Sitting amongst the sea of white crossovers in the parking lot, it stands out like a sore thumb. Honestly, a red 1992 FD Mazda RX-7 would be hard to miss anywhere.
You remember seeing that double bump roof in the car magazines and wondering when this thing might depreciate to a point where you could afford one once you get that first real job. This was almost a race car for the street, a far cry from the more restrained cut-rate 944 of the previous model.
In the rust belt, you go out of your way to ogle such machines that are thin on the ground today. Just the sight of something like this can honestly make you forget the fact that you just shipped six hundred of the wrong things out to the field at work.
Looking around the back to see if this example has the infamous Bose sound system that looks like a digestive system …
It’s in looking at this detail that something hits you in the face like a brick: a “collector plate.” Oh, shit. This thing is the requisite thirty-two years old now to qualify for something you would imagine could only be stuck onto Tri-Five Chevrolets or other popular-with-boomers rides.
Damn, I’m old. What the hell happened? As much as I might make fun of those guys with New Balance sneakers and tube socks sitting in folding camp chairs complete with the logo printed on of the pride and joy they’re sitting next to, I’m just a stone’s throw away from that.
There are plenty of cars just like this today, from a McClaren F1 to a Nissan Z32 300ZX; cars I still see as modern, unobtainable objects that only exist in glossy advertisements. Now they’re classic cars to the latest generation, and it’s hard to deal with that.
How about you? What cars do you love with all your heart but in some twisted way cause you pain by reminding you that you’re a day closer to death and already eligible for an AARP card?
Top graphic inset: starush/stock.adobe.com
I’ve never felt old in a car, then again I don’t drive Today’s technophilic automobiles.
Eh, cars don’t make me feel old actually. I’ve loved cars from every generation since I was 3. Actually, seeing the world turned into a sea of boring SUVs and CUVs all looking the same kinda makes me feel old I guess.
I was 3 in 1958 and knew every car on the road. Old cars make me feel young again, not old. Plenty of other things do the latter for me.
I remember going to the Henry Ford museum in the mid 90’s, and seeing the Gen 1 Taurus next to all the older, classic cars made it look like some sort of minimalistic space car from the future. I went back last year expecting the same feeling but it just looked like some boring-ass old car I wouldn’t vote for on Shitbox Showdown.
I was there a couple years ago and they had a 1989 Honda Accord, identical to the one my family had until 1998 or so. I was only five when they sold it but still, that made me feel old.
That my 07 Tiburon is 17 years old now…. yikes man 07 feels like not that long ago. I was a 12 year old kid playing NHL 06 when it was built
believe it or not, the PT Cruiser. They were lousy cars but it’s the last time I remember that a car manufacturer had the guts to put out something that didn’t look like a minor variation of every other vehicle on the street. Those days are long gone and will never return.
The cybertruck (For all its faults) exists. Weird and different designs will always have a niche in the market.
6th-gen Civic (95-00) – I’m in my late 30s and my high school girlfriend drove one. I still see them (and the same era Accord) driving around and it snaps me back to realize that these cars are 25-30 years old and still what I consider “current era” vehicles. I guess if you make a car so reliable that they never go away, they stay in the zeitgeist longer?
Today I saw a 1965 Ford LTD 2 door hardtop on the road.
I thought to myself “Wow – You’re still on the road, Oldtimer!”
Then I realized we’re the same age.
To beat my favorite drum, modern pickup trucks. They haven’t sold a compact pickup in the US since 20 years ago, and full-size trucks with 8′ beds are a dying breed.
Bonus be-wrinkler: people who are afraid of motorcycles with carburetors. Carbs are stone-simple, don’t really wear and once clean have nothing to break.
For me it’s something like a Rivian, or some other cutting edge electric car filled with touchscreens, radar guided cruise control, lane assist and all of those things. I finally understand why when I would try explain computer stuff to my parents, they would say “I’m not bothering to learn that”
I was just driving my Son home from school and took a circuitous route today because the wife wanted me to get bagels on the way home. On the previously aforementioned circuitous route we passed a Stealth RT Turbo sitting in someone’s driveway. I exclaimed to my son “MAN! I had a poster of one of those on my wall when I was a little bit older than you. Always wanted one of those”. Then it hit me that I was talking about a time that was 20 years before he was born. And he was born 12 years ago. So that was 34 years ago. And here i was saying things to my Son my Dad used to say to me. Ugh, Im old
My state gives out historic tags to cars that are 20 years old or older. Lots of people get them and put them on their daily drivers because registration is cheaper and they don’t have to get a safety inspection or emissions tested. You aren’t supposed to do that for daily drivers, but people do it.
