Shout-out to any nine-year-olds reading The Autopian, but I’m confident we’re almost all adults here and can agree that our tastes have changed since graduating from kid-dom to full-fledged Serious Grown-Up Person. Your favorite meal is an aged cut of beef served at a restaurant that doesn’t have pictures on the menu, not a burger at a place with an indoor playground. You don’t stab straws into Ecto Coolers, you sip expertly prepared Old Fashioneds. As for what you drive (or aspire to drive) well, it probably doesn’t have a giant bird on the hood like the machine kid-you dreamed of owning along with a luxuriant mustache. (Ladies, insert your own examples, I have no idea.)
To each their own, of course, but odds are you’re less into maximum horsepower and more into precise handling; more concerned with comfort and convenience, less dazzled by decals; not into scoops and wings, more impressed by crisp lines and classic proportions … you get it, and I don’t feel like coming up with more of these ying-yang things. You might be really excited to have a new Honda Odyssey on order. Maybe find yourself thinking about how sharp Camrys are these days. Ever spotted a nice 12th-gen Cadillac Eldorado and thought, “boy, it would be great to do a road trip in one of those”? We respect aaaall that. Adulting!
So tell us: What cars are you into now that kid-you would say are lame? Or flip it: What cars blew your mind as a kid that you now regard as cringemobiles? Heck, they might even be the same car. That’s the Countach for me. Naturally, lil’ Pete thought the scooped, straked, winged, and widened LP5000 was the ne plus ultra of bedroom-poster supercars, infinitely superior to the unadorned LP400. Not even close! Suffice it to say, I learned the error of my ways long ago. I’d still happily take either one though. Obviously. [Editor’s Note: I used to think the Audi A2 and BMW i3 were short and ugly, but now I adore them. I also used to think the Ferrari 360 was a bit boring looking, now I can’t get enough. -DT].Â
To the comments!
Topshot image credit: Dodge Caravan via Chrysler; excited guy by wayhomestudios/Freepik
My first car in high school was a 1978 Camaro base coupe with a powder blue interior. Loved the car, hated the interior. I wished so hard it was black or tan. Now? I’d give anything to have an interior in an actual color, even powder blue. The outside, too – kid me wouldn’t believe how hard I’d rock a 70s triple-green car right about now.
I’m 51, and I don’t remember not being in love with cars. Most of what I loved as a kid and a teenager, I still do. Also, there are a lot of cars from back then that I either already liked, or at least secretly liked – I’ve been waiting for the rest of the world to agree with me how cool old school rear wheel drive V8 American station wagons are for decades now.
But generally speaking? I never got “sleepers” as a kid – a fast car should look fast! – but now, I love them. Speaking of 70s green, and being a second-gen F-body fanboy, I have dreamed of a 1973 Firebird Esprit in Verdoro Green, the “secretary’s car” kind – whitewall tires, wheel covers, no spoiler, maybe even a white vinyl top – but with an angry 400 under the hood, the 1979-81 WS6 suspension with four-wheel discs, and perhaps a vanity plate that reads “ZZZZZZZ.” Another secret warped part of me has always wanted to take the plainest four-door Dodge Dart/Plymouth Valiant from the 70s I could find and stuff a 6.2 Hemi in it with the quietest exhaust I could manage, put it on a real suspension with 16-inch steelies and the original dog-dish hubcaps, dress in grandma drag, and go stoplight trolling.
But I love them all. An 80s Corolla wagon with a 1JZ. A square-body Chevy Caprice with wire wheel covers, velour interior, and C4 Corvette goodies underneath. That insane V8-swapped 1958 Beetle from a while back. A fleet-spec Corolla with The Fast And The Furious hiding behind plastic wheel covers. No matter the brand, the fandom, the culture, or the country of origin, few things tickle me like a lot of go-fast in a plain brown wrapper. The older I get, the funnier people effing around and finding out gets.
Oh I enjoyed that, definitely having a sleeper is so much fun. We had an old Taurus SHO that shocked a corvette or two, and the 93 would eat up so many different cars in the twisties, that was fun!
