted car thief showed how The Club only slowed him down by a few seconds when stealing a car (he cut through the steering wheel with a hacksaw - not the lock - GENIOUS!)



So my real first car - title in my name and everything, was a 1984 Mazda Sundowner pickup that I bought from my grandpa. It had EVERYTHING 5-speed stick, turquoise blue vinyl interior, cassette tape deck that I quickly swapped out with a $400 Blaupunkt CD player (almost as much as I paid for the truck), and most importantly of all - a white metal bolted in tool box (rusted just right to match the rusted white body paint) and matching rusted white HEADACHE RACK behind the rear window. It was grandpa's old farm truck. Best part was the 75-horsepower 4-banger that could get that little two-seater all the way up to a frighteningly fast 77 miles per hour on I-35 - the trick was to run through the first three gears to accelerate onto the entrance ramp, then put the pedal on the floor as you shift into fourth gear ... keep it in 4th, pedal mashed into the floorboard for a few minutes (literally) while it eeked its way from about 40 mph up into the high 60s (with the tac well over 5000 rpm), then wait for a downslope on the other side of rise and shift into 5th with the pedal still mashed to the floor. If you were lucky and the interstate leveled out for a few miles and you did this just right, within a few more minutes you were in the mid 70s. At 77 mph the whole contraption was shaking like a washing machine on spin with an uneven load distribution. Total time to hit 77 mph when leaving the Belton/Temple area for the Cedar Park area - about 10 minutes, or roughly 1/4 of the entire trip.



Anyway, here's a photo of a truck that looks very similar to mine (just without the super cool rusty tool box and headache rack).