When I was growing up, mine was the poster family for the stripped-down economy vehicle. We had VW bugs, Datsuns, Toyotas, a Chevette—if it was small and operated on a manual transmission, it was probably parked in our driveway at one point or another. My own first car was a Plymouth Horizon Miser (manual, of course) that got more than 40 miles to the gallon. (We did also have, for years, a Ford Econoline van, which wasn't so much "economy" but defined "stripped down." It was a utility van with seats, and a three-speed transmission stick on the steering column and that's the monster I learned to drive on; being on the shortish side, I had to hang on to the steering wheel with my left arm to yank myself far enough forward in the seat to mash down the clutch and wrestle the always-recalcitrant shifter into gear. Lemmee tell you, hill starts were fraught with excitement. I still have nightmares about driving that thing.)
At any rate, there was a brief period when I was about 14 when my family had 3 Pintos. The second-hand Pinto with automatic transmission and A/C was our luxury car, the first we'd owned that had either of those decadent features.
But here's a far better (second) life for a Pinto: "Scalding a Quarter-Mile in an Electric Ford Pinto" from NPR.
And speaking of EVs, I just found out that Alexandra Paul, actor and EV advocate featured in Who Killed the Electric Car (and kids, if you can remember this far back, once a star on Baywatch; she was the non-bimbo who looked like she might actually be able to save someone's life) is also an open water distance swimmer. A kindred soul!
(There's some weird cross-pollination between my passions going on here; it was my friend Bill, who lives in Highlands, NJ, former summer home of Gertrude Ederle, first woman to swim the English Channel, who alerted me to this NPR story.)
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