Growing up as enthusiasts, one of our key points of exposure to awesome cars was simply finding them in the wild. It was even better when a cool car lived in the neighborhood you lived or went to school, because it meant a chance to see it regularly, get familiar with it, and admire it.
Some of us even form childhood bonds with these cars, these roadside sculptures, these monuments to engineering. They can become our favorites, canonized in the pantheon on greats. Best of all, they don’t have to be mind-blowing to rock our worlds. Whether something exotic or something affordable yet neat, as long as it captures the imagination and inspires, it’s cool.
For about three years, I attended a school outside my immediate neighborhood, and on the way there, I’d see a Ferrari 550 Maranello that lived outdoors in front of a modest home. It was completely unexpected, and yet, there it was — the last pretty manual Ferrari used as a daily driver. The GT cars were always Enzo’s favorites for the road, and I got to see one of my personal hero cars almost every day on the way to school.
Today we’re asking you what the coolest car in your childhood neighborhood was, or any other neighborhood you frequented for school or friend meet-ups. It doesn’t have to be the most astonishing thing on the books, it just has to have moved you in some way. Who knows? It could’ve even been the beginning of something great.
(Photo credits: Bring A Trailer)
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My neighbor across the street had a red Alfetta GTV for a while, and my grandad’s car was a ’77 Taunus GT.
We had a neighbor that bought a Ford GT, white with the blue stripes. He was a nice guy and took me for a ride in it once. Incredible car.
I’d like to think that it was us. We had a 1975 Porsche 914 2.0.
However, being in the Metro Detroit area, my neighbor’s dad worked for GM, so they had a new car every 6 months. He had an orange Firebird Formula that was SO EFFING COOL, only to then get a 1977 Trans Am, just like Smoky and the Bandit. And it had a CB RADIO!
So my neighbors not only had a Smoky and The Bandit Trans Am with a CB Radio, they had CB Handles! Eddie, IIRC, was “Tweety Bird”. How can you even pretend to have a handle if you don’t have a CB radio?
Lamborghini Countach, Cocaine White.
Neighbor 4 doors down owned a body shop and spliced 2 totaled Lambos together. Looked and sounded good. Funny thing is that we lived in a lower middle-class suburb with tiny lots and small single floor homes. Most people drove rusty Chevys and Fords. So it was quite a sight to see that thing rolling around. It also played La Cucaracha over custom air horns every time he pulled up to his house in it.
Weird dude, but a cool car.
Growing up in the 60’s in a rural area not much in the way of exotic metal. A friend of the family had an old barn inside I discovered a late teens model T Ford roadster just sitting there all covered in dirt and dust. It was so different from the cars I was used to. I spent many hours playing on that car and developed a life long passion for older vehicles.
Growing up in the 1960s in a conservative Pennsylvania town, there was a Citroen DS and Saab 93 within a block of my home. Those were the daily drivers for a pair of college professors, so they were definite outliers. The husband usually sported a beret, the first (and I think only) time I saw one in that town. Most surprising, though, was the Isetta our Boy Scouts scoutmaster had secreted in his garage just a few doors from my home. Even then, it was a “project I’m going to get to very soon.” To the best of my knowledge, he never did …
We’d have a Ferrari Testarossa appear up the street from me pretty regularly. Guy came from a family of doctors who also owned a medical center. He’d get visited, or borrow the Ferrari for days at a time. It’d just be parked on the street, and our crew of kids on bikes would go drool nearby. We were middle class families, you’d be surprised to see a BMW or Cadillac in our neighborhood, let alone a Ferrari you had on a poster on your wall.
Not my neighborhood directly, but notable mention to my buddy down the road a bit who had a neighbor with a Viper GTS, blue on white stripes, although he put a wing on it for some reason.
Growing up in Chennai, India, the only cars I grew up seeing were Fiat 1100s, and Hindustan Ambassadors. But, my grandaunt had the foresight to marry a man who knew his cars.
This gentleman worked for the Indian Railways, the government-owned monopoly that operated the entire railway network in India. Now, Indian Railways were using the WDM-4 locomotive manufactured by Electro-Motive Diesel (a GM subsidiary) in Illinois, and they chose my granduncle to visit the factory. Apart from what I assume was a reasonable learning experience (he had a pretty successful career at Indian Railways), he also picked up a used Studebaker Commander (’54 if I remember right).
