Every car I have ever owned, ranked…
21. 1994 Ford Ranger. Chrome bumpers started rusting after two weeks (brand new!). Only two seats. Could never put enough weight in the flat bed to make it remotely useful after a heavy snow. Underpowered. Just an overall dog of a vehicle. The day I traded it for the car I have at #2 on this last was one of the happiest days of my life to that point (I was 26).
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20. 1981 Plymouth Horizon TC3. Sporty looking but not at all fast. The damning feature on this car was something that would happen if you ran the air conditioner on a really hot day. Somehow the A/C would “vapor lock” the fuel line between the gas tank and the engine. Horrendous design flaw that left me stranded on the road several times before I realized what was happening.
19. Dodge Ram short box truck. Three speeds—and by that I mean both gears and forward motion. It went slow, slower and slower still. Loud as hell and about as basic as it gets. I only owned it a very short time so I don’t even recall the year it was built. Still it had a certain old school cool.
18. 1975 Buick Skyhawk. My mother bought this car brand new from Armstrong/Tamaroff Buick when it debuted as a brand new model that year. Red with a black vinyl interior and a four-speed manual. By the time she tossed me the keys 10 years later, the Skyhawk had rusted so badly when I accelerated the wheels went straight but the body would list to the right. I can still remember the day the tow truck came and got it out of our driveway.
17. 2001 Audi TT Roadster. I’m shocking myself by ranking this car so low on this list because it was fun to drive and was a brand new lease unlike anything on the road when it came out. The ranking has less to do with the car itself and more to do with my idiocy that I ever thought I needed it. Truth is, I didn’t. I was single and already had an awesome car that I loved (again #2 below). The $500 a month I spent on this car over two years could have bought a lot of Apple stock, cheap. Easily one of the worst financial decisions I ever made. Ah, the folly of youth. Also, it was red, and I never quite got over the fact it might have been a chick car. Fast, all-wheel Quattro and a convertible to boot. But still possibly one more for the ladies.
16. 1968 Buick LeSabre. Another one that could justifiably rank higher because I have so many fond memories about it. It was my third car even before my 17th birthday. More on that later. This was the first car to be bestowed a nickname by its driver and that name was The Shark. Blue with a white landau top. Gas guzzling V8. Burned a lot of oil. So much oil in fact that I ran the engine block dry without even realizing it. Turns out the check oil light was burned out. Bought it from an old man who came into the grocery store I worked at for $500. Another Buick towed out of my life.
15. 2005 BMW 5-series. Shortly after I bought this ride from a close friend I proclaimed it one of my favorite cars ever. Fast, handled beautifully, spacious interior. And then two things happened. First, it would just die under hard acceleration and would not start again until you had pulled over, cut off the ignition, and re-started it. This flaw, whatever its cause, almost got me killed on 696 during rush hour. It is a miracle I didn’t cause a 20-car pileup trying to go from the left lane all the way over to the right shoulder literally coasting and losing speed. I made it by a hair. And then, second, the engine literally blew up one day at 68,000 miles on the odometer. People this was a $60,000 car with total engine failure. What the what?
14. 2002 Lincoln LS. Essentially a Jaguar in a Lincoln skin. I always thought this car’s styling was slick. So I bought this one from a college friend as my winter beater. And I currently own it still. It’s black on black and a very rare stick shift (a Lincoln with a manual?). Sadly it, too, has mysterious issues with sputtering under acceleration and is vastly underpowered for being a sporty sedan. Why Lincoln thought a V6 producing only 210 horsepower needed to be married to a stick is beyond me.
13. 1992 Dodge Ramcharger. Another Dodge Ram product that easily could have ranked lower on lack of creature comforts, terrible gas mileage and rust. But oh was it fun. I nicknamed it the Canyonero after the Simpsons episode that satirized America’s lust for big SUV’s. Sold it to a former co-worker on a handshake. And then he disappeared and the Canyonero ended up in the Wayne County impound, who called me wanting $900 to get it back because my name was still on the title. I told them to keep it.
12. 1981 Plymouth Horizon base model. Not the TC3 I mentioned earlier, but the base model. This was my third car before turning 17 and it’s a wonder I’m not dead. I got T-boned on the driver’s side by a pickup going through an intersection. I survived with a fractured clavicle and the impact was so hard I had glass embedded in my face. Three years later, while at MSU, I felt something in my jawline and out poked a half-inch shard of glass. Thankfully the scars healed mainly unnoticeable. Aside: the crash happened at the ER entrance to Sacred Heart hospital. The ambulance merely had to wee-woo wee-woo down the driveway, pick me up, then wee-woo wee-woo back. Possibly the shortest ambulance ride in history.
11. 2004 Audi A8L. It genuinely pains me that I have this ranked in the middle of the pack. I loved the car. I sunk a lot of money into it (the main reason it’s at 11) and it drove like a limousine with the heart of a sports sedan. In fact, it was in Transporter 2 with Jason Statham. I brought my newborn daughter home from the hospital in this car, which is the entire reason I bought it. And yet it had one fatal flaw that drove my OCD crazy: a noisy air compressor that powered the air suspension. Kicking on and off constantly. The rumble was such that I would have to crank the radio. And the fan.
