The cars I’ve owned

This is the story of the cars I’ve owned. Since I got my first car back in 2017 and I began paying more attention to the other cars around me, I’ve wanted to make a genealogy of sorts of all the cars owned by my dad’s side of the family going back to their immigration to the US in the 1950s. It’s a great history that I’d love to put to paper.

I want to make my mark on that story, and I have already begun to. I personally have only owned three cars in my lifetime, but I’m treating what you’re reading here as more of an introduction to that larger project. This is my first step; write what you know!

2013 Volkswagen GTI (Mk6)

I graduated from college in Chicago in 2017 and moved back home to northern Virginia, a notoriously difficult region to get around without a car. My family all pitched in to help me get my first car as a graduation present, and I spent the first couple months of that summer touring dealerships across the DC area. I tested a Mazda3, a Subaru Impreza, a Hyundai Elantra, and a Honda Civic HF (which is basically just a regular Civic with a neutered power train for more fuel efficiency?) — truly a tour de force of the hottest cars on the market.

I also test drove a 2014 Volkswagen GTI with a certified pre-owned (CPO) two-year warranty and around 40,000 miles — waited too long to buy the car and it disappeared — and finally ended up buying a 2013 GTI with 65,000 miles and no warranty for around $1000 more. Not exactly brilliant business on my part, but unlike the first GTI I tested, the 2013 model I ended up with had the only good wheel design from that generation of the car (Mk6), the Detroits.

That 2013 GTI was so cool. At 200 horsepower and 207 lb/ft of torque, it was one of the fastest cars I’d ever been in, let alone driven. And it just had so much presence — the wheels, the stance, the spoiler, the tartan cloth seats (Mk7 seats shown in link), the absolute rush from the turbo hitting peak power, the way it stayed flat around corners, every part of it was addicting. I’d grown up on racing video games from Need for Speed to Gran Turismo, and the thrill I got from this car for at least the first half year of ownership matched or exceeded the childhood joy of driving games. Everywhere I went, I felt like the king of the world, unless a car with a hood scoop and bigger spoiler came along (I had an inferiority complex to Mazdaspeed3, Mitsubishi Evolution, and Subaru STI drivers).

Almost exactly a year after I bought the car, I brought it to New German Performance in Manassas, VA, and got an APR Stage 1 (low torque) tune flashed on it, boosting the power figures to ~260hp and ~297lb/ft. The standard Stage 1 tune produced over 310lb/ft, but without a clutch upgrade there was a slight risk of messing up the GTI’s OEM clutch, and I already worried I was going overboard getting the tune at all (my family is sort of conservative about these things and I internalized their philosophy), so I opted for the low-torque option that doesn’t put the clutch at risk.

Six years later, I still don’t think I’ve driven a car that feels faster than the Stage 1 GTI. It was off the wall, spinning tires well through second gear and throwing me back in my seat when flooring it even at low highway speeds. Just writing about this, I miss that feeling.

I know that my dad’s current car, a recent BMW M240xi, is seconds faster to 60, as is my uncle’s Audi S4 — both of which I have driven pretty extensively. But both of those AWD luxury sports cars simply feel muted (sorry, guys) compared to the joy of my old GTI. I always felt there was so little between me and the road, between me and the delivery of that power. That’s hard to replace in a car that is hundreds of pounds heavier, even with hundreds more horsepower (to my uncle: I still want your S4, I’ve been first in line for it for over half a decade, and I will pay you top dollar!). 260hp and 300lb/ft is a hell of a ride in a 3100lb hatchback that can fit into a smaller parking space in the city than basically any other vehicle on the road.

For years after I tuned my car, I would sometimes drive around the wide boulevards of northern Virginia looking for frisky hot hatch drivers to drag race at stoplights. I succeeded a few times, although I never fully committed to the send and would only floor it to 10-15 mph over the speed limit (can I legally admit this without creating liability? If anyone asks, what I’m writing here is fiction).

One time I was driving back from a Korean restaurant in Annandale with the windows down and my mom and stepdad in the car, there was a Subaru BRZ next to us, and I exclaimed loudly to my parents that my car was faster than the BRZ. I’m not sure if the driver actually heard me, or if that’s just a story I tell myself, but he immediately revved his engine and then sped off when the light changed.

