Best “date car” story

Back when GM was still doing the Auto Show in Motion - where you could test drive both their cars and competitors' on something that looked close enough to an autocross course for me - I took my girlfriend and we both checked out some of the cars. Some of the highlights:

• She was a bit frightened at how I drove the Malibu Maxx - I'm pretty sure I never got more than one wheel off the ground at any time.
• She was even more terrified at how I drove the E46 BMW.
• Her take on the C5 Corvette was "It wasn't all that."
• But she really loved flinging the Aveo through the slalom flat out.

Yes, she was a keeper, both for putting up with me and eventually trying similar hijinx herself - she's now my wife.

maj75 (Forum Supporter) said:

There was one with my college girlfriend and the gearshift in my '75 Trans Am...

In high school, this story involved a Corvair, drive-in theatre and spanish fly.    

Gearheadotaku (Forum Supporter) said:

My life is dull. I have no stories....

Yea, me too.  It sucks to be me.  

I'm not going into any sordid details, but the car about which I have so many fond memories is the somewhat surprising 1987 Plymouth Reliant SE (not mine).  Yes, this unremarkable 4-door automobile had a somewhat weak 2.2-liter 4-cylinder engine, a nondescript automatic transmission with column shift, a super-squishy suspension that bottomed over speed bumps at 2 mph, and a front bench seat.  The front bench seat was easily it's most glorious attribute.  I will never forget the pleasant drives I took in that car for as long as I live.

Not much of a "date" story, but senior year 1985 and Grad Night at Kings Island amusement park, my friend and I had intentionally waited to get on a rolling river raft type ride until a group of girls got on.  We ended up talking to them on the ride and maybe a little after, I forget.

Time to leave that evening, see them again with a few more friends.  Turned out their ride split on them and they had to get back to northern KY (~1hr).  My friend had a 1970 Camaro, and we managed to fit 5-6 girls in there with us.  Front bucket seats mind you.

They invited us to their big farm party a few weeks later.  Needless to say I was too much of a nerd to score, but it made for a fun adventure.

One comes to mind.

I was driving my VW Fox, which was handed down to me after my mom beat the crap out of it for the first 2-3 years of its life. Picked up a girl I had been interested in for a while: it was our first date. While we were in mid-conversation, the whole exhaust system fell off and started dragging on the FDR drive exiting Manhattan.

I pulled over, took out my pocketknife (spyderco delica for those who care), cut the rubber exhaust hangers, tossed the muffler in the trunk, jumped back in and resumed our conversation. I had her crack the window to ventilate the cabin a bit, which she found hilarious.

We had a pretty wild time over the next few weeks, including my first experience with a girl bringing a friend into the bedroom (technically, the couch). She later told me that the nonchalant way I dealt with my car literally falling apart on our first date convinced her I was worth her time.

A Datsun 510 with no backseat and a partial cage and highside bucket seats is a terrible, terrible date car. But it turns out, referring another thread title here, that there are one or two *other* reasons why box flares make everything awesomer. 

A while back I was pretty broke and driving a minivan with about 300k (real, not exaggerated) miles on it. The A/C was a casualty of age and finances. 
 

A friend of mine was trying to set me up with her friend and it seemed like there was potential until the girl rode with me somewhere one day. It was summer in South Carolina and she seemed unimpressed by my wheels. 
 

My lady life partner likes taking my low, not quiet, and not well insulated Miata on dates now so that worked out pretty well for me.

Had just finished putting a header on my ride and the first good drive in it was to go to a movie date night with my girlfriend on a cool fall evening.  Turned out that the EGR crossover was in contact with some of the wiring for the ignition harness and it grounded out stopping the car. We had to get a tow instead of going to a movie we sat on the side of the road fogging up the windows. 

I say fogging up the windows because we couldnt do much more than sit and talk and maybe kiss a bit because Miata...   

Shes my wife now and actually sees it as an endearing memory. 

