OT: Talking Cars Tuesday - Fast Car/Slow Car
Pretty simple for this week - what's the fastest car you've ever owned? How about the slowest? Good or bad (hopefully not too dangerous) speed stories are welcome.
Personally, the fastest is the current MkVII GTI. It's quick. 0-60 in 6 seconds, top speed of 150ish. That's boring. The older, slower, 1991 Jeep Wrangler YJ has much better speed stories. The thing that I remember most about it was how passing semi-trucks on the highway was always harrowing. Aerodynamics weren't the Jeep's forte, and hitting a wall of wind was super taxing on the little 2.5L 4cyl (rated at 120HP when new in 1991! Did I mention I bought this in 2003?). The other aerodynamic issue was the soft top and half doors. Air going over the top of the jeep got thinner because of the same reason airplanes fly, and the soft top would balloon something ridiculous. The worst was when the top half of the half doors would bow out from the soft top, bringing in cold/rain/whatever was out side unless I slowed down. I think the fastest I ever felt comfortable* in that was about 74mph.
*Comfort meaning non terrified with the speed. Not actually comfortable - mainly due to everything mentioned above.
Let's hear about your fast & slow.
As always, throw suggestions for future topics in the comments!
Should we save this for MGoAfterDark?
My last year of high school, I bought a 1985 Pontiac Fiero. It was basically a nice go-kart, so you could be going 35 mph but it would feel like 90.
I've mentioned several times the three cars I've owned, and clearly the Mustang outpaces the two stuff-haulers I've had (or have.)
So here's my why-I-hate-Toyotas story. One of the reasons, anyway. Some cars are so nice and quiet and smooth that you can be on a nice drive down the freeway and hit 85 without realizing it. Big old Mercurys and Lincolns used to do that. I tend to like about 77, 78 myself, so these cars aren't far off anyway. I rented a Corolla one time (a silver one, which means it was essentially the single most generic car you could ever find) and got out on the mainly empty freeways of Vermont, accelerated to a good freeway speed that I liked, and hit the cruise. Then I looked down to see how fast I was going: 61.
I blew a fart-noise raspberry at Toyota engineers and spent the next few minutes patiently coaxing the car up to 75 or so. It was like getting a lazy teenager to do something he kind of wants to do, but wants to do it less just because you want him to do it.
I had one of these.....
and you could hit 95 mph on the highway and not even realize you were above 60. You could also hit people or other cars and not even realize it because it weighed so much.
Rented one to go up noth cross country skiing. You could put the skis lengthwise across the back seat with room to spare.
drivers seat back to where you could barely see over the dash and still fit a 6'0" dude in the back seat beghind the driver's seat with leg room to spare. You could also fit 4 bodies in the trunk.
Hookers allegedly?
allegedly. And put them in the trunk of a LTC.
If he allegedly had a Town Car, one wonders why he allegedly stopped at five.
You should drive a Tundra sometime, that would change your tune on Toyota's have no speed. With the cars that is likely true, escpecially an entry level type car such as a Corolla. I have a Tundra and its no slouch at 385hp. I'm no Toyota homer, just like their trucks but as I recall the Supra was a pretty quick car back in the day. Other than that I'm not inclined to get any Toyota cars either.
My fastest car is nowhere near what most of these guys have or had, mine was a 2003 Mustang GT. It was pretty fast and quick but by todays sports car standards it was nothing.
Slowest car I ever had was probably my first, a hand me down from my mother. A 1975 Pontiac Bonneville. It was a land yacht and a nasty burn orange with a huge 400 V8, but being a mid 70's car meant it had no power. That huge car, combined with no power equaled no get up and go.
I did actually drive a Tundra once. I mean, it moved just fine, but I've never driven any of its competitors so I dunno. But I've driven Corolla competitors - and a 2008 Focus, for example, was nowhere near as poky as that 2012 Corolla.
Fastest: 2007 Mustang (V6, yup. I said fastest).
Slowest: 1991 Mazda Miata -- 0-60 is approaching 10 seconds.