One of my favorite cars ever was an accidental factory sleeper. I love this.
https://www.hemmings.com/stories/article/limited-rarity-1968-ford-ltd-brougham
I’ve read that before & it’s an awesome story!
My dad wouldn’t let me buy a Japanese car. RIP to a sweet Sentra Se-R that was not meant to be. My first car ended up being a V6 Camaro. Which came in handy, because Tokyo Drift came out soon after. Young me loved that FF JDM though. I wanted that build worthy of Super Street!. I did get a Scion Tc for minute, but was too broke for body kits and big wings. Then in my 20’s I got super into Eurotrash and now own 3 w211 wagons in various states of modifications, a clapped drift missile E90 and a big turbo TDI. 16 year old me would stare at this collection of aging German steel and wonder where the yellow Acura Intergra Type R I so dearly loved was!
The audi RS6 avant and cadillac cts-v wagon. My dad had a mercury sable wagon that I called the herse, so 15 year old me would have thought it was rediculous to want a long roof sports car.
Kid me was pretty open minded when it came to cars I guess, cause I can’t come up with anything that drives that he would snicker at.
Adult me is much more discerning and or less naive.
I guess the strongest stand out for me would be motorcycles. Kid me loved motorcycles.
Now, like heights, they suddenly scare me.
I was never that into bikes, and as an adult, I wondered if I might flirt with them someday. But I have had one friend killed and another broken to pieces and nearly killed on motorcycles, through no fault of their own. My late friend was sitting at a red light, for God’s sake. So now I’m listening to bikes than ever. Well, having one anyway – they’re still cool.
My wife does not give me many ultimatums, but bringing home a motorcycle is grounds for divorce. If I were her, I would divorce me to.
As a kid I always wanted three things; a motorcycle, a ski boat, and a small plane. None happened until I had a serious health scare and realized I wasn’t immortal, so as a grown ass man I got the cheapest of these, a motorcycle. Like so many others, through no fault of my own, I was broken in two accidents. Wife made it clear if I got on another, we were done.
I’ve only ever ridden trail bikes, or on dune’s. Riding on the highway or city streets is beyond my skill level.
Looks really fun though.
I’m just glad I’m not the only one who is suddenly becoming scared of things as an adult. My theory is that we know too much. Back to the ignorance of childhood, please!
S30 Nissan/Datsun Fairlady Z. Ford Festiva. First generation Dodge Neon. Daihatsu Mira TR-XX. 1971 Chrysler 300. First generation of the W-body Pontiac Grand Prix, specifically the SE and the GTP with the NASCAR compliant nose. Volkswagen New Beetle before the refresh. Ford Probe post refresh.
The king of them all though probably has to be the 1991 Pontiac Grand Am. Why a 1991 Pontiac Grand Am? Because it’s hilarious. A GM N-body people never liked, with a stock engine that’s legendary for how bad it is, and which has the capacity to fit an LS in it. It probably won’t survive long with an LS, but you’ll never stop laughing because it’s an inside joke.
I was 9 in 1974, early Malaise Era. At the time we had a BMW 2000 and a Mercedes 250S early in the year and a Volvo 164E late in the year after the Mercedes threw a rod. I still like early 70s BMWs, Volvos and Mercedes but adult me is very wary of 21st century German cars because they are money pits. Ked me would scoff at the Buick LeSabre family beater and slightly disappointed that I last owned a manual transmission car in 1997. On the other hand kid me would be impressed by my BMW R100S that I have had for 33 years.
9 year old me would definitely dig my pickup truck but may consider my crossover a bland mobile. Both mes still want a BMW 3.0 CSL Batmobile, a Porsche 911 and a Series III Landrover. We even think a colonnade style Cutlass Supreme with swiveling front seats is interesting.
My kingdom for any clean Colonnade car from any GM division, particularly any not-Monte-Carlo. I saw a guy when I lived in Portland who had a 1973 Buick Regal Gran Sport – 455, 4-speed, and power everything. A true gentleman’s muscle car. I’m pretty sure I swooned.
