You guys have had some nice rides!
Below is my history, the good, the bad, and the UGLY! I wasn’t always glamourous you know 
Here is the honest truth.
I learned to drive on a 1991 Mitsubishi Diamante. I loved that car. The cool thing was I was turning 16 when my Mom bought it, so I knew I would be learning to drive on that car. She wanted a Lexus 300 ES, but I persuaded her to get the Diamante because it had the Mitsubishi 3000GT’s v6 in it! Thought i didn’t tell her that. It also had a killer stereo in it, where you would tell it how many people where in the car and it would adjust the sweet spot of the speakers. It also had an aux line into the stereo so I could connect my Discman. It was pretty pimp on a date… even though it was an automatic transmission. I also loved the knock off BMW 5 series look to the front end at the time. Ours was white with the same LS trim as above.
It went decidedly down hill from there! In college I bought my grandfather’s 1989 Buick Somerset Regal for $1 (it was one dollar, and in good shape). Check out this beauty. Mine was the same, but a grey interior. Digital instrument panel. Super odd center stack, nearly vertical rear window, and probably one of the ugliest front end’s ever! It was a total POS, but something about it was fun to throw around the road. The radio ate a cassette and would not eject it, even after removing the front of the radio and fiddling around, so I kept a giant ghetto blaster in the car. Problem solved… I hated that thing! It is so god awful, that it is kind of awesome.
I wish I could say it got better… maybe it did, but not by much. For some reason after the sweet Diamante my Mom bought a 1996 Pontiac Sunfire. Black just like this one. I think she thought it was little and cute. After a couple of years she was done to it and she gave it to me… and it needed constant fixing. I remember once I pushed the door unlock button and the switch pushed right into the door and fell to the bottom. As much as I hated it, it was pretty good for a 90’s GM. The sculpting was decent, and at least GM remembered how to make curved glass at that point. It was black with a 5 speed… I had to take the entire door panel a part to fix it! I kept it for about 3 years and then…
I got married in the year 2000. My wife and I both liked cars and we wanted to buy one together to replace my Sunfire. We had a pretty limited budget, I set the cap at 25k all in. Kristina really wanted a new car because she didn’t want me getting stuck on my commute of about 30 miles, in the New England winter… we lived in Connecticut at the time. We test drove a New Beetle, a Mazda Protege 5, a Toyota Celica, a Ford Focus, a Mercury Cougar… and a the Toyota MR-2 which had just come out. Tiny, rear engined, rear wheel drive, with barely enough storage space for a laptop bag. After a few days of haggling with dealers, I was able to get the price knocked down from 25k not including the taxed to 22k all in (it was the middle of January in New England, I told the guy, hey you can sit on this thing for 3-4 months and maybe get your full 25k, or sell it to me now!)… it was horrible in the snow, really non functional, but we loved that car and loved that our first ride was so impractical. Ours was just like this one. we bought it in erly January, snow was on the ground, but we drove home with the top down!
The MR-2 was great, but man was it small. We couldn’t really take it on road trips because Kristina would end up having to have a duffle bag on her lap. It was great on the back roads, but it was so light that on the highway it felt like driving a go cart. This got bad once we moved to Oregon where the big highways have tractor trailer ruts. I also liked to turn in pretty hard and lost the back end a couple of times… I like to have fun when I drive… It would get a little funny above 80MPH and of course I insisted on going 90-100, at least sometimes, when I thought I could get away with it… it also seemed to have zero sound insulation. but it was fun to hear the motor behind you. It had a horrible radio, but I never used it much anyway.
Back in 1998, Kristina and I went to the New York auto show. The Audi TT concept car was on display then. I remember Kristina just loving the spider. I told her that car would never come out because it was way to designery and simple. She told me that she thought it would go to production, and that we would own it. As usual, she was right on both counts. We wanted something with a little more room than the MR2, and a little more civility. I was done with pretending to be a boy racer.
I had kept my eye on cars.com for a used TT, and in 2005 I spotted a 2001 spider, dark grey with the baseball glove interior, just like the concept car. Even better it had low miles and Quattro with the HO turbo motor, which was a rare set up on the original spider. I went over on lunch and test drove it, then started haggling. We went back and forth for about 2-3 weeks, and I surprised Kristina by pulling into the dealership on a Saturday. I showed her the car, and said that if she drove it and liked it, it was ours… we left that day with the car.
These are some shots of it in our driveway when we lived in Oregon. There are so many nice details to this thing. The way the seat heater switches pop out and turn, the way the HVAC looks analog but it digital, the solid chunks of aluminum that are the radio cover, shift gate bezel, steering wheel trim, glove box door handle, and air vent bezels… it feels like it was made for me. I just wish I didn’t have such a wondering eye. I could easily own 5-6 cars all used under 30g’s each.
Surprisingly capable on moderately nasty dirt roads:
