Cars: 2000 Dodge Neon vs. 1978 Chevrolet Corvette

Sat Dec 9 13:12:02 EST 2000

I had a 1988 Ford Tempo. It died a slow, painful, thorough death, ending with a leaking radiator on a Saturday. The following Monday I was supposed to start working at a new company. It's illegal to sell cars in pennsylvania, where I live, on a Sunday. I got approval to start working at the new place a day late so I could deal with this problem.

I spent probably all of Sunday pouring over adds for cars. I have some pretty picky tastes, especially on things that cost a lot of money that I'm going to have to live with for several years. I was having great difficulty deciding on a car. I knew my tempo was dieing, I should have been researching this. Eventually, I decided that 2 possibilities looked acceptable at the Northeast Auto Outlet, and then verified on their website that they had one on the lot in black.

So Helen drove me to the Northeast Auto Outlet, and I bought myself a new 2000 Dodge Neon.

At the time I wasn't expecting to be driving much in the near future, because I was planning on buying a house within walking distance of a train station. I bought the house. I was only driving about one day a week, for groceries or something. The neon was acceptable for my needs.

I recently got another job that's not near a train station. I'm driving to work every day. I'm thinking about other cars.

This past Monday, on my way to work, my car shook a couple times at traffic lights. It concerned me a little, but not enough to do anything about it.

Tuesday the car felt bad. I wasn't sure it was going to get me into work. It shook practically the whole way there, and the engine light blinked whenever I put the gas pedal down more than half way. I'd seen the engine light come on before, but never blink. So that was bad. It felt like it was either about to seize or stall, and once in a while I'd hear a popping sound which I could feel in the gas pedal.

I made it to work. When Jim got in, I asked him what he thought it might be. Before I left, he looked at my car -- checked all the fluids -- all was well, no idea what was wrong.

I asked my boss if I could not come into work the next day so I could get my car looked at by the dealer. He agreed, and I did so.

N-tropy had the day off and was planning to go visit one of our old college professors - the guy who taught the unix class that we'd been in the pilot of. So I went with him while they worked on my car. It was entertaining. Apparently he still talks about us to his classes (4 years later).

They fixed it. "#2 spark plug cracked and fouled out. Replaced spark plug ok." So I'd blown a spark plug.

My car's happy again. It is very good to have functioning transportation.



So now that I'm driving a lot, I'm thinking about cars I'd enjoy more. As I said, I can be picky about things. I've been pondering what would be the right car for me for some time. It started out "manual transmission + rear wheel drive". Then "all black". Hadn't gotten much farther than that.

When I started working at Aspre, I met a guy named Jim, who is into cars. He's apparently been doing car stuff for some time. He started building a big block engine from scratch a while ago, and finished it not long ago, then went looking for a car for the engine, and got a 68 chevelle. He's very fond of this car. I've only seen pictures so far.

I've recognized advantages of having a car that's old enough that it was still designed to be worked on, as opposed to, say, my 2000 neon, which is put together with fucking inverted torx screws so I can't even replace a mirror myself. After talking with Jim, I decided this was a feature I really wanted.

So we started talking about possibilities. The biggest problem seemed to be that none of the cars that were old enough to work on were aerodynamic enough to suit my tastes. While I consider the pictures I've seen of his chevelle attractive, and consider it a very respectable car, it just doesn't quite do it for me. We went through pictures of several different kinds of cars on the web, and among them were a couple corvettes, to which I responded "that could be acceptable".

As I was leaving, he suggested a 78 corvette. This is a 78 corvette:

1978 corvette

So my current thinking is I need a 1978 style corvette, soaked in black, with a manual transmission, and preferably t-tops.

<lx`> if you get that car in black, and you dress in all black, and you drive around at night, you are going to look like something out of a movie
<lx`> a very scary movie
<lx`> something dark, rainy, and containing a super villain. like batman without the stupid costume.
<lx`> im not sure if you play the super villain or the hero yet.
next:Got my boots and my gun.2001-01-12
previous:NRA2000-12-04
Comment on this page.
Return to Adventures index
Return to Darxus' home page.