Kid me’s favorite car was a Ford thunderbird. The 02-05 one. So he doesn’t get to have an opinion.
I guess that runs in the kid car enthusiast circle.
This actually isn’t that interesting of a question for me to be honest. A Porsche was my aspirational car as a kid and it more or less still is today. If you told me I could have any car in the world right now I would probably take a 911 GT3. Seriously. I’m not all that complicated and hypercars really don’t interest me.
The lone curious answer for me here would probably be pony cars. As a kid/teenager I thought they were unsophisticated, inelegant cars compared to their European counterparts. Today I see the best performance per dollar ratios on the market and embrace the lack of sophistication/drunk uncle building a car in his garage energy.
The brashness and working class roots have, in fact, become very cool to me. And how could they not once you understand the heritage? Slash I challenge any Autopian to tell me with a straight face that they didn’t watch the Garage 56 car all last weekend and think it was cool as fuck.
See my Mustang appreciation below, but my reason for loving them is very close to yours. Prior to 2015, they were raw in the best possible way. Uncouth in various degrees, loud, harsh, yet with this seemingly unbroken connection to their ancestors and undeniable small-d democratic charm.
I own an SN95 (yeah, the one everyone hates) and despite it being from the 21st century, it feels straight out of the 60s, both intentionally and unintentionally so.
I cherish the Consumer Reports review of them at the time…”understanding the continued popularity of this primitive rear-driver eludes us.” Damn straight.
You’d win that challenge. I actually watched parts of the race solely because I read about #24 here
I was raised on American cars, mainly GM stuff, but now I’m all about the Germans.
Simply, ditto.
Started with a Caprice, Cutlass Supreme, 2x Cavaliers, S10… …last few Mk7.5 GTI, Mk8 GTI, M235i, Mk8 Golf R
As a kid I for sure thought I’d own a (very) used BMW M3/5/6, Audio S4/6/8, Mercedes AMG…. you get the idea.
Now all I really want is another 4wd van that I can fit a queen mattress in to go camping and just escape in to the woods to just be around some nature and decompress.
Although, in my defense, I lusted after Vanagon Syncros back when I was a teenager and everyone thought I was stupid… and this was when no one wanted them and they weren’t worth much…..(hindsight…sigh)
I sold my 1977 Westfalia for $400 with no engine. Dummy. And ever since I saw my first one, an Adventure Wagon or whatever they call it has had all my wants.
I think the kid version of me would be happy I have an old Dodge truck and a stick-shift V8 Mustang, he would be confused by my appreciation for the niches of car culture like lowriders and 4-wheeling and would tell me I’m boring for buying my wife a Forester (which she adores). I bet I could convince kid me of the merits of all those though..
Adult me has started to appreciate the late ’50s to early ’60s Chrysler designs from Virgil Exner, a trend I find rather concerning. As a high school kid, I thought the ’62 Dodge Dart and first generation Valiant were two of the ugliest pieces of steel ever to come out of Detroit.
More recently, I was a bit troubled to find myself looking at pictures of those cars and thinking, gee, these things are sort of cool looking, in a quirky way. I’m considering seeking the services of a licensed counselor to reorient my views.
Growing up we had our grandpa’s black 1962 Chrysler 300 coupe in our garage that ran, sometimes. I’ll never forget how cool and menacing that thing looked, especially in black. It seemed like a CIA car and would terrify people. It had the Exner front… but lost the fins in 62, which was a shame. I still want one to this day.
It had A/C vents that popped out of the dash that looked like they belonged on a submarine and, believe it or not, my grandpa had it fitted with a car phone back when car phones were first ever put in cars.
I think the Mazda 5 is a good design. Basically every car in Europe is that design but it’s rare in the US. Me-kid and my kid, who I bought one for, disagree. I thought the Ford Probe looked like a freakin spaceship when it came out. I was stoked when my mom bought a Mercury Sable because it looked similar. Bleck.