But I bet on a track I can do laps around you in her <3
I have had a great many boring cars...so here we go:
Slowest: 1986 Olds Cutlass Sierra (aka the Gutless Cutlass). This is by far the slowest car I've ever been in, let alone drove. I hated that car.
Fastest: Probably the 2007 V6 Accord I owned. Again, pretty boring but the VTech engine was actually pretty fast (240+ HP).
I sold it to buy the much talked about TDI for gas mileage purposes. What a decision that turned out to be.
Bonus car for Car I've Owned That Was Most Like a Yacht. When my grandpa passed away, I got his 1985 Ford Vic. It had a compass mounted on the dashboard.
In high school a friend had a land yacht. Something like this. Crap brown too.
This was essentially the LTD I had for about a month (blue in navy blue). My friends, rather than yelling "SHOTGUN" would yell "STARBOARD"
the 78 Cutlass was pretty slow, pretty sad they could only get 140 hp out of 305 inches of displacement. The 91 Mustang LX with a 4 pot and 90 whatever hp wasnt swift. But the absolute worst was the farm truck I learned to drive on. It was an 82 Chevy Luv, and it had a 1.8L Diesel. It was a ton of fun to toss around on the farm, but when we took it on the expressway (whe it was still street legal), it took about 15 minutes to get down the entrance ramps.
The fastest car? Every rental car Ive ever driven.
The first car I ever owned was a 1972 VW Beetle that I bought from my uncle for $650. I think top speed was around 55 or 60 mph. Probably the most fun car I've ever had though. It's a shame that I had it when I was 16 and didn't have the money to take proper care of it.
Fastest: 2008 Saturn Sky Redline. 4.9 0-60 with the GM tune. 290 HP, 340 Tq from a 2.0 liter 4.
Slowest. Hmmm. 76 Monte Carlo with the 145HP 350? 1999 Sienna? 86 CJ7 with the straight six and four-speed?
1. Fastest 1/4 mile: 1965 Burgandy 389 Tri-power GTO with a 4:11 rear end and four speed. Could almost get the front end off the ground and you dropped the clutch at about 5K RPM and had to shift out of first at about 25 MPH. Car would literally overheat if you drove it on the expressway at 65 for more than about 15 minutes. My 8 year old daughter once said "daddy I dont like riding in that car. It hurts my neck (when I would shift gears).
2. Fastest top end: 2009 Cadillac CTS-V. Pearl white and supercharged. Car had a power band from about 50-150 that literally made me hold on to the steering wheel for dear life. Loved it when somebody would roll up in a new Challenger or some other MOPAR muscle and want to race cause I'd crush them from a 30 roll on. Allegedly the car could do over 200 but my brain is bigger than my balls so I never got it above 160 but I can tell you the car was still accelerating strongly at that number. I just couldnt see anything I was going so fast.
3. Slowest car: 1980 Powder Blue 4 door Chevy Citation. What the Citatiion lacked in acceleration it made up for in ugly. Car was easily the biggest piece of shit I've ever owned or hope to own. Slow and not well put together. And did I mention it was ugly?
Man, the Chevrolet Citation photo brings back some memories.
My dad had a "silver" one. I put silver in quotation marks because the thing was so rusted-out that the color might as well have been brown. Total piece of shit car, but for some reason my dad liked driving the thing. He owned it for years.
Anyway, when I was in high school I had this long succession of dirt cheap cars that I would buy, drive until they broke down, and then have to replace. My dad was like "I bought my first car for $50 so you should be able to get a used car for $50." Of course, my dad bought his $50 car in the late '60s and this was the early '90s. Even for $500 you couldn't really get a decent used car in the early '90s. But that's what I would have to spend, and so whatever I bought would last...not a long time.
