You are what you drive

As a bloke, I feel my automotive history, the sum of my owning/driving/craving experiences, should say something about the man I am. It should make known the True, Manly Me. So let’s give it a spin round the block, as it were, and see what is revealed. The first car I remember was the Holden Belmont my dad drove. It was beige or grey or one of those quintessentially dull colours that encapsulated New Zealand in the 1960s. The gear-stick was mounted on the steering column, so I could change gears when I was sitting on Dad’s knee as he let me “drive” down our driveway.

The first car that I actually drove down a driveway, when I was 13 or 14, was Mum’s red Datsun Bluebird. That didn’t end so well, when I managed to do the classic “hit the accelerator instead of the brake” manoeuvre and put the car through our garage door and into the side of the house. Mum, sitting in the passenger seat, was not thrilled.

But the car, Mum, the house and I survived and after many more successful driving lessons it was in the Bluebird that I passed my driver’s licence when, I think, I was 15. I took my driving test in Hastings, a city so flat that you had to do the hill-start on the railway-crossing near Hastings Boys’ High — the only suitably inclined piece of road in town. Thankfully I did not hit the accelerator at the wrong moment and put the car under a train — which I think helped the licence-gleaning process no end.

Now free to terrorise the population of Hastings in Mum’s Bluebird — now renamed the Little Red Rooster — many happy Friday nights were spent driving round and round the ring road system searching for word of a party. People indulging in that sort of behaviour would, these days, be called “boy racers” but when you’re driving your Mum’s shopping-basket-on-wheels, the image really does not stick.

The first car I actually owned was a Fiat 128. It was imaginatively dubbed the Clockwork Orange, on account of it being orange. It certainly didn’t earn its name on account of it running like clockwork. While it was great fun to drive, when it went all Italian and refused to go, it was a pain in the arse.

When the Clockwork Orange broke down for the last time, I tried to sell it but no one wanted to buy it. So I tried to get a wrecker to come and take it away, but they were no takers there, either. Eventually a roadie for the Netherworld Dancing Toys took it away to do it up to sell, only to discover the chassis was cracked, at which time the Clockwork Orange was dubbed a lemon.

Proving I am incapable of learning from my mistakes, the next car I bought was an Alfa Romeo — but not one of the good ones. Still, it was a fun car to drive. But further still, there were long periods were it wouldn’t drive because it was Italian and, therefore, temperamental.

The first sensible car I owned was a Ford Laser. The biggest problem with this car was that it seemed to have the words “steal me” on it, in letters only visible to car thieves. The second biggest problem with this car was that after being stolen it kept getting found, with just enough damage done to it to really mess with my insurance premiums. It once got stolen from outside our house with so little petrol in the tank that it was found, out of petrol, 400m down the street.

But the most surreal time the Laser boomeranged on me was after it had been missing a week and the idiots who had stolen it overtook a police car. Unfortunately for these criminal geniuses, riding in the police car was the enthusiastic wannabecop civilian-aide who had taken my call reporting the theft. Somehow she remembered the licence plate number from my call and the car was duly pulled over and was returned (damaged and minus all the car stereos they found in it from all the other cars these morons had done over that week).

My next car was much less sensible and therefore never got stolen. It was a Peugeot 306, which is French, so is like an Italian car in that they are great fun to drive but when they stop, they really do stop.

Nowadays we have two cars: a Falcon station wagon and a Kia people-mover. This says everything you need to know about my life, automotive and otherwise, as it stands.

But my next car, I swear, will definitely be an Aston Martin.