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i learned to drive on my father's 1995 saturn sl (the exact make and color pictured in at the top of that article). it was a five speed manual transmission with no options. no automatic locks. no tape deck, never mind cd player. basically, it was an engine, a few places to sit and an fm radio.
and i loved to drive it. with 100 horses under the engine, it was hardly a performance vehicle. but it sat low to the ground, you could feel every detail of the road right through the steering wheel, and it made appreciative noises when downshifting into sharp country road corners at speed. that car saw me through a lot of ill-advised teenaged adventures including pcp-fueled bobcaygeon retreats and unplanned all-night drives to new hampshire to climb mount washington. i drove that car for about three years before i moved to the city. my sister eventually inherited it and it was still running fine when she sold it two years ago. --- living in downtown toronto i had no need for a vehicle and didn't figure i would own one for as long as i lived in the city. but about two years after moving out, i got a call from my younger sister (the same one who would later inherit the saturn), bemoaning the fact that our parents didn't let her use the car often enough. she had found a 4-speed manual transmission 1996 Suzuki Sidekick soft-top convertible for sale in the area for $800 and wanted to borrow money from me to buy it. instead, i bought the car and effectively gave it to her, leaving it parked at my parent's house and stipulating only that she pay the insurance and that she not complain when i wanted to use it for road trips. it was a beautiful car for tooling around at slow speeds on country roads with the top down in the summer. for just about anything else, it was a total piece of shit. it had a big warning sticker on the inside of the driver side door basically stating that if you tried to take any corner sharper than five degrees at anything faster than a swift jog, you would die in a fire and it wouldn't be suzuki's fault. at any speed above 85 km/hr the soft-top started to make snapping noises like it was going to abandon ship at any moment. and the whole car started to feel like it was going to fall apart if you pushed it above 130. it took a brave man to drive it on highway 401. incidentally, about a week after i bought it, the turn signals stopped working. so we just used hand signals out the driver side window. let me tell you, that's quite an adventure in canada in january. then one day, about eight months into my ownership of the car, i was on my way to my parent's house after some serious debauching in montreal and a thin line of visible smoke started coming out of the steering column. i pulled over to the side of the road and considered what to do. eventually, i decided to start it back up and see if i could get it home before the whole car went up in flames. not only did the smoke not reappear, but forever after the turn signals worked again. despite it's problems, i got a lot of use out of it while it lasted. but eventually the soft-top actually did get sick of the abuse and take to the skies. this happened while my sister's boyfriend was driving it at high speeds along a country road. in surprise, the kid veered off the road and flipped my poor little green jeep-a-be. amazingly, he walked away without a scratch. the car, on the other hand, was totalled. of course i didn't have collision insurance, only liability. so it was a write off. but that was a good two and a half years after i purchased it, so i could hardly say i didn't get my money's worth. --- and that was my entire car ownership history up until this past winter when i purchased a much abused 1995 honda civic (later named old salt) for $600. i hated that car. among other things, it was the only automatic transmission i've ever owned. still, it served it's purpose. i drove it cruelly for three months, including a well documented excursion to boston. and then it's engine seized. however thanks to the constant ricer-driven demand for honda civics, i was still able to turn a profit on it. my next car will be a klr 650.
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