" A Need for Speed The Digital Antiquarian
The Digital Antiquarian
A history of computer entertainment and digital culture by Jimmy Maher
Home<br>About Me
Ebooks
Hall of Fame
Table of Contents
RSS
← This Week on The Analog Antiquarian
A Need for Speed
21<br>Aug
Your humble author in 2009, with his last even vaguely cool car, a 2000 Volkswagen GTI. I sold the GTI and left the United States that same summer. I wouldn’t own another car for ten years.
Looking back from the vantage point of today, it’s hard for even me to believe, but it’s true all the same: I used to be a full-blown car guy. I bought my first car, a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle, for $800 in 1989, when I was sixteen years old. The bad thing about a Beetle was that you could generally expect no more than 60,000 miles or so out of the motor; the good thing was that you could rebuild the motor in your garage over a long weekend and make it good as new again. My inner Luddite, who seems to become stronger almost by the day in our current era of feverish tech-sector nonsense, still feels that something was lost when we stopped making cars that were so amenable to shade-tree mechanics.
I had a couple of other Beetles over the decade and a half that followed that first one, along with a number of other vehicles that made them look like the height of sober-minded practicality.
I had a 1965 Ford Mustang that was rusted out so badly it was literally on the verge of breaking in two. (I maybe should have taken a look underneath before I bought it.) I sold it to a fellow who ran an import/export business; the plan was to send it to Finland for restoration and resale, which means my old Mustang may have beat me to northern Europe by about fifteen years.
I had a 1969 MGB that was determined to prove every cliché about the quirky unreliability of British sports cars to be the gospel truth. I learned that there’s a reason that Lucas Industries, which was responsible for the electrical systems in those cars, is known in enthusiast circles as "the Prince of Darkness." That MGB is the only car I’ve ever driven where you had a choice between headlights and windshield wipers; there wasn’t enough juice to run them both at the same time. Then again, you probably didn’t want to be driving in the rain anyway, because never was an MGB made without a top that leaked like a sieve. All that aside, the car was a hell of a lot of fun whenever the weather was good and it decided it was in the mood to start.
I had a 1975 Nissan — or Datsun, as they were known in the United States back then — 280Z. It was more fun to drive than any car I’ve ever owned, even the MGB, with an in-line six-cylinder engine that was the stuff of which car-nerd wet dreams are made. For some reason, I decided to swap that 280Z for a 1981 280ZX. I knew I had made a terrible mistake within a week, even if the new car did have the exact same engine. It was like trading the svelte Elvis of 1956 for the fat one of 1976.
But the all-around funnest vehicle I’ve ever owned — not just fun to drive, but fun in general — was a 1972 Volkswagen camper van. It would do about 50 milers per hour flat-out on level ground. Driving it felt weirdly like guiding a boat, and not only because the engine was chirping away about fifteen feet behind you when you sat at the wheel. You could expect a delay of several seconds to any control input as it bobbed and swayed gently on its well-worn springs. So, you just kind of pointed it in the general direction you wanted to go and hoped for the best. Looking back on it, it was a good thing that it wouldn’t go any faster.
That little Volkswagen bus could sleep four people — or rather two couples, assuming you didn’t want to cuddle too much with mere friends. There could be two in the back and two under the pop-up roof, with just a thin net between them and the great outdoors. It had a little refrigerator, a little stove, and even a little heater that ran on — I kid you not — pure gasoline. It’s a wonder that we didn’t blow ourselves up at some point during the weekends that we drove the magic bus up from Dallas to southern Oklahoma’s Arbuckle Mountains.
The joys of all of these oddball vehicles started to pale a bit for me as I entered my thirties. (Come to think of it, it was at about this same point that I started to feel too old for backpacker hostels; this must have been the borderline that marked the onset of a belated adulthood.) In 2004, I bought a Volkswagen GTI that was just a few years old instead of a few decades. It was a nice enough car, but it was kind of soft and heavy in the same way that the Datsun 280ZX had been. Still, it did have the advantage of being (more or less) reliable.
Then I moved to Denmark in 2009 with my new wife, and that was that for the car life. We didn’t even own a car for ten years thereafter. I re-familiarized myself with the lost (to me) art of biking, which is certainly a healthier way to get around as one closes in on middle age....