So what really makes me feel old is seeing, like, 2004 Camrys / Corollas / Accords with historic tags. Like I was legally an adult when those were new!
This was going to be my reply. Seeing any “normal” car from 2000+ with Antique/Classic Car plates makes me feel hella old.
Anything from the 90s is making me feel old. I live in a area where rust eats up cars so at least I’m not reminded of it constantly.
My son is learning to drive with my Mom’s 94 Accord. Seems like a perfectly fine car to me (and my son likes it) but it occurred to me it’s 30 freaking years old. The equivalent of me learning to drive in the 80s with a 55 Chevy.
It puts things in perspective. Too much f-ing perspective, if you ask me
SN95 Mustang. I remember when they came out, and looked so modern and sleek. Now I see them and ooof do they look fairly crude. Especially where the rear roof pillars meet the quarter panels, and there’s just a gap there. It made all the models look like convertibles (so coupes looked like hardtop convertibles), and the 1993-1998 models a bit bathtub-like.
Admittedly it probably made stampings common for both coupes and convertibles, but even when they were new the gap stood out. One of my jobs back when was as a porter/detailer at a Ford dealership when the New Edge Mustangs (facelifted SN95s with, well, edgier styling that came out in 1998) were on sale, and I hated having to detail-clean that area because there was inevitably some hidden muck up in there.
The 1990 Miata that I bought new…
now sporting an antique car tag.
The E36 BMW I had one new 30 years ago. When I see a pristine one it doesn’t look that old a design to me.
The McLaren F1 made it’s debut a week after I was born… that definitely makes me feel old.
But really, as far as street cars are concerned, it’s the S2000. I absolutely adore that car, but my mind is blown every time I remember it first launched 24 years ago.
On the racing side of things, pretty much anything NASCAR related pre-Dale Earnhardts death makes me feel old. I still remember going to the track with my dad in the late 90’s and watching him race. While I was never a Dale fan (Rusty was my guy), his death was the end of an era.
Oof. Was just watching the Talladega race, and your Earnhardt comment reminded me of the feel old moment I just had. Saw #3, wonder why that number was being used so soon. Then realized it was 23 years ago we lost Earnhardt. And it was 8 years that #3 wasn’t used.
Austin Dillon has been using that number for years now and it still doesn’t feel right haha.
GM EV1 and AC Propulsion TZero
I loved these cars when I was a kid. Now they are almost extinct. One TZero survives, along with a double-digit number of EV1s, the count of which is in dispute.
These cars show what the major automakers could have been selling to the public almost 3 decades ago, and from an efficiency standpoint, none of the OEM’s current offerings have matched or beat them.
I think the main thing that makes me feel old is drive by wire. My first car to have it was a 2001 A4, and I couldn’t stand it. The throttle lag was so frustrating, I vowed to stick with a “conventional” throttle moving forward, after all my 1990 Miata and 2002 WRX both had cable throttles, how hard could it be to avoid DBW? Well, hard. I ended up with a modern automatic for a bit but next time around I vowed to get a cable throttle, and the most modern thing I could get with it that met my needs was a 1998 Boxster (technically a 1999 would have done as well, I just happened to find a 1998 instead). The 911 only got it for a year. This means that 25 years ago, the last Porsche with a cable throttle was made. The 997, for a very long time my dream car, features DBW, even the Carrera GT has it. Hell, even EPAS is hard to escape, both the S2000 and Z4 featured it, leaving the Boxster, Miata and, unexpectedly, the SLK as the only roadsters of the 2000s with hydraulic power steering.
It bewilders my senile brain that these two features alone eliminate nearly everything made since I gained sentience.
I’m daily driving a 1993 Miata because I consider that modern. My insurance company won’t cover it and I have to use collector insurance or Progressive.