Okay, so at one point whatever I'd been driving broke down, and I was shopping for a new car. My dad comes home and says "I saw a car for sale over on McCarty Road. You should go check it out." So we go and see the car. It's a light blue citation, pretty similar to the one in your photo. Unlike my dad's, the body is actually in good shape--no rust or collision damage. And the price was right--I don't remember how much, but it had to be in three figures because (above). But it's still a Citation. I freaking hated those things. So I'm like "No."
Well, my dad really wants me to buy the car for some reason. So after some back & forth, he says, "Okay, I'll tell you what: I will guarantee this car. If it breaks down, I will pay to have it fixed for you." Now THAT was an offer I could not refuse. So I bought the car.
A couple months later, I am driving home from work. This is Saginaw, Mich. and I have to take a viaduct over I-675. I get about halfway across the viaduct on a two-lane, 45 mph country road, when the CV joint breaks and I can't fucking steer. Luckily the alignment on the car was off and it pulled slightly the to right, so instead of coasting into oncoming traffic I coasted onto the shoulder, stopped, parked the car, and walked home. I went into the house and was like, "so, dad, about that guarantee..."
My dad says, "okay, well, if I am paying to have the car fixed then I get to decide where to take it." Fair enough. As long as it got fixed, I didn't care. But what I didn't expect was that my dad was going to have his cousin Arnie fix the car. Arnie was the blackest of the many black sheep in my family. He was regularly in and out of jail, and always in some state of intoxication. But he came and got the car; he attached a tow chain to his pickup and somehow pulled the thing across Saginaw County to his "workshop."
So, Arnie has the car for several days and we don't hear anything. So my dad calls Arnie and inquires, and he's like "I'm working on it..." The days turn into weeks, and eventually my dad and I decide to go over to Arnie's place to see what's going on with the car. When we get there, Arnie confesses that he fixed the car almost immediately, but he's been driving it himself. The reason he's been driving it is because Arnie was pulled over for DUI a few weeks earlier. He somehow managed to get released by giving the police his brother's name, but Arnie's own vehicle is in the state police impound lot and Arnie can't get it out because he is now a fugitive. Arnie's wife also cannot retrieve the car because her license is suspened. So, Arnie has a proposal: we trade cars. Arnie will give me his 1983 Buick Regal--which, he assures me, is in much better working condition than my Citation. But I have to pick the car up from the impound lot and pay the fees and whatnot.
At first I was iffy about this trade. But then I go and look at the Citation. I don't know what Arnie had done to it, but it looked like a bomb had gone off inside it. The seats were all shredded, the ceiling cloth was torn, there were papers everywhere, it was ridiculous. Plus I figured there was probably some bio-material in there somewhere, given it was Arnie. I never liked the Citation to begin with, and I didn't trust Arnie's repair skills anyway (and the last thing I needed was another CV joint disaster), so I decided to roll the dice. I go to the impound lot, pay about $250 to get the car out, and that was my new ride.
I don't remember the Regal much, becuase a few weeks later the exhaust manifold fell off of it and turned the car into Detroit's own version of Sandy the Horse from Meijer Thrify Acres. So I sold it and somehow scraped up enough cash to buy the Pontiac Fiero described above in this thread.
I don't recall the exact timing or sequence, but a few years later while I was an undergraduate at M, I somehow came into possession of my dad's original "silver" Citation. The thing was so hilariously ugly that one night my buddies and I went outside and painted the thing--using rollers and brushes and interior latex. We painted it like a race car, which I happily drove around A2 for a few months until something happened with the gear shifter causing it to be permanently in third gear. Let me tell you--if you can only have one gear, third is not a bad choice. If you are smart about hills and stuff, you can use elevation to go backwards and then with third gear the only real difficulty is getting the car started. So I coped with that for a few weeks until I decided life in third gear only was no way to live. I took it to a junkyard on the far side of Ypsi to sell it for scrap. I get there and have to haggle for beer money with some dude wearing a mesh-back hat that says "I don't give a shit." I think I got $35. Maybe less.
Awesome, awesome story. Thanks for sharing it.