The car, rocking an after-market gold paint job, was eye-catching to say the least. My granduncle rarely took it out, preferring to use his government-issue Ambassador. But I would drop in at every chance, to sit in the ‘golden car’ (6-year old me didn’t know the make or model). The car smelled rich – polished leather and pipe tobacco, with a dash of Eau Savage.
Parts and maintenance were definitely a problem, but the old man somehow kept it running and in tiptop condition, till the day he died. My grandaunt sold the car to a collector, who still has it.
Not the fastest or the sleekest car ever, but a gem in the wilds of 80’s India, nevertheless.
We didn’t have a lot of interesting cars around, no supercars or sportscars, but there were still some that i thought were nice. I remember a blue Toyota Dyna, which is really nothing special, but I alwayd used to like it, and I still think they are cool.
Then there was an other van, but this was no work truck. It was a Mitsubishi Delica with the cool bumpers, wheels and the lifted suspension. It must have been pretty rare and was most likely imported. I thought already then that it was cool, but I didn’t know how rare it was. Since then I still haven’t seen one in real life. And, lastly, the only sports car was a blue Subaru Impreza (I have to imagine it was a sporty edition) whos owner, who was a quite well known singer, had the habit of taking it out and revving it in the cul de sac in front of the houses at dawn.
I grew up in the 70s in a very boring suburb where most families had very boring sedans or family wagons. The most interesting car in the street for ages was the 1962 Valiant a neighbour had hidden in his garage – it might have been a significant part of the reason why I own one now! A guy further down the road had a 1949 Holden sedan, but a friend of his that regularly visited had a Maserati Merak that was dented, had patchy paint and rust spots, and smoked a fair bit! I assumed at the time it was an old, clapped-ouit example he had found cheap, but later realised it would have still been in production at that time, so could have been 10 years old at most!
But the most interesting car was built by a couple of brothers who lived down the road and were older than most of the local kids – they graduated from competitive skateboarding to building an HQ Holden panelvan, complete with flares, custom nosecone and rear spoiler, bubble windows, candy apple red paint, airbrushed murals and a fully decked-out interior. To the rest of us younger kids riding around on BMXs or old Chopper style bikes, they were the KINGS!
My stepdad had the coolest car on my block. He flipped exotic cars as a side hustle, and for a while the family hauler was an open top Jeepster, a really fancy one that had been owned by some Saudi prince. This was in the mid-70’s, no seatbelts, no top, so my sister and I would get beat up by the wind in the backseat on the LA freeways. He bought some Army-surplus gas masks and sewed on some webbing to fit our noggins so we could shield our faces. We looked like two little Martians in the backseat. I wish I still had a picture of that.
We had one of these in the neighborhood….didn’t know how rare it was back then. https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.Tpk4UwC_FBHA-QsHSy61awHaEo?w=295&h=184&c=7&r=0&o=5&pid=1.7
A neighbor had a smoke silver 1978 733i manual with a red leather interior. That car was all the sex.
On the 1/2 mile dirt road I grew up on, there was the guy with the ’54 Cadillac hearse, the lady with a first gen toyota celica notchback, my next door neighbor that had a ’66 Plymouth Belvedere as their family car until their son knocked a Belvedere shaped hole in a brick wall, then there was my family with my ’74 buick, my ’85 mustang gt, my dad’s ’31 ford panel delivery, and my brother’s ’68 Plymouth GTX.
Take your pick.
I could name the 308 GTB my neighbor owned, but the hardly ever drove it. I could name the Rover P6 3500 (with the Buick V8) another neighbor drove. These two were the coolest cars when I was a kid. But now in hindsight as an adult I know better. It’s the Austin Allegro of which the front end was swapped for the Van Den Plas Allegro front end. It looked so bizarre to me as a kid and I couldn’t understand why you would put a Rolls Royce grill on an Allegro. Now I know this actually was a BMC failure to understand the market. So cool and I might have done the exact same thing if I had owned that Allegro in the 1980s.
Grew up semi-rural, so not a lot of unusual or exotic cars around, mostly work trucks and DDs. But a few still stand out.