Sold the Miata, but the new date mobile (if we ever get babysitter support for the two kids AND out of a pandemic so we can actually go somewhere...) is a Bugeye Sprite. 

759NRNG (Forum Partidario) said:

rustybugkiller said:

I'm just here to see what story Curtis has!

Didn't disappoint did it ?

I have another one I gotta share, but I was unsure of how it would fly.  It's definitely NSFW

In college, I drove buses for a company near Pittsburgh.  It was school bus runs during the week and charters on the weekends.  We had a small fleet of MCIs and Prevosts.  The company had chartered a trip to Virginia Beach that was a dead-header (just drive them down, chill out for 5 days while the passengers were at a conference, then bring them home).  We had an opportunity for a charter in the middle of that trip, so it was my job to drive the boss' truck down to VA, bring the bus home, and then take it back down for the tail of the trip.  I drove down and stayed overnight at the hotel where I met a lady at the hotel bar who needed a ride to Harrisburg.  I offered to take her with me in the bus.  I was in my 20s and she was likely 40, but she was the kind of woman you would describe with a word that begins with M and ends with ILF.

It's not difficult to imagine what she offered as a fare for her transportation.  What was difficult were the logistics of receiving the fare while driving a 1978 MC8.  The steering wheel is practically in your belly, so... um... access to where she intended to deliver said compensation meant pretty much putting her face down through the steering wheel.  Every time I had to make a turn, I had to warn her and she would stop so I could turn the wheel.  My biggest recollection of that experience was that my hootus was like a playing card in bicycle spokes every time I had to turn.  Kinda took away from the enjoyment.

Still, probably the most fun I've had driving a coach.

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

 

I have another one I gotta share, but I was unsure of how it would fly. 

The magic is in the tact. Crafting words to convey it as sensual without being vulgar. It's not for lack of irony for which that such a skill set is how one has such situations present themselves to them...

spitfirebill said:

Gearheadotaku (Forum Supporter) said:

My life is dull. I have no stories....

Yea, me too.  It sucks to be me.  

If it makes you feel better, in most cases the more fun a story is to tell, the worse it was to be there when it happened.

My 91 jeep pickup and my 89 Toyota pickup. How more stuff for dates and stuff in the single cab or the bed in the jeep a couple of times. You can kinda have fun with three people in the cab of a toy pickup somehow.

captdownshift (Forum Supporter) said:

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

 

I have another one I gotta share, but I was unsure of how it would fly. 

 

 

The magic is in the tact. Crafting words to convey it as sensual without being vulgar. It's not for lack of irony for which that such a skill set is how one has such situations present themselves to them...

Most eloquently stated, sir.

When I went on my first date with my now-wife, it was 2005 and I had my recently-acquired 2002 WRX wagon. I made sure the thing was impeccably detailed and ready to rock. I picked her up, we went to dinner to a nice restaurant, went on a cruise on one of my favorite coastal driving roads, and then ended up at my buddy's "bar" in his garage with some friends of mine and their significant others. I drove her back to the parking lot where we initially met, we parted ways, and all was good. It was a great night!

About 5 minutes later, I was sitting at a stoplight, thinking about how well the night went, and some guy in a early 90's Honda Accord smacked my bumper. As I started getting out of the car to inspect the damage, he opened his door to get out, then slammed it shut, backed up, and took off through the red light. I immediately called the cops and gave chase. Local cops in the next town told me to stay with him until they could pick us up, and once they did, they diverted him into a grocery store lot. I got out and inspected the damage, and the guy was ordered out of the car by two cops. A quick whiff and I knew why he ran; he had been smoking lots and lots of weed. Luckily, there was no major damage to my car, but that guy ended up handcuffed in the back of the cruiser and the Accord ended up on a flatbed to an impound lot for that.

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

 

... my hootus was like a playing card in bicycle spokes every time I had to turn.