I'm glad you dug it. There was actually one part I omitted just to keep the length somewhat reasonable, but I'll put it here:
The house I grew up in was an old farmhouse on a pretty big lot. Next to it was what we called a "shed," but was actually an even older, very small house from which all the interior walls had been removed many years earlier, and a giant barn door installed on the outside. It wasn't really a shed; there were piles of insulation throughout the inside of it, ground hogs had burrowed under the foundation and pretty much established a rodent metropolis down there, the roof was partially caved in, thing was a total mess. I suppose we could maybe have used part of it as a shed if we'd cleaned it out, but it wouldn't have been worth it; the thing was a hazard and should have long been demolished.
Well, my dad didn't want to pay to have the thing demolished. So he decided he would demolish it himself--except he was going to do it Shawshank Redemption style, taking out a wee part of the thing day after day after day. So every weekend or so he would go into the "shed" and fill a trash can with insulation or sheetrock or roof shingles or something, which we would set out the curb for trash pickup. Then a week (or several weeks) later he'd repeat the process. This went on for years, with very little noticeable progress being made in removing the structure.
Well, the day Arnie came to pick up the blue Citation, he noticed this "shed" removal project. So Arnie says to my dad, "hey, if you want that shed gone, I can do a 'real professional job' and get rid of it for you." I believe the agreed-upon price was south of $200. Whatever it was, a few days later Arnie appears with an old pickup truck he had borrowed from a friend or neighbor or somebody. I wasn't there at the time. But according to my mother, Arnie buckled himself into the pickup, backed it up a good distance from the shed, and then floored it. My mother said he had to ram this thing numerous times before it finally came down--a fact which was obvious from the many deep ruts he left in the yard. But to Arnie's credit, it worked: the shed came down, and he was eventually able to haul the debris away (god knows what he did with it, but I am pretty certain it involved significantg illegal dumping because no way was Arnie or my dad going to pay dump fees). I can only wonder what that pickup truck must have looked like when Arnie was done with it.
could be a movie. Its fantastic.
I wish I had a Cousin Arnie in my family.
But I wish that some friends had a Cousin Arnie in *their* family that I could watch from a distance.
Fastest: 2007 Subaru Legacy 2.5GT (5MT)
Slowest: 1992 Plymouth Laser (This was a dog!)
Current: 2014 Honda Accord Sport (CVT)
I had a 1974 Firebird Formula 400 (400 ci V8). You could really smoke the tires but I never got it going really fast.
Fastest on the freeway was an Audi GT that I had up to 120 and it was smooth, right until the police pulled me over. Managed to get the ticket town to 5 over as the cop did not use radar but estimated my speed from about 2 miles away.
Slowest. A Slovo Wagon like this one. I'm pretty sure my lawn mower is faster.
My fastest is my current daily driver.....a Jaguar XF with a 400 hp V8. My slowest was my 1st car, a 1979 AMC Spirit with a 4 cylinder motor. 0 to 60 time was by 5 pm the day after you put the accelerator to the floor.
I've owned 4 cars (not including my wife's primary cars), so figuring out the fastest and slowest is pretty easy.
Fastest: 2005 Subaru Impreza WRX. Once my warranty was essentially up, I got a Cobb AccessPort to reflash it to roughly 250 (claimed) at the crank. Never really timed 0-60, but given the other cars I've owned it's not even close. Did hit 145 in her once, and will never try to do something like that again outside of a racetrack.
Slowest: 2011 Honda CR-Z. It's my current car. I drove it across the country when I moved from Pennsylvania to Oregon, and I couldn't even take advantage of the 80 MPH speed limits through Nebraska and Wyoming. But I did manage to find it in a 6-speed, so at least it has some semblance of sportiness.
The other cars I had were different models of Pontiac Grand Ams, and while neither were anything resembling fast, the fact that they could theoretically hit 100 makes them faster than my tiny Honda.