At some point, I put a few stickers on my back windows: one of Captain Falcon (my main in competitive Super Smash Bros Melee), one that said Send It, and another that said Still gonna send it. One afternoon I was stuck in traffic at Seven Corners in Falls Church, and a Dodge Challenger SRT8 driver roared past me whooping out his open window “Hell yeah, send it my dude!” or something like that. It was great.

In August of 2020, I was about to start graduate school (remotely) and was stuck at home in Virginia because of the pandemic, and I decided to put all of my most critical belongings into my car and drive up to Massachusetts where the rest of my family lives. I was at first planning on returning after a couple weeks, but I ended up staying for 9 months and living in three different places. It was during that time — my last year with the car — that it became a place for me in a way no other could because of the month-by-month precarity of where I might next be living. I did not live in my car, and I was thankfully never under the threat of homelessness; but when I was all but living out of a suitcase, it meant a lot to have one place I could always go that didn’t change no matter where I was.

In the winter of 2021, when I was living in a 300 square foot apartment in Cambridge and the only human beings I spoke to face-to-face for weeks on end were my grandparents on my weekly visit to their house nearby, my car felt like the only escape I had from the tiny box of my life. I would drive for hours with no navigation, getting utterly lost as one city turned to the next and the Boston skyline came and went — mornings, afternoons, midnights. In sub-zero temperatures with inches of snow on the ground, I sometimes had a bit of trouble getting up driveways. But no matter the challenge, my GTI always pulled me through — starting in August 2021, it went through 12 months, including a long and snowy New England winter, without needing a single visit to the shop, even with its aftermarket-tuned sports-car powertrain at over 80,000 miles.

I sold my car in early September of 2021, in preparation for moving to London two weeks later for my second year of grad school. At that point, it had over 85,000 miles on it and I had no income, and maintaining and insuring an 8-year-old sports car for 9 months without any use seemed like a recipe for financial insolvency. Luck had it that September 2021 landed us smack in the middle of perhaps the greatest used car price inflation in history, and so I sold a car for $12,000 in cash that less than two years prior had been worth $9,000. But it was not just a car; it was my car, my GTI. I don’t know if I regret selling it, but I do miss it. In its last act, it bequeathed upon me enough money to go on many adventures in the UK, and for that and many other things, I am grateful.

2017 Volkswagen GTI (Mk7)

In the following March, at a theater near Camden Town, north London, I saw the film adaptation of Murakami Haruki’s Drive My Car and fell head over heels in love with its titular red Saab 900. I’d already been a Saab fan probably since I learned to walk — that was basically inevitable, growing up in a highly European-influenced household to parents who themselves came of age as car enthusiasts in the 1970s, but Saab can and did still stand on its own high merits. But everything that I bring to my love of cars came together in Drive My Car‘s red 900 and Japanese cityscapes, and Murakami’s Instax-tinted colors brought to film. I am a dreamer; I dream of midcentury, of modern, of life in the peak of the economic miracle, in the slow movement of time and the fast movement of cars; Drive My Car was my dream.

I came back home to Virginia in June of 2022 after getting a job at the leading Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, and soon moved to an old luxury midcentury-modern apartment in DC. Looking out my window onto the avenue below and the old apartment buildings up and down the horizon, I let my dreams run wild. They led me to a new car.

My mom had given me her old Jetta (which I never technically owned since we never transferred the title) when I returned from London, and in late August, I sold it and put the funds toward a red 2017 (Mk7) GTI. I felt there was something about the lines of the car’s design that carried the same spirit as the Saab 900, and I set my sights exclusively on a red one.

That 2017 GTI was a gorgeous car inside and out. It had the classic tartan cloth seats (a must for me), red interior accent lights, a customizable sport mode, and an Apple CarPlay enabled system with a backup camera — something I sorely missed in my previous car, hence its scratched-up wheels.

But the new car never quite took for me. Maybe the magic had worn off after the previous one, maybe the 2017 car felt a little too refined, maybe the red was too showy, maybe I’m bored and don’t really like living in DC and hate driving in this city; maybe it was because the car had been in a minor accident under the prior owner and that always irked my obsessive-compulsive mentality; or maybe I simply didn’t give it enough time; but the car didn’t have that same this is my place feel. I spent as much time, if not more, online searching for valuations of my car to sell it as I did actually driving it.

Things came to a head in midsummer 2023 and then cascaded from there. In July, I decided I would stop