Car Blog

The First Time

If you’re sitting at a party and the conversation lags, you can always spark a lively discussion, particularly among guys, by asking the question, “What was your first car?” That query will often spark many wistful smiles. With glazed eyes those present will look back a few decades to their part of the American rite of passage, getting the first set of car keys, long-awaited tickets to freedom.

The classic car restoration market has a lot of serious collectors and investors. However, a large number of fans take the time to restore only one classic, the car they first owned. Like rediscovering an old love affair, many will invest any amount of time and money to find and fully restore this memento of their teen years.

You will often see an older man pull up at a light in a gleaming classic. You’ll see him smiling as he sits there and, as he glances around to see who’s checking him out, he’ll beam an even bigger smile and maybe even give you a little nod of the head or mock salute. As he drives off, a quick mental calculation of the age of the car and the man will usually put it in his teen years as a good used car. Nostalgia lives.

It’s All Relative

For more than a century, successive generations of young people have found their first independence behind the wheel of first, the family car, and then their own set of wheels. Uncountable scenes in movies and TV shows have captured scenes of these early love affairs and, before computerized autos, young men leaning into engine compartments with the hood raised up.

It makes perfect sense for this form of time travel to captivate so many classic car buffs. There are few things in life that allow you to revisit your younger lives, and in a more perfect version than the original. With a focused effort, most ensure their modern reincarnation of that firs love is perfect, totally fit out with pristine paint jobs and sparkling engines. No compromises are allowed when it comes to these babies.

While there isn’t much in life that can be made perfect with a checkbook, you can come very close when finding, buying and restoring a replica of your first car. Or, even better, finding the exact car you used to own and restoring the real thing. Wouldn’t it be great if we could so simply restore other such old memories?