And now I have the feels

I have bought and sold more than my fair share of cars, trucks and bikes. Usually selling one is like seeing the light at the end of a long dark tunnel, and somewhere a couple miles back all the money fell out of my pockets.

Yesterday my trusty little S10 drove out of my driveway for the last time. I know it went to a good home and it will be appreciated and cared for, but dammit, I feel bad about selling it. I bought it on the cheap, on a whim, and daily drove the thing for 3 years (an eternity for me). It didn't have any problems, and I didn't need to sell it. It never left me stranded, it did truck stuff, it was just a good, good vehicle.

What cars/trucks/bikes do you regret selling? And why? Reliable classics? Badly timed collectors cars? Lets hear it.

My 99 Integra GSR coupe, manual, black on black, relatively unmolested save for a CAI and Koni/H&R suspension. I had it for almost a decade and it took me through the harrowing cratered streets of ATL, many autocrosses, and my first track days.  Sniff.

I had a '95 Neon ACR sedan I bought in '99.  Drove it about 7 years and 70,000 miles through all kinds of crap.  Added an Iceman and MPP ECU.  Always intended to autocross it but never did.  But I drove the crap out of it as a daily, and we both loved every minute of it.

Sold it to a guy who was going to turn it into a hillclimber.  I hope he did.

I also, of course, miss the '67 Le Mans I owned for 30+ years.  But that is more than offset by the knowledge that the current owner (Hi, Curtis!) loves it to pieces as well, and drives it like it deserves to be driven.

Datsun/Nissan Stanza.  It was a 3-door, 5-speed and my first "foreign" car.  I sold it because I didn't think I could perform the very basic repairs that it needed.  Repairs that I caused because I also couldn't perform basic maintenance.    The regret is less about the car, and more about losing money on the sale and wasting money on buying something else when I didn't really need to.  

Hard to find pictures, mine was blue and was a lot of fun to drive, having not driven a 4th Gen Civic yet.

I was in highschool in the 90's when I bought my first car, a '64 Plymouth Savoy that has been parked in a house-turned-garage for 20 years.  I got my first job working off the farm for a local undertaker that own most of a city block; I did ground work around his business/home as well as working in cemeteries pouring slabs for headstones, helping repair old headstone slabs, et cetera.  Crappy work but I was making... not enough to really resto/repair the car as much as it needed.  My father hated this car, even though it was quite clean with little rust.   He kept lobbying for me to sell the car for any amount to just be rid of it while I refused.  My mother was the referee on this one and she seemed to be okay with it.

That all changed one night when I was parking the car in a shed to avoid storms and the master cylinder didn't hold pressure.  The car basically idled into a stack of wood, me pumping the brake furiously, and bent the grill a bit.  That was enough for my Dad to say that it was unsafe, needed to go, etc.  I was basically broke and the car was sold for not-really-market-value to a jerk that my father knew.  My father did get me a replacement car, my turbo 626, which was a very odd change from the Plymouth, but a great car all the same.

I don't know that I really want the Savoy back, were it to be handed to me today.  They're kind of cool, but more in the "they used to race these" kind of way.  The suspension is kind of cute, with torsion bars up front, leafs in the back, and garbage drum brakes all around.  Sometimes I think about what it would take to make it a great daily driver today and the answer is basically a $15k pile of parts (Mustang 8.8 out back, some kind of disc brake kit up front, a different k-member with a steering rack and mounts for an LA V8, engine and trans from a 90's 2wd truck, etc).  And in the end it's just not really my kind of car.  

In 1974 sold 66 Mustang fastback purchased for $750 out of a junkyard/tranny repair shop.  Put a rebuilt transmission in it and drove it for 3 years until I crunched right rear quarter panel hitting a tree. Only had liability insurance and not enough money to fix it.

It was just an old ratty former rental car. Sold it for $450. Oh yeah, did I mention it was originally a Hertz gt350h?

Dammit Ovid.

barefootskater said:

What cars/trucks/bikes do you regret selling?

Pretty much every one of them.  I tend to keep cars and bikes for a long time and develop sentimental attachments to them, so it's kind of traumatic when I do sell one (or even worse, when I have to send them to the salvage yard.)

I sold my Miata to a friend to be a dedicated autocross toy.  So now I see it at each event we do.  

I regret selling my '91 318is. 