10. 2009 Lexus RX suv. Exactly what you’d expect. A smooth grocery getter. No emotion when turning in the lease. Also, mainly my wife’s car.
9. 2011 Toyota 4-Runner. Maybe the most underwhelming vehicle on the list. I had long coveted owning a 4-Runner. But during the time I had it my reaction was always the same: meh. Dependable? Sure. 7 seats, too. It just never felt like me. And it had HORRIBLE brakes that supposedly were anti-lock but the several times I needed to slam on the brakes all I heard was screeching tires. Scary stuff.
8. 1986 Nissan 300ZX. I had this car in college. Gun metal blue with a matching interior. T-tops. Not a turbo, though, and the V6 was not as fast as the car looked. And its’ fatal flaw: automatic transmission. Still, what we used to call a chick magnet when fresh out of the car wash and the t-tops stowed in the hatchback. Fun times, fun times.
7. 2008 Volkwagen EOS hardtop convertible. Boy howdy what a great car. Found it for my wife to replace her Eclipse convertible. She mainly drove it but I never minded taking a turn when we would go somewhere together. Front wheel drive but fast and great handling. Convertible top worked perfectly. And maybe the most surprising factor: was an absolute beast in the snow.
6. 1974 Volkswagen Beetle. I might have this overranked for sentimental reasons but if you have ever owned a Bug then you just know. Slow as an actual insect but so much fun. My car my senior year in high school and it remains a bone of contention that it was my car and not my mother’s when I went off to MSU. You see my grandfather bought it from her for me but then it just sort of reverted to my parents when I moved out. Still a little salty about that.
5. 2013 BMW 3-series X-drive. I bought this car new-used in 2016 and to that point was the fastest car I’ve ever owned. Everything about it was great, except, again, it was an automatic and I ended up hating the color, which looked charcoal when I signed on the dotted line on a cloudy rainy day but then turned out to be more of a blah pewter that definitely subtracted cool points. If it had been a stick shift and black or silver I might still own it to this day. Aside: I set my all-time record getting to work in this car. 19 minutes from my front door to the Local 4 garage. Folks, that is F-L-Y-I-N-G down the Lodge.
4. 2004 Nissan 350Z roadster. Here’s where it gets emotional. Ever since I had owned my first Z car 14 years earlier, here was my chance to redeem that car’s lack of speed and the auto transmission. I bought this car straight off the trailer at Key Nissan in Warren. It was still shrink-wrapped. I didn’t even drive it. $42,000 full sticker price. $635.79 a month payment. 287 horsepower (could have been faster, to be honest). Stick shift. Black body, black convertible top, black leather interior. I was so happy. Had it only a few months, took it to an automatic car wash, and the brushes swirled the clear coat. Never got over that flaw. I owned it 15 years and literally drove it until it died on my street and I coasted into my driveway. It currently resides at Parts-Galore on Eight Mile.
3. 1983 Ford Thunderbird Heritage Classic. My dad handed me the keys to this low-key monster when I was still a freshman at Michigan State. In retrospect probably not the best decision on his part. I drove this car on city streets like I was Dale Earnhardt competing for a Winston Cup trophy. I burned rubber at every stop light, my foot mashed pedal to the metal. It came with a Mustang 5.0 V-8 under the hood and I drove it to an early grave. It’s a wonder that grave wasn’t my own. I think I had it about a year before it couldn’t take me anymore. White with a crushed velour red interior, it was also the pimp’s whip. Premium sound system, power everything. I get misty-eyed just thinking about it. Aside: it had Ford’s signature key pad to unlock the doors. Still remember the code: 41722.
2. 1994 Honda Prelude V-TEC. Eight days after I traded that damned Ranger (last at #21 on this list) for this sporty Honda, I hit a pregnant doe on a Traverse City highway. It was never quite the same when I got it back from the body shop. There were annoying visual flaws only I noticed but man—this car was my everything. So much so that when I traded it for the Nissan (#4 on the list)- for only $1800 I panicked and tried to buy it back from Key Nissan two weeks later, just to have it. But sadly they had already sent it to wholesale auction, where it was snapped up by an unknown buyer. I dug this car so much that I had the factory CD player installed for $600 at the Honda dealership so that it would be “fully loaded.”
And coming in at number one: 2019 Ford Mustang Bullitt edition. Best car I have ever owned. Cool, stylish, fast. Everything about this car Ford got note-perfect. 485 horsepower with a six-speed manual. The gearshift looks like a cue ball from billiards. Every imaginable option. Did I mention it’s fast? Also, the exhaust note sounds exactly like Steve McQueen’s Mustang in the legendary movie Bullitt—the most famous car chase in movie history. Aside: I buried the speedometer at 164 miles per hour. I won’t say where. But what a heart-stopper. I love this car.
And there you have it. 21 cars in 36 years. I hope to slow that pace. But my last name is Carr, after all.
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