Today, I spotted a Mercedes Marco-Polo Westfalia pop-top van in the mall parking lot, and loitered around for 15 minutes hoping for the owner to return. It had German plates (I’m in Alberta) so they must be touring the continent. Sadly, zee Germans never showed up. I could pretend that kid-me would make fun of dad-me drooling over a van, but who am I kidding, even kid-me me would’ve loved this thing.
All modern cars, with “modern” being defined as ~1979 and newer. As a kid, classic car shows made a huge impression on me and I thought classic cars were the coolest things ever, that their styling and analog nature gives them more character and “soul” and makes them more fun to drive, and that modern cars are universally dull ugly boring anonymous blobs. I also thought all Pontiac Trans Ams and station wagons were ugly and lame because my dad said so.
I didn’t understand how anyone could be interested in tuner cars because their styling automatically fell into the “boring modern car” category for me, and I thought of modern car enthusiasts as unenlightened because they hadn’t realized how much more enjoyable classic cars are.
…This slowly started to change around the beginning of high school as I started thinking about what my first car could be, and realized that most classic cars are crazy expensive. So I dove headfirst into learning about obscure cars, and the further I went down the rabbit hole, the more fascinated I became with the all the deeply weird stuff and why it was built that way. I was particularly obsessed with microcars, and all their adorable quirky bizarreness, and Jalopnik (which wasn’t crap yet) had lots of great articles about those and other quirky obscure classic cars as well.
I grew to enjoy the writing and community there and became a regular reader and commenter, and my hunger for more articles about weird obscure cars grew into a desire to just read more Jalopnik articles about anything. As I encountered other car enthusiasts with different opinions, I started to consider why they like the cars they do, and started to respect things like tuner cars more, even though I still didn’t like the styling. Particularly my love of weird cars led to an appreciation of bubble-era Japanese stuff, which grew into a genuine fascination with Japanese cars in general, despite me previously thinking they were boring.
Jalopnik was eventually banned by the school internet system among other things, but Opposite-lock wasn’t, so I joined that community as a replacement and found a place writing about the obscure cars I was researching. Since Oppo has always been open to enthusiasm for all different types of cars, the posts from other members there convinced me that there are fascinating aspects of all kinds of cars, and things worth appreciating in cars I would have dismissed as boring at a quick glance.
Thanks to these communities, now when I’ve visited other countries and gotten to see different car cultures, I’ve been absolutely thrilled to see things like Peugeot 207s and Opel Kadets which are normal boring cars outside the U.S., but are exciting and exotic to me. One of my favorite driving experiences I’ve had was when a stranger let me drive his beat up old Lada Samara after seeing me geeking out about it.
Now practically every car seems to have something worth appreciating about it, and if anything it’s even more fun to be a car enthusiast the more different types of cars you can learn to appreciate. I’m still very much a classic car enthusiast, and my first car ended up being a 1966 Thunderbird because I was convinced I had to have a classic car instead of some “boring” Civic, though now in my search for a second car I’m getting excited at the prospect of things like Geo Metros or maybe JDM Daihatsu Charades… though the dream is to find a clean manual Civic hatch, something kid me would’ve yawned at.
If you are a millennial, the new cars when you were a kid probably were dull ugly boring anonymous blobs. 90’s styling was terrible
Big ol’ American trucks. 2018 Ram 2500 with a diesel and a stick shift. Yeah it’s way too much truck for my use case but it’s sort of a guilty pleasure to feel that American excess every now and then. I try to only drive it when I’m actually doing truck stuff, thus lessening it’s impact. I guess I’ve fallen prey to the “you need all the capability all the time for the maybe two times ever you’ll use it!” marketing strategy. Ah well…
I don’t care how big it is, a manual diesel anything is cooler than 94.6% of all cars on the road in the US.
My old 2000 Cummins-Dodge looks tiny compared to today’s bro-dozers and even showroom stock trucks. But it still gets the “I want that” looks from strangers especially when they find out it’s a manual. Work trucks with stick shifts have always been among my favorite cars. Just simple, no-nonsense workers — what’s not to love?
Today me is wondering why the ACAB post disappeared. Methinks DT and JT don’t like that narrative, so I’m headed back over The Drive, where they have the cojones to stand by their writers.