Fastest is my current 2015 Ram 1500. Love Ram Trucks. Only problem I have ever had owning Ram trucks is that other people like to crash into them apparently. 400+ hp from the factory. 0-60 in 6.4 seconds or so. Not bad. If I went with the 2500 with the Cummins, I could have put a BullyDog in it and raced (and beat) Mustangs/Corvettes. But something about "voiding warranties" made me change my mind.
Slowest was my first car, a 1989 Renault Medallion 4 door sedan rocking the 132 cu in (2.2 L) overhead cam I4 engine that pumped out 103 hp. Got to my destination, regardless of where that was, before I got it up to 70 mph on the freeway.
The Medallion made the Alliance look like a rocket ship. The Renault Alliance (circa 1983) 1.4L boasted 64HP. You read that right. 64.
Fastest by far Audi S6 with 450HP. Dangerous. 120+ feels like nothing with a lot more to give.
I was going to mention that while I never owned an Alliance, I had the displeasure of driving one as a rental car for a few days while in Los Angeles on business. Must have been 1986, I think. Given it's utter lack of horsepower, merging into LA freeway traffic was pretty nerve wracking. Of course, after that, you'd get run off the road because it couldn't keep up with traffic very well. Made my first car and slowest car I've owned, a 1978 Mecury Zephyr with a dinky 4-cyl motor and a 4 speed manual (with no tach, so you shifted by how loud the hamster was screaming under the hood), seem powerful.
http://www.carscoops.com/2015/07/remember-when-renault-alliance-tried-to.html
Monochrome baby! Fog Lights! Maybe Louvres in the back!
Welcome to the performance drought of my childhood.
Fastest: 2012 Charger RT RWD.
Slowest: 2000 Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited. Had the V8 and actually sounded pretty nice, but my god... I have never and may not ever, sit in a more comfortable seat. Whatever they did to those WJ leather seats... like riding on a la z boy down the road.
A friends collection of microcars
http://www.isettagarage.com/microcollection.html
Evidently this one is nicknamed the "tin snail"
Next topic. The most clapped out POS you have ever driven. I once drove a 60's Dodge pickup with the doors bolted shut because the door hinge mounting points had rusted away. You had to dukes of hazzard your way in and out of the truck.
So. Much. Rust. You could see the road beneath you. Had a side window just fall out while driving. Apparently, the rubber was holding the window in, the metal around the window had rusted away. He put an 18 inch sub in the back. The rear window fell into the car as soon as the bass dropped the very first time. INTO the car. It's not supposed to go IN.
A guy that worked for me bought a Chevette in the early-80s and decided he would drive the car until it dropped. He'd never done that before and wanted to have the experience for some reason. Oh yes, Chevette's are slow and they went through brakes for some reason too, as I recall. I think he got close to 170K miles on the thing before he hit a pothole on a rainy day. The floor board had a big chunk fall out and the rain water shot straight up and knocked his baseball hat off his head. His wife told him that now it was a Flintstones car, it was time to go. He put a piece of plywood on the floor and kept driving for a few weeks. I had to send him to a customer site for 3 or 4 days and when he came home, his wife handed him the $150 she got from the auto salvage guy and told him to go get a new car.
The proper pronunciation is "Shitvette"
We could go on picnics and pull the seats out to use as lawn chairs.
on the way back from detroit to socal with a new truck i'd bought through dad's A plan 25 yrs ago. we are in colorado on the I-70 and my bodyguard is driving. we pass three cars tightly together and one of them is a grey ford mustang, 5.0, and i thought it had the side spot lights like some state trooper cars do, although the rest of the car was 'plain wrap'.
i mention this to bodyguard and he says he didn't see it. note that we are going significantly faster than the speedometer will allow, somewhere north of 110 MPH, but no idea how far above that.
a few mintues later we see marked colorado state troopers coming the other way, lights and sirens on. interesting. a few minutes after that we get lit up, as bodyguard says, '[expletive], rollers. we're dust" we get pulled over. apologies, badges, and in God's providence, it turns out i know this trooper's brother who actually worked in our jurisdiction. warning only.
there's more to the story and that trip, but not worth boring you all with it on the internet.
