My 30 year car history

I'm known to my associates as a road trip guy, and I have put a lot of miles on cars over the years. While going through my archives of old photos to prepare for a future blog series, I hit upon the idea of assembling some of them into a chronological history of my various vehicles. To that end, here are my nearly thirty years' worth of cars. It's a somewhat bittersweet trip down memory lane.

1988 Toyota Corolla (1995-1998)

This was my first car, a high school graduation gift in 1995, and to date the only one I've owned with an automatic transmission. Upon its purchase from the previous owner it had racked up about 89,000 miles and a food stain on the driver's seat. Never underestimate the degree of freedom afforded a sixteen-year-old by his first vehicle, particularly during a time before today's age-based restrictions on driving time and hours. This car was my ticket away from a toxic home environment, and I put somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 miles on it during the first year I had it. It was also the one involved in my first auto accident, at the age of eighteen near the southeast corner of Dallas County. The car was fixed up enough to still be viable, and I continued to drive it, despite seemingly constant tire issues, until the engine failed. The engine was replaced with a rebuilt one, but the new engine was plagued with so many overheating issues that I eventually gave it up as a lost cause.

1991 Mazda Protegé (1998-2007)

From the Corolla I moved on to my first of two successive Mazda Protegés, the first one being a 1991 model. There aren't a lot of photos of this car, but one of the few that does exist shows the two-toned look it had for several years following a collision in the early 2000s. A wine-colored hood and side panel were installed to fix the damage, and I never did get around to having them repainted to match the car's original black. I had this car for a really long time, long enough to have replaced the alternator, thermostat (twice!), driver's side automatic seat belt, headlight high-beam switch, ashtray, gear stick, window tinting, a fuel injector, and even the glove box and driver's seat. The engine got rebuilt as well, and over the course of nearly nine years I took the car from 69,000 miles at the time of purchase to over 292,900 at the time I was rear-ended on the way to work. It's the only vehicle I ever had outfitted with a pricey car stereo and amplifier (the benefit of being in my late teens with nearly 100% disposable income). It's also the car I took on my first significant road trip in April of 2003. Having the car totaled in an accident was bad enough, but I also lost a set of four brand new tires I had just put on it. This first Protegé had been found via a newspaper classified ad and had cost $2,900 (remember this was 1998). Its successor would come from a place considerably closer to home.

1994 Mazda Protegé (2007-2008)

This was the car I learned to drive in the second time I learned to drive. My first time learning was in 1994 via Sears Driving School, and the second was with my father in this car when I learned to drive a stick. My dad eventually bought a truck and this became my mom's car after hers was totaled in an accident. Then, after my first Protegé was hauled off to the junkyard, I ended up with this one. Aesthetically it was almost identical to its predecessor, save for small differences in the body design, and it had the same issues with the automatic seat belt intermittently (and frustratingly) staying put. Unfortunately, it also had a much bigger issue, that of an oil leak that resisted all efforts to plug or otherwise do away with it. Repeated attempts to identify the source of this problem never bore any fruit, and eventually things reached the point where I threw in the towel and resolved to get another car. This one had technically only cost me a few hundred dollars to acquire - the title office had required there be some kind of fees paid when the title was officially transferred to me, so I ended up paying what was in effect a pittance amount. To date, this is the only one of my cars to never leave the state while it was in my possession. I donated it to the Dallas Can! Academy, and my last memory of it is that of seeing it lifted onto a towing vehicle and carried away.

2004 Ford Focus (2008-2015)

With this one, I moved away from foreign makes and models to something a bit more homegrown. As far back as I could remember, my family had always had foreign cars: Toyotas, Volkswagens, Mazdas, and the like. My mom had in fact refused to consider buying American for decades since consumer advocate (and later aspiring public office holder) Ralph Nader had blown the whistle on dangerous vehicle designs and industry practices. She took some convincing when it came to the Ford, characteristically trying to steer me away from domestic makes and models while I was in the market. I acquired the Focus via a reseller - my first car not bought directly from a previous owner - on December 31, 2008. At the time of purchase, the odometer reading was a little over 17,700 miles on it, making this the closest thing to a new car I've ever had. The Ford Focus was the car I took on all my early North American road trips, beginning with a visit to friends in Illinois in December 2010 and continuing on to others in Michigan and Florida, as well as journeying to more distant destinations such as New York, New England, and Atlantic Canada. In all, twenty-six U.S. states and four Canadian provinces made the final itinerary between 2012 and 2015, when the car was totaled in my worst accident yet. I was heading home from a coffee group meetup one Sunday morning when an idiot driver traveling in the opposite direction thought it would be a good idea to directly against two lanes of oncoming traffic. The final odometer reading was over 174,000 miles.

2013 Hyundai Accent (2015 - present)

Following the loss of the Focus, it was back to an overseas make and model for my next (and, as of this writing, current) vehicle. I had some trouble finding a car that met my criteria this time - manual transmission vehicles are virtual unicorns in the used market nowadays, with people who have them holding onto them forever (I can't really talk here, since this is exactly what I do, too). Eventually it came down to a choice between another Mazda and a potential Hyundai, and the Hyundai won out. Driving the car home from the dealership, signed paperwork in hand, I learned just how "soft" six and a half years of driving American had made me as far as clutches go. Getting used to having a six-speed transmission as opposed to five also took some getting used to. But all went well until the transmission started failing at less than 59,000 miles, less than four months after I drove it off the lot and, coincidentally, right before the start of my 2015 road trip. Hyundai replaced the transmission with a new one under warranty the week before I hit the road, and I had to get the thermostat replaced 180 miles into the actual road trip, but following that the trip proceeded without incident. As of today, I've put over 209,000 miles onto this car, covering a total of forty-eight states and eight Canadian provinces plus the Yukon territory. It's on its second engine, third catalytic converter, and third alternator. Will this finally be the vehicle to reach the 300,000 mile milestone? Only time will tell.