As a little kid, we had a neighbor who bought new a mid-60s 4 door Mercury Breezeway with the roll down rear window. Had a BBQ just to show it off. I thought it was cool, but my dad looked at it and went, why? I still thought it was cool.
Then in middle school, had a teacher who bought a green ’71 (I think) mustang and they became the cool teacher. Years later told him how cool we all thought it was and he laughed and said it was slow and handled like crap. I still thought it was cool.
Lastly it was an older moneyed kid that as soon as he had a license, got a new lime green Superbird with the huge wing, and all the bells and whistles. The thing was a monster. I rapidly didn’t think it was cool. No hate, it just didn’t suit the type of roads and the situation at the time. Even the kid who owned it got out of it within a year.
Our neighbor down the street picked up a Lancer Evolution VIII right when they came out. He then proceeded to turn it into an autocross beast. Loved hearing it come down the street.
The car I thought was the coolest was a super clean, silver, second gen (1980ish) Honda Civic on very nice BBS-style basket-weave wheels five houses down from mine and parked on the curb. I’d admire it each day from 6th grade-ish (1980) all the way through high school. I think it was still around and just as clean 12-15 years later. I liked silver on that car, though I’ve since developed a hate for silver cars. That’s the car that impressed on me the transformative effect of a pretty set of wheels.
Second place would be the Porsche 930 Turbo even closer to my house, but across the street. It was always garaged (backed in), but sometimes the garage door would be left open. I and some other kids were once invited in to look at it. The supercar Parsh was not as cool as the Civic to me though.
That’s a tossup. The dude across the road from our farm had a Centurion-converted E-350 with the 7.3 and a Porsche 944 for about 3 weeks til it burned up. But then, our next-door neighbor was a gearhead and he and his daughters had some pretty cool rides, too. I recall he daily’ed a slammed GMT400 dually with an Escalade front clip, while his oldest daughter had a Prelude Si and the youngest had a lowered S10 Xtreme. Being a GMT400 nerd, I guess our neighbor wins.
I will have to give 2 answers, i had 2 neigborhoods as my parents were divorced. I grew up around the world of 4×4 and offroad racing and in my neighborhood lived scott ellinger, one of the original people who set up the king of the hammers race, we use to go four wheeling with him a lot and the work done to his (very early) ultra 4 truck is incredible. while it has been disassembled the parts are in another rig of his and the frame and cage sits in his shop. the other one is another family friend of ours, he has the first Shelby gt500 fastback. Ive gotten to drive (and do a burnout) in this car and it is incredible. it is one of the most beautiful cars on the planet and the noises it makes are just stunning.
(Scott ellinger)
https://www.offroadlifestyle.com/2020/06/01/the-true-story-of-king-of-the-hammers/
(the mustang)
https://www.motortrend.com/features/mdmp-0707-1967-ford-shelby-mustang-gt500/
I grew up in a very rural part of a very unpopulated state, so there weren’t many cool cars around since most folks were either farmers, ranchers, or laborers on farms and ranches. A neighbor had a mint mid-70s Dodge D200 Power Wagon with a 440 and in one of those crazy Mopar green colors, which I thought was cool back then and would love to own now. Another person had a similar vintage D100 Power Wagon in yellow that I also loved, but it wasn’t in as good of shape and was saddled with the 318. Nearly everything else was farm trucks and dull fullsize and midsize American cars.
83 Hurst Olds, 454SS, DB9, “shelby” mustang (retro one, sticker pack, beat to shit)
Now, it’s one house that has a Vehicross and an SSR, and another house that has an orange 1M and a red S2000 on gold Meisters
The ones that stick out are the Bradley GT a few blocks from home, a then brand new 240Z and the middle school chorus teacher who drove a yellow E-Type V12 roadster, although I think it was automatic.
MG TA, BRG w tan interior, and the cut-down doors you weren’t supposed to fall out of, but pretended every time you did
An early ’80s Ford Mustang turbo. It belonged to the rich family some houses down the street. I distinctly remember the pony decals on the side.
This being about 1982, that car was an absolute spaceship in our middle-class neighborhood.
Quite possibly, after that the coolest cars were my dad’s Locost Se7ens, both with a race-prepped Fiat 125 engine.