Re:Looking for a car?
2012/06/12 16:24:56
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I have no pictures of the car I used to drive back in the day. Most cave paintings tended to focus on the fireball and mushroom shaped cloud left in its wake. In my defense, my family and I did not buy this car. It was given to us out of pity. My father insisted that I drive it in hopes that it would solve his problems permanently.
It was a Buick Electra 225 with a 425 V8 and a miniature nuclear power plant. Fuel economy? It think it got somewhere around 12 - 15 gpm (gallons per mile). It was suicide wrapped in steel.
The accelerator stuck frequently. When this happened, you'd stomp on the gas in an effort to unstick the pedal. In reality, it only stuck further down, propelling you to Mach 4.
The driver's door would not stay closed. To keep the door from flying out at inconvenient times, you had to hold it shut.
The car idled at around 75 mph. I don't think it had a top speed.
The heater/defroster didn't work. In the winter, you rode with an ice scraper on the dashboard. As the window iced up on the inside, you would scrape like a madman in a vain attempt to see exactly what you were about to hit.
Eventually, the ignition broke. To keep the car running, you had to hold the key in position. If you let go, the engine would die. At first, this seemed like a brilliant solution to the accelerator problem. It was, as long as you didn't need to steer. Since the car weighed several tons, turning it without power steering was more of an unrealistic idelogical concept than a reality.
Oddly enough, as a 16 year old driving in the mountains, this car was not as much fun as you might expect. I used to take a good look at the terrain whenever I crested a hill, just so I could identify potential obstacles I might use to reduce speed.
I can't tell you how many times, I'd stand on the brakes in an attempt to lock the wheels when approaching irrational impossibilities such as intersections and stop signs. They had a parade when the car was finally towed to a junk yard.