Probably the weirdest realization was in my 1968 4-4-2, though. I was driving it to work and I slowly began to notice that as I drove down the interstate, hands began popping out of car windows with phones in them, taking pics or video. That was the exact moment that I realized the days of driving a 60’s muscle car around like a normal car were gone. If you’re on the interstate in a ’68 4-4-2, it seems very, very weird to people.
It was also at that point that my brain did the math and I realized that driving a 1968 4-4-2 in 2024 is the equivalent of driving around in a 1932 Ford in 1986.
Ouch.
Nissan GTR. The GTR came out in my 20s and it always seemed like a futurist, high-tech sports car. The GTR isn’t really that old since it is still in production, but something I read on Ye Olde Site a few years ago changed my perception of that car and myself.
It was a post where people wrote about vehicles that got them interested in cars. Several readers mentioned the GTR and wrote about having posters of Nissan GTRs on their bedroom walls as kids. While reading that I recalled the Countach poster on my childhood bedroom wall and realized I was no longer one of the youths.
As someone who is technically a millennial, I think that was the first time I ever felt old. Now I work with several people who do not remember a time before the internet and cellphones, so I feel old on a regular basis.
It occurs to me the GTR is still in production without major changes after 15 years. If cars were sentient, I wonder if a 2024 GTR would make a 2009 feel old?
MGB. In the ’80s they were all over the classifieds and as a kid I dreamt of someday buying one. Now they just feel old.
Long gone are the days when my friends and I could pick up an old beater MG for less than $500 and run it for the summer…….
I put classic plates on my ’88 MR2. I was born in 1988. That was an emotionally traumatic moment.
I have an ’89 MR2… I avoided the historical plates so I could drive it at night. The MR2 was a car I thought was super cool when I first got my license (in the mid 80s). So I avoided the trauma of historical plates and all the little kids in the neighborhood also think I’m driving a really cool car 🙂
The collector plate thing…. We don’t really have collector plates in California, per se (there is a “Historical Vehicle” plate, but they’re very uncommon), so I did a double-take when I went to college in Virginia and saw my first collector plate there—attached to a Fox-body Mustang. This was in 2004, so the Mustang would have to have been a newly-eligible ’79, but to me, coming from California where cars don’t die, that was just a not-that-old used car.
Someone also mentioned the relative ages of cars then and now; when I was learning to drive in our family’s ’87 El Camino, it was 15 years old—significantly newer than the 21-year-old 2003 BMW I daily today, but you can’t tell me that the El Camino at 15 felt anywhere near as modern as a BMW at 21. Even if you factor in the age of the basic engineering; that generation El Camino was introduced for 1978, so in 2002 the platform was 24 years old. The E39 was introduced in 1995, so its platform is now 29 years old. Yikes.
And then there’s the “my family had that car new, why is it so trashed now?” phenomenon. So many there: the Saturn and the PT Cruiser have become truly rare in decent condition, but even they’re old now. The one that gets me is, my mom had an E93 BMW 328i convertible (six-speed with the Sport package and no iDrive!), bought new in 2007. That doesn’t seem that long ago, but trashed E9X 3ers have become a sadly common sight. The last time I saw an E93, it was parked on the side of the road, where it had been set on fire by whoever had stolen it.
The Clio MK1. It came out when I turned 8, and it was a radical shift in design for Renault. It will always feel kind of like a car from the future to me – that rear windshield wiper was like nothing I’d ever seen back then in a cheap car – but it’s now garnering some cult following as a classic and that is sometimes hard for my brain to process.
It’s always a reality check about my age when I see a Clio MK1 phase 1. Looking at that rear windshield wiper and no longer feeling like I’m looking at the arm of a robot makes me feel old as hell. I still get excited when I see one of those wipers perfectly intact (they were gone with the very first facelift; whenever I find a good condition windshield wiper+old Renault logo combo – meaning it’s either a 90′ or a ’91 – I almost lose my shit).
90s Cutlass Ciera, thats the one my grandpa used to have around those years when I was kid, he would pick me up to go to the movies, such great memories.
Every time I see a mint one I just smile, thinking he is driving it.