Thank you, Chevy Vega!

I chuckled today as I clicked through a list of the “25 worst cars ever sold.”

I’m happy to say I never owned one of those cars, but I did get lucky by accident because of a car on the list and another that I was surprised to see omitted.

I bought my first car in 1976, when my brand-new driver’s license was all of one week old. I wanted to buy a new car. My theory on wanting new was simple: I was just a stupid girl with no mechanical knowledge or ability and, with the limited income of a full-time college student, I didn’t want to buy someone else’s problem. I'd much rather have a budgeted monthly bill than a host of unscheduled repair bills.

Armed with a maximum budget of $3,000, I set out to shop, knowing the only cars falling within that price range were the Chevy Vega and the Ford Pinto. Chevrolet had also just released a new car called the Chevette, but I was avoiding that because even stupid girls knew enough to avoid a car in its first year of release.

A 1976 Honda Civic. Not my car, but damn close.

A male friend of mine and I set out to shop and landed at Luby Chevrolet to look at a Vega and check out the Chevette.

Luckily for me, Luby at the time was just one of two Baltimore area Honda dealers. I didn’t even know Honda had cars on the market; I knew them simply as a motorcycle outfit.

I saw this adorable little car tucked away in a corner and asked the salesman about it. He informed me that I didn’t want that car; it was “foreign” and “new” and not many mechanics would be able to work on it when maintenance was needed.

The salesman got rude when I became insistent that I wanted to know more about the car and began to ignore me and talked instead to my male friend.

To his credit, my friend Pete told the salesman that I was the one spending the money and he needed to talk to me. 

I was already over the salesman and we left. We went to Doug Griffith Chrysler-Plymouth on Harford Road, where the salesman was more than happy to sell me a 1976 Honda Civic. It was adorable (stupid girl observation) in a color that was a reddish-orange. It came with an AM-FM radio and a rear-window defroster, which I thought was so state-of-the art! It also was one of the few models with a trunk, as opposed to a hatchback. 

When the dust settled, the on-the-road price was $2,985 and change. I put $400 down (money saved from being a summer playground leader) and then had three years worth of monthly payments of $90.76.

I loved that car and battered the hell out of it for nearly five years. It hauled kids to special events, nursing home residents to Orioles baseball games and once was picked up and moved to a sidewalk by some of the aforementioned rec center kids.

My beloved first car was obliterated in 1981 when a car ran a red light and broadsided it. I loved that car so much that, even when confronted with the visual proof that the frame was torn up and the dash and roof was folded over into itself, I begged a mechanic to fix it.

So thanks, Chevy Vega, for being such a crappy car. Because of you, I have enjoyed a 40-year love affair with Honda vehicles.