That may very well be the most inspired use of simile that I've ever had the experience of reading.  Nicely done, sir.

In college, my brother borrowed his roommate's beat-up Karman Ghia to go on a date.   Going around a corner, he hit a curb and the exhaust hanger broke.   He had to pull over because the exhaust was dragging on the pavement.

He didn't have much to fix the exhaust, but found his roommate's gym bag in the frunk.  Stealing a sweat sock (you know, white tube sock) from the gym bag, he rigged up an exhaust hanger to the bumper.  Problem fixed!

His roommate wasn't one to fix things quickly and that sweat sock lasted a long time.   When it finally burned through, he used the other sock.   When that one failed, he grabbed all of the single sweat socks from the local Laundromat Lost and Found.   He kept a bag of those Lost and Found socks in the frunk until he sold the car...  

What about the date? The girl?  Those socks lasted longer than the relationship.....

Oh, I have another one! This one predates the wife. 

Back in college, after I made the terrible decision to purchase and attempt daily driving a certain 1979 Pontiac Trans Am, I resorted to driving my dad's 1992 Ford F150 Flareside Nite 4x4 a lot, basically becoming my de facto daily driver for a while. He had a company truck, so he liked when I drove it so it wouldn't sit. I loved that truck and took good care of it when it was my daily driver, but man, it HATED me. Case in point: 

I lined myself up with a date with a girl I liked. I had been chasing this one for months, so I was excited. She brought another single friend, which was cool, because we were going out in a group with some of my friends. So I shined up the ol' Ford, cleaned it up real nice, and the ladies were impressed. We start heading toward the destination (a local pool hall/hangout place) and I start hearing some not-great noises. I press on, and then I hear grinding, metal clanking, and then the sound of the 5.0 singing at high RPM without going anywhere. One of the girls said "Whoa, what was that?", and my response was "That's the sound of a Ford breaking down!". To add even more awkwardness, we were about to cross a bridge, and the last place I could safely pull over was the parking lot of an adult store. That did NOT go over well with the ladies. My friends were following us, and they ended up picking up the girls and had a nice time without me. All that buildup for nothing! Thanks Ford! 

I had to call my dad, and once he got there, we took a look under the truck. What the hell made that noise? Then we noticed something long and tubular was missing; the driveshaft just LEFT. The yoke was still there, as was the end on the rear axle, but the shaft was completely gone. Usually when those go, they cause all sorts of damage, but in this case, it was as if the thing was selectively beamed up by the USS Enterprise. We never found it, either! We limped it home by engaging 4WD and the front axle crawled its way back home. 

C-blocked by a Ford. Unreal. 

Mine goes the other way mostly. We used to have a cruise route uptown and me and the other car guys hung out in a parking lot for cool downs etc.  a woman walked past and told me how much she liked the car (gutted 79 Capri, 306/c4 combo but it was the bright red she liked) so I ask her out and she agrees if I pick her up in the car. 
 

date night and it's upper 80s, she walks out in a miniskirt and as soon as I open the door her face went sour. It got even worse when she had to strap into a 5 point harness because teenage me thought they were awesome. The 30 minute drive too the restaurant was silent because you can't talk over an open header v8 spinning 3k rpm at 55. We had dinner and she called her sister for a ride home so she didn't have to get back In that death trap.

she might have been smarter then me, about 3 months later it shot a rear coil spring into the hatch! My now wife has loved my cars, although she did complain about the heat in the wagon when cruising since the engine swap. Something about heat shielding and carpet missing

1988RedT2 said:

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

 

... my hootus was like a playing card in bicycle spokes every time I had to turn.

 

That may very well be the most inspired use of simile that I've ever had the experience of reading.  Nicely done, sir.

Well what we have here, is a concise description of a serious design oversight if not an outright flaw!

Ill keep mine PG and talk about me and my now wife's first Christmas.

