My first cars

From 1980 to 1983 (my high school years) I drove a horrible 1978 Plymouth Horizon like the wood paneled model shown above (we're talkin' 75 horsepower on a good day). I wish I could track it down and set it on fire. One of the things I hated was the placement of the extremely small accelerator pedal, which made it very uncomfortable to use. I finally got so sick of it that I rigged up a Rube Goldberg apparatus enabling me to control the accelerator with my hand by pulling a string -- not very safe. I also installed a switch on the console that allowed me to turn off the license plate light when my friends and I were engaging in teenage hooliganism.

In 1983, my freshman year in college, I bought a red 1979 280zx like the one pictured above for about $5,000. It was a great car, and I drove it until about 1991. On one occasion, I got it up to about 125 mph on a remote stretch of highway near Crawford, Texas. One of my favorite things about the Z was the automatic driver's side window, which went all the way down OR up with the touch of a button. That is common now, but American auto manufacturers refuse to include an automatic up feature, I guess for safety reasons. That's a lame excuse though, because I'm sure the foreign autos with this feature are designed so that the window stops rolling up when a sensor decides that someone's head is about to get squashed.