After my 1967 Mustang flipped on the floating bridge, and would cost more than I wanted to pay to fix it, I was without a car for a bit. Fortunately, I was living in an apartment not too far from where I worked. I so I was able to walk to and from work until I got another car. And also I was making better money at this point, so I was able to afford another car without any big savings efforts. I figured I could find a decent used car for $500. I started going through the classified ads for cars. I found a 1979 Honda Accord for $500. My buddy John had Honda Civic, which I think was a 1977 or 1978 model. He abused that car. He didn’t do the oil changes. He used take it fast over bumps to see how much air he could catch. He would take it at fairly good speeds around corners at the local race track where we had worked for a summer. And the thing kept going. Honda’s are solid reliable cars.
John took me up to check out the Honda Accord. It was in very good shape. There were some spots where the paint was oxidized. But there wasn’t any major damage, and the car ran great. I paid them the $500, and didn’t even attempt to talk them down at all. My buddy John was shocked that I managed to get such a great car for $500.
I drove this car regularly. I don’t know what kind of gas mileage it got, but it did pretty well I think.
When my wife and I moved to New York in 1994, we brought this car with us. We had sold her Toyota MR2 figuring it would not do well in the snow. Also, we could only tow a single car behind the rental truck.
The 79 Honda Accord handled fantastic in the snow. We shared this car for a few months after relocating. But when my wife was going to get a job, we needed to get another car. I wanted another Honda. We visited a Honda dealership near where I worked. We parked the Accord and waited for someone to come show us some cars. After about 15 minutes of being ignored by the Honda dealership people, someone finally came out. He didn’t offer to help us, but asked us to move the Accord as they didn’t want people to think they were selling that. He totally insulted my car!
We left there, drove to an Acura dealership that was up the road and owned my different people. And I bought a 1989 Acura Integra. The 1979 Honda Accord would belong to my wife, and the 1989 Acura Integra would be mine. We were both happy with our cars. The Accord started to have a few electrical issues. The heater blower motor stopped working. It wasn’t the motor. There was no power getting to it. Then the dashboard lights stopped working, and the speedometer worked intermittently.
Then one day my wife called me from work to ask me to bring some oil. She said the oil light came on, and that it was making a grinding noise. She called back about 15 minutes later to tell me I didn’t need to bring the oil, that the car had burned. Apparently there had been an electrical short, and the car caught fire, and the engine compartment was destroyed. She said the lights had be flashing, and the wipes going, and everything had been going nuts while car burned. The car was toasted.

Posted by Rob in My Car on May 29th, 2009 | No Comments