My house is in the middle of the woods, it's off grid and isolated. My wife had always lived in the city so this sounded like heaven to her, so we planned a trip up to the mountains. It's a roughly 2 hour drive from where she lived. I was happy she liked the idea because this would be my dad's first Xmas without my mom, and I was very determined to make this happen.

It started snowing heavy and we left her house late. My dad called me up and said they already had a foot of snow. I told him we were still coming up anyway.

Que one of the hardest winter drives of my life. They ended up pulling the snowplows off the road because they were getting stuck and it was too dangerous. They closed the 2 highways I was driving on but no berkeleys were given by me. My trusty 00 explorer with horrid weathermaster tires was making the trek.

I saw probably 2 dozen cars off the road. I went around a few down trees and the police car meant to stop me from going on the highway. Top speed was maybe 30 most the way and I was locked in 4 wheel drive the whole way. It was night and snowing so heavy that I had to go down to a crawl just to be able to see what I assumed was probably the road.

For the whole trip we were making nice conversation the whole way and she was enjoying the drive. I played it cool the whole time and she never guessed how bad it was. Eventually the car was warm and we had been sitting awhile so she fell asleep. She woke up as we turned into the driveway to the house that had about 2 feet of snow by now. She assumed that she had slept an hour by about how long the trip normally takes.

We pull up to the house and my dad is stunned we made it, hell I'm a little stunned but we were gonna make it goddamit. Total time eclipsed you ask? Almost 6 hours.

It was worth it because my dad had family close, my wife got to do the tradition we have of finding a tree on the land and cutting it down and she fell in love with it up here. We moved back years later.

That was an absolute bitch of a drive and I felt it was a good sign that my now wife felt so relaxed that she fell asleep even though we knew each other for about 3 months then. She's either my kind of crazy or im that good of a driver

This isn't really a date story since it wasn't really a date, as much as I hoped it would.

This has got to be in the early 90s. I was commuting to college in North Adams MA. Most days in a '79 Civic, but on nice days I'd take my '71 MGB. I fell in with a pack of geeks via a computer BBS system and hung out with them. One girl was a real cutie, 19 or 20 (I was 24ish) but she was going out with a 16 year old kid in this same clique. Drove me nuts.

One day she said she was free and wanted to go for a ride in the MG. Hell yeah, I said, I know just the place. On a glorious late spring late afternoon we piled in and we romped up Mount Greylock, which was a wonderful winding road that the B could just barely keep up to speed on, but it felt like 100 MPH. She loved it. We got to the summit and walked around a while, just talking and stuff till it started getting chilly and sunlight was fading. Time to head back to civilization.

Back in the MG and tearing down the hill, I'm Stirling Moss double-clutching and just throwing that poor car into every corner like I thought it would actually stick. Then, stunning silence. The car just quit and we coasted to a stop. I got this, I say even though I'm sure it's only a 50/50 chance I'll successfully diagnose the issue, much less repair it. She's probably thinking she's going to die on this hill because it's a long walk home, nobody is going to drive by and find us till the morning, and cell phones haven't been invented yet. Meanwhile, I'm under the hood poking around hoping it doesn't get much darker.

Suddenly, I spot it! The wire simply fell out of the end of the ignition coil. I popped that back in and we were on our way. I am going to be this girl's hero, I think, and all I got when we got back to her place was a cold "thanks" and she slammed the door after she got out. I don't know if that little mechanical failure killed any slim chances I had at landing this girl, but I'm sure it didn't help.

I had a 64 Comet back in '79. The 3 speed MT had a modified floor shift. It would shift into 2nd if ya rushed it, even though the trans. would stay in first. Did it while on a date; I just stopped, grabbed the drift pin I kept in the center console, rolled under the car to pin shifter in N, and pop trans. out of gear. Hopped back in and went on down the road. She just kinda stared at me. I explained what I had just done and she got a great laugh out of it. Honestly, I don't even remember who that was. Wasn't the situation, just something that didn't go anywhere.