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What were your impressions, as a child, when your family bought a new car?
I think my dad was one of the last people in town to buy a post-war car after WWII. I grew up in our 1938 Pontiac, and nearly every kid had a new car before I did. Finally, when I was 13, he traded for a '48 Dodge, which was three years old at the time. There wasn't a "new" car off the showroom floor until I was old enough to drive, a '55 Dodge.
I know he was very proud of his new cars, and I was pretty much of a car buff in those days, but I can't recall the new cars really making all that much of an impression on me. There was a huge difference between the '38 and the '48, but by then I was pretty used to riding in other people's newer cars. By the time I was 16, the idea of a "new car" no longer hald the fascination it might have had at an earlier age.
My dad worked for the US Government and they furnished him a car. The family car was always the cheapest car Chevrolet made and he didn't take care of it, sometimes hauling a bale of hay in the backseat.
I grew up in NYC and my family never had a car although I was fascinated with cars and driving since a very early age. I would beg my mom to take me to the video arcade just so that I can play the driving games and always chose manual rather than automatic so that I can get the feel of changing gears myself.
Bought my first car at the age of 18. It was a 1987 Mazda rx-7 with a 5 speed manual transmission. I knew the concept of driving manual but never applied it to an actual car. I had the previous owner back it up out of his garage for me and off I went. Had the car jumping and jerking all the way home but I got it home! .
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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Despite having a good job, my parents never bought a new car, they always bought used, mostly because they had so many kids (9 in all). None of us (including my mother) ever went with my father to buy a car, he always did it by himself. The first car I remember as a kid was a 1948 DeSoto, then a 1952 Imperial. When there were 5 kids he bought a 1957 Chrysler wagon, which he still had when I started driving and got my own first car. When in college I bought my first new car, a 1972, my father had still never had a new one, he was driving a 1964 Chrysler Wagon.
As a kid, the closest to a brand new car my parents got was a program (sales manager drove) 1984 Dodge Diplomat fully loaded. They traded in their Chrysler Cordoba (mom bought it because of the Ricardo Montelbon commercial). We had used the Cardoba to tow a camper on long trips and it had seen better days. Because my sister and I were now teenagers, the Diplomat felt like it had more rear seat leg room. Felt more comfortable on long road trips.
The first new car I can remember was when my dad got a Honda Accord in 1979. I remember that it had all these cool features on the interior such as little pictures on some of the buttons on the dash that our American made cars didn't have. It basically seemed "much cooler" than our American made cars - to my then 10-year-old mind.
I was living abroad at the time but the first new car I was old enough to remember was a 1965 Opel Rekord in yellow. Looking back at the pictures now it looks so bare and spartan by today’s standards.
growing up, our new used cars were always kinda uneventful. My dad was a mechanic so he would come home with a well used car that he bought for a few hundred bucks and we drove it until the wheels fell off.
When I got married, my wife worked for a short time at Lehman Brothers and her bonus check for working 6 months was so big, we went out and bought a new Audi A4 (in hindsight, saving that money would have served us much better). Driving that high end new car was special and we took care of it until she went to work for BMW.
She got a new car every 6 months and the novelty of a fancy new car quickly wore off even for the kids, but having a convertible for the summer and an AWD for the winter was sure fun.
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