Indeed. What happened to that post ?
It’s getting so difficult… I left Jalopnik because they never – ever – approved any of my comments (probably a kinja technical issue, but no support or help email of any kind was available, so I gave up), came here, now this.
What was wrong with that post ?!?
What was the gist of it? Asking for someone who didn’t see it
Inquiring minds want to know…
Late 90’s Teen me thought Muscle Cars, of pretty much any type, were the absolute coolest. These days? Not so much. Now to me they tend to look bloated, uncomfortable, loud, unsafe, stinky and handle like crap.
These days, I pine for a nice minivan. I love the one I have, but something newer, with some more comfort sounds very nice. Great on road trips, easy to drive, cozy and quiet.
Trucks and Jeeps are one thing that pretty much never changed. My first car was an ’86 Bronco XLT, still wish I owned it today, but I love a good off-roader still. My ZJ sits in the garage, undergoing an engine rebuild, so I still have something in this line of thinking.
Adult me still adores 60s/70s muscle cars – especially now that four-wheel disc brake conversions and QA Suspension and Holley Sniper fuel injection and Vintage Air exist.
Station wagons and custom vans. As a kid, I thought station wagons were for moms and custom vans were hideous; now I kinda like wagons now that they’re almost gone, and custom vans are just so completely different from what people do now that I have to admire them.
Are you me?
Hmm. Even as a kid I was pragmatic and liked more “normal” cars more than exotics for the most part. I guess my answer might be the 1st gen Toyota Sequoia I recently bought. When it was new I thought they were mommy-mobiles and had no interest in them. Today I appreciate it as off-road capable and reliable which is exactly why I bought it. The leather seats are thrashed but I don’t care.
BTW as an aside, the Apple thumbs up kid next to the Countach is Brent Rambo who is now a rich tech geek who owns a McLaren P1 (or maybe multiple?). He’s a friend of a friend whose wedding I attended, and Brent was one of the groomsmen. I didn’t know until after the wedding that I was in the presence of internet geek stardom!
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/brent-rambo
Brent Rambo is possibly one of the most 90s names I’ve ever heard and it applies perfectly to that kid. He looks exactly the way I would imagine someone named Brent Rambo looks.
My automotive tastes haven’t changed a whole lot, actually. But maybe that’s because I never really did like any of the bedroom-poster cars except the Testarossa (and I still love those) and I grew up with weird little European cars, old pickup trucks, and big Mopar sedans. Well, look what I own now…
The one compromise I’ve made is that I’ve abandoned the “everything must be a manual no matter what, I don’t care if it’s a Rolls-Royce” mentality, and now I can see the virtue of automatics in certain cars, and more importantly, in certain driving situations.
Yeah, automatics make a lot of sense in rock crawlers and almost nothing else.
Any points for decade spanning, consistent tastes (if of a sort too square for this place, I know)?
When I was a kid in the ’80s, I so wanted a Mustang and promised myself I’d get one as soon as I could. I was finally was able to in the 2000s. I still have her and love her as much as I did enviously watching the malaise era ones growl around town as a kid.
Now that I’m deep into middle age, I push back on younger people throwing around the phrase “midlife crisis” at any 40+ man with a fun car. The vast majority of the time, you are probably looking at someone who got the car they have wanted since they were 12, that it took them 40 years to be able to afford. It’s not a midlife crisis for a 52-year-old man, it’s the realization of a 12-year-old boy’s dream. It couldn’t be further from a crisis. More like a life’s mission.
Toyotas.
I no longer have any tolerance for unreliability.
Typical young to middle age car enthusiast dad track:
In: reliability, sliding doors, legroom, vinyl flooring.
Out: pre-owned status, forced induction, German-ness, compromising ride quality for handling.
I won’t sell all my fun car(s), but the things I consider virtues have changed a bit haha.
Station wagons. Big wagons…big engines. Classics or modern. Muscle car territory, but wagons. E63 or a Buick Roadmaster or something much much older. I love them all.