My two car fleet in 2025
It’s getting late on a weeknight, but I need to blow off a little steam. A little cathartic quick fix sure would feel good before bed.
I walk outside and poke my head under one of my two street parked 1980s hoopties. “Oh, so that’s why the exhaust got so loud. The whole thing isn’t even connected in the middle!” There’s at least a 1/4″ gap between the lightly perforated catalytic converter and the equally holey muffler.
With entirely too much effort, I jack it up just enough to get my hand under there and thread a new bolt through the exhaust flanges to clamp the two halves back together. “Surely it will be much quieter now!”
It wasn’t any quieter. Drat.
So how did I get to the point where I’m taking public transit to work so I can have two street parked project cars? To find out, we only need to back up a few years.
My mom’s family hauler in 2020 – a 2005 Volvo XC90 2.5T FWD
I was always obsessed with cars from a young age, but my experience was limited to what I could glean from print publications like Motor Trend. By my last year of high school, the sum total of my interesting automotive experiences was once having ridden in a Jeep Patriot with a manual transmission. I had occasionally ended up at a car meetup or big auto show where I enjoyed seeing some cool vehicles, but I had basically no firsthand experience to speak of.
Sure, my mom’s car was somewhat unusual in that it had a turbocharged five cylinder. All I knew about it was that it had zero traction in even a light drizzle, making it pretty miserable to drive, and that it constantly broke in new and unusual ways. I appreciated some of the mechanical quirkiness, but I didn’t like driving it at all when I was learning to drive. The blind spots and overall size made it unpleasant to parallel park.
Basically a sports car
Then, my older brother briefly owned a 2003 Mazda Mazda6 V6 with the automatic. This was by far the sportiest car I had ever driven and one of the only sedans I’d ever ridden in up to that point. I loved how you sat low down yet had great visibility. And I discovered what handling was. When the wheel turned, the car turned without delay or sloppiness. It was a revelation.
This car didn’t last much longer than a year before a piston kissed a valve. It quickly was replaced by a much less fun Ford Fusion.
The family fleet at the end of high school in 2020 – the Fusion belonged to my brother
When it came time for me to finally have my own car to free my parents from chauffeur duties, I helped pick out a relatively mundane 2012 Chevrolet Cruze. Aside from an automatic and an unusual reddish copper color, it had zero options, but I didn’t mind. It felt downright sporty compared to the lumbering Volvo or the other car – a 2002 Toyota Tundra with worn out suspension that squeaked over every bump.
I had it set to color cycle
I didn’t have any idea how to work on a car, but I set out to learn. I changed my own oil. I installed custom color changing LED lighting under the dash and seats. I repainted the black steel wheels since the surface rust looked bad. I restored the headlights. None of these things took longer than an afternoon, but they didn’t all go smoothly either. It was a good introduction to learning to solve problems with cars.
Changing the oil on a car is a good introduction to wrenching in that it takes some of the mystery out of a car. Seeing a vehicle from the underside for the first time got me curious how much else I could do. Eventually, I even worked up the courage to change rotors and pads on the front.
The Tundra’s one big mishap
The next big event in my trajectory towards owning entirely too many old cars of questionable quality was that my dad’s Tundra hit 300,000 miles.
That’s an impressive feat, but what kicked off my wrenching habit was what happened next. You see, this truck, since new, had only ever had a radiator go bad in addition to not-so-regular maintenance. It wasn’t that surprising that eventually one or two other things needed to be addressed. Within two or three days of it hitting 300k, the key wore out so that it wouldn’t open the gas flap anymore. If some other companies build cars to fail exactly at 100,000 miles, I guess Toyota builds them for 300,000 miles.
The other thing that occurred was that a shock absorber violently disassembled itself over a bump at speed. This was just one month after hitting 300K.
This is what a 300K mile shock absorber looks like
Wanting to learn more about how to work on cars, I suggested that I help my dad install new struts ourselves to save money. We had basic tools and a nice covered place to work on it. How hard could it be?
As it turns out, quite hard with little experience between us for lining up stubborn mounting bolts. A defective part thrown in extended the job into a multi week fiasco, but we eventually got both front struts replaced ourselves. This triumph had me hooked on the wrenching “high.”
So, what did I do next? Buy a classic car? Turbocharge the Cruze? Learn to fall off motorcycles at speed?
Say hello to Arlo the whippet
No, I got into gaming. That demanded a proper gaming chair, which I couldn’t afford, so I made one out of scrap lumber I found lying around and a seat from a car. I didn’t do such a good job the first time around, so I disassembled the base I built, glued the wood back together end-to-end, and cut it at different lengths so the chair wouldn’t fall over as easily. I’m still shocked that worked.
The former Gray and White U-Pull-It in Atlanta
Naturally, I didn’t have a chair lying around, so I had to go get one. I visited a selection of local junkyards a few times before I found a good condition seat with manual adjustment in a 90s Honda Accord coupe. Wandering the rows of a junkyard and poking my head into all sorts of decrepit cars to check the condition of the seats, I saw a lot of janky low budget repairs and questionable modifications.