Ground control coilovers, exhaust, intake, all brakes/bushings/control arms, etc were fresh. Euro trim. TMS chip, lightweight flywheel, 17x7.5 SSR Comps with 215/45/17 RT-615k (THis was 2010.)

I desperately regret selling that car.

The 64 impala, 97 neon acr, and track prepped crx si. 

Only the acr is one i would write a check for today though. Is a skinny damn minute.

66 Mustang GT.    66 Chevelle Lt1 (from the 70's version) 4 speed.   68 Chevelle small block, 4 speed.   63 Impala 6 cyl, 3 speed stick.  60 MGA.... All fun cars, but I was young and broke most of the time.   Sold a few to buy motorcycles.

My first '88 944 Turbo S.  That was a good car...

I'm in the process of re-homing my '01 F250.  I bought it new and have driven it over 280k miles.  I've spent 20 hour days in it plowing snow, driven it on vacations, hauled tools and supplies on mission trips in it, used it to explore logging trails in the Adirondack mountains, hauled a variety of race cars to a variety of tracks around the South West with it, dragged home a bunch of project cars behind it, used it to rescue countless stuck and stranded motorists and driven it to work most days.  I'm sure that I'll create a bunch of memories with it's replacement but it's still sad to see it go.

pres589 said:

Dammit Ovid.

Yep. It was just a ratted out 100000+ mile rental car. Nobody ever thought it would be worth anything. The guy that bought it cut it up to make a dirt track car.

That story just keeps getting worse!

'64 corvair monza spyder convertible.   i'll build another one someday.

pinchvalve said:

Datsun/Nissan Stanza.  

I wish i still had my first car. Also 83 datsun/nissan stanza. 4 door, automatic trans, silver with gray interior and maybe all the options. Had power windows, power locks and a tape deck. It was relatively minty, a survivor. Wasnt until i got my 2012 frontier that i had a more optioned vehicle. 

The datsun was sold in 2000 if i remember right. 

My first car was a '73 Mazda RX-2.  Just a frumpy little 4-door, but she was fun to drive and got me around for a few years.  Fresh out of college, I was looking for something a little spiffier and sold her to a guy I knew for $75 less than I had paid for it five years earlier.  About a week later, it was totaled in a T-bone collision in an intersection.  The new owner had run a light, but was okay, fortunately.

It was a cool car, and it would be neat to have it back in one piece, but I never considered keeping it at the time.  It wasn't until a decade later that I found the virtues of owning multiple vehicles and acquired the means necessary to keep them.

A few years back, my Dad was cleaning out the garage and brought me the two factory original wheel covers that were on the car when I got it.  They're hanging this moment on the wall of my garage.  They're all that I have left to remind me of her.  <sniff>

I’ve kept every car until they died. 

Miss my NB, but don’t regret selling it. I regret not buying the Tundra from my dad when he sold it. That was kind of mine, but the regret really only came in hindsight. We really should have kept it. 

I guess I regret selling the SAAB. I shouldn’t, but I loved that car. 

Dad has a 91 318ic, and we keep talking about listing it for sale. But it’s too hard to do at a fair price, and we both know we will regret it. That’s not my car, but I certainly have claim to love it like mine. 

The '10 Forte. Trading the 93 full size for the Sonoma. That's about it. 

My ZX2 s/r

87 928S4 - My personal long distance commuter from Boston to NY and Bethesda on a weekly basis.  So want that one back.  Dark blue with a manual trans.  You could eat up the miles for many hours and get out fresh and ready to do waht ever needed to be done.  

86 951 First or second in the country as a dealer demo. Purchased off the dealer showroom floor. (I was going to see about getting a 911 but I saw it and had to have it) Turns out it was a gray market car that was way more peppy than the US version.   Back then they were not nearly as strict about those things.

79 ZEPHER WAGON Canada market car.  Strait 6 and rear defrost and a plug in block warmer.  No other options.  Loved they simplicity of it.  Hand crank windows and a bench seat with an AM radio.  Life was good.   

Ya I know a weird dichotomy of cars but those three stick out the most.  I would like to get them all back if I could.   

'69 AMC Javelin. High school car. 290 "Cyclone" V8, 4bbl, 4 speed, and Clean as a pin.

Also, '89 Swift GTi. L just plain loved that car. It was a P.O.S., and 2-300K miles on the chassis. I got it very close to being a nice car, and was tempted by a Starlet. RWD got me.