Would you ride in a car with this man?

Cars I Have Known
The oldest car I remember my parents having was an AMC Gremlin. My memory of it is a static image that's rather vague and likely inaccurate. It was sitting on the grass between my parents' driveway and the driveway of their uphill neighbors, parked facing the street (which seems like a very odd place for it to be). I also have some slight memory which I may have completely made up of the faux-denim and copper rivet interior. Most of what I know about the car (which isn't much) I learned second-hand from my parents. The two things they told me was that the Levis interior package was a bad idea, because those copper rivets get really hot when the car has been sitting in the sun, and the doors used to fall off (heavy doors with with a center of gravity too far away from the hinge). The car was eventually replaced with my parents' Chevy Cavalier, which was later my Cavalier (which I will talk about some other time).

The next oldest car, which my parents had at the same time as the Gremlin, was a Chevrolet Citation. It was a brown (or at least a dark tan) 4-door hatchback. For daily purposes it was my dad's car and had a trailer hitch on it, for towing the sailboat trailer. Near the end of it's time with us, bubbles started forming in the headliner where it separated from the roof, which became a more advanced problem in the Cavalier. (Apparently this was a common problem for GM cars of that era.) After we sold it, we occasionally saw a car around town that we were sure was the same vehicle.

The Citation was replaced with a blue Plymouth Voyager minivan. When my parents were buying it, one of the last questions they were asked was what brand they wanted, which didn't really matter all that much since the thing was covered in pentastars anyway. This took over the trailering duties of the Citation, as well as the road-trip duties of the Cavalier, with my dad the one using it as a daily driver. The van provided two bench seats which allowed both my brother and I to lie down on long trips. In addition to trips to the grandparents, the van also took us to Washington, DC and Orlando, FL. But, the van also had cheap plastic latches on the bins in the rear passenger area, the paint started peeling off right about when the warranty expired, and in general it didn't really age well. The van was also the second car I ever drove, after some random car belonging to the driver's ed school. I never really liked driving the van, it was big, the driving position was too high, and it really caught crosswinds. but it had the easiest clutch of the three cars we had at the time, so it was assigned to the task of teaching me a manual transmission.

Eventually the Cavalier was relegated to the kids' use (my brother and I), and my parents got a Saturn SL-1 for my mom to use. Since there was no Saturn dealer in Rochester, my parents drove up to the Twin Cities to buy it. (The local Chevrolet dealership was able to perform most of the scheduled maintenence until a Saturn dealership moved to town, though.) The Saturn's a good car, seats adults in the backseat comfortably (while still keeping a low profile), plenty of room in the trunk (the seats even fold down), and I don't think we've had any reliability problems with it. Plus, it has excellent fuel economy. When I started looking for a new car, I figured there'd be plenty of cars that got 40+ highway, since the Saturn was getting that back in '97, but it turns out not many. In fact, the only car that beats it without cheating (by using a diesel or hybrid) is the Toyota Corolla, although I believe several cars get better average fuel economy by improving the city mpg. It's ten years old now, and other cars around that age would probably be getting close to replacement time, but the Saturn's paint job isn't flaking (or rusting) off, and the headliner hasn't started falling down, so it can probably go on a while longer. Plus, to my mind there isn't anything out that really replaces it.

Eventually, not too long before I went off to college, my parents decided to replace the van with a new van. Two things happened between the purchase of the first van and the second one: minivans got bigger, and manual transmission minivans completely disappeared. My parents knew some people who bought a Honda Odyssey, and they were rather impressed with it. Eventually, they decided to order one, although it took several months for the backlog to clear out enough to get to their order (and by that time they ended up getting the next model year). Despite our misgivings about the minivans of the era, the Odyssey was very well put together, especially compared to the old Voyager, and I handled the lack of clutch by simply driving it as little as I could get away with. Plus, it had sliding doors on both sides, and the fold-away rear seat came in very handy when moving all of my junk to and from the dorm. I don't recall for certain, but I think it can hold a full-size sheet of plywood flat on the floor, too.

When my brother and I were away at college, my grandmother bought herself a new PT Cruiser, and she needed to do something with her Cavalier. (In fact, it's the same Cavalier that's pictured on that page under "Second Generation".) Since both my brother and I were living in the Cities (and my parents thought it was too dangerous to drive our Cavalier around the Cities), it moved to the street next to my brother's apartment and my brother mostly used it. I occasionally took it when I needed to get somewhere I couldn't easily get with the bus. This Cavalier was 5 years newer than our other one, and it had never been parked out on the driveway under the birch tree for years, or had two new drivers wear out its clutch, and was pretty much the stereotypical car that was only driven to the grocery store and the church. Other key differences: it was an automatic, it had the power package (locks and windows), and the A/C worked. My brother kept it until rather recently, when he finally got his new VW Jetta TDI.

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