It also resulted in a famously unlikely event in which I accidentally glued my eyelids open with sticky seat rail filth. You never expect your ability to blink to be suddenly taken from you, but I assure you, it can happen. I had to manually blink for well over an hour before I got to a sink!
But by this point in my life, I was an architecture student at Georgia Tech and living in Atlanta without a car. I’ll cover how the Cruze and I became estranged and I dragged home a classic Mercedes in the future. Stay tuned for the second part of my COAL background for where I learn to break other people’s cars in parking lots and discover the hospitality of internet car enthusiasts!
Related CC reading:
2003 Honda CR-V: Desperate Car Shopping in 2025 – A Hopeless Hooptie Adventure
Great story, but you left me hanging again!
I gotta hear the part about the Cruze. Your automotive life and mine have many similarities….
The LED lighting in the Cruze cracks me up. How exactly did that become the first “modification” for the car?
I’m a bit surprised about the lack of traction on the Volvo. Of the range of possible complaints about one of those, no traction seems like it wouldn’t be on the short list. Was that ever addressed through improved tires and perhaps struts…or was it simply left as a given?
LED interior mood lighting is a pretty popular modification for high schoolers. Except I did a much cleaner install than most other people I knew that did it, running hidden wires from a fuse adaptor. And I didn’t even mentioned turning the Cruze’s roof into a rolling Christmas light display!
The Volvo had an unfortunate tendency to break the front wheels loose even with brand new tires on asphalt. The general gutlessness of the I5T before the boost kicked in was well suited to propelling a heavy SUV through the front wheels. Any amount of throttle in the wet and you were liable to chirp the wheels or fully break traction.
A Volvo that doesnt have much traction on tar, wow, they are good on snow and mud, My car has the same transmission, and fortunately traction control, that warning light is easy to light up but it does its thing really well.
Cruz with Holden badges are really cheap here, not quite free to a good home yet there must be a reason for that,
Im curious how the brilliantly steering Mondeo lost its edge over a Mazda 6 when translated to American, Mazda 6 is good on good dry roads Mondeo just goes where you point it speed doesnt matter very Citroenish but not as poised
That generation of the North American Ford Fusion is not based on the European Ford Mondeo, it’s based on…..the Mazda 6. So I’m not sure how or why the handling would be so different.
I think my son’s just a bit older than Gray, but after fitting undercar lighting to his Lancer (non-Evo), his next mod was LED interior lighting – I think his was just red though. It helped that during his apprenticeship as a heavy diesel fitter he got to work on all sorts of vehicles, all sorts of systems – made him pretty much fearless when it came to attempting stuff.
Great start to a COAL series. I am looking forward to further instalments.
Great story, looking forward to the next installment. Plus I had a red Cruze, so I’m even more curious about that.
Excellent stuff.
Ah yes, the familiar confidence of youth. “I’m sure I can fix this”, only to find oneself gloomily sat amongst the glories of public transport chariots as the sole source of one’s movements some weeks later. Been there, travelled on that.
The 300ZX self destructing mere hours into ownership did happen to coincide with a botched thermostat replacement on the faithful 300D. Fortunately, that’s all resolved now. But it certainly tested my willingness to endure the hooptie lifestyle.
I eventually did get the Nissan going again only to discover it was truly scary to drive due to certain quirks.
I use some caution in my old age Justy, I have a car that nobody knows anything about, so I phone NZ’s premier C5/6 guy and now Ive got most of it sussed, but I farmed out a nut and bolt job you need a lift for and they had a oops, so I’ll teach them how it works sometimes the customer does know, nearest Citroen shop had never seen a C5 till I showed up for a scan, and Ive seen 5 different hydra-active cars in this area.
Ive heard the doom and gloom stories about French electronics, in 230,000kms in C5s I finally have suspension issues and its simple to fix, I learned how,
You’ll be fine.
Love it. Great story.
And yes, the part about you gluing your eyelids open certainly had me laughing out loud.
I wasn’t laughing in the moment but it’s turned into one of my best “you’ll never believe what happened to me” stories. Hard to top for unlikely ways to be uncomfortable.
Yes. We certainly need to know more about this and the other upcoming COALS.
300 could be a lucky number with two 300s ZX & D, those Benz engines were pretty good and still in production in Korea, good choice
Most of those Nissan sports cars got driven hard at some stage of life, taking on a end of life example is brave good luck.
It is quite an accomplishment going from zero knowledge about fixing anything on a car to tackling the kinds of jobs you have tackled – especially in this era. I learned long ago that pretty much any decent automotive repair will involve at least a little blood at some part of the process, but the gluing open of an eyelid is a new one to me.
I am looking forward to the next installment!
There came a point when I realized owning an old car had to come before the knowledge to work on it. So far I’ve managed pretty well but there have been a couple disappointing weekends of wrenching in that time.
You have a good writing style .
I look forward to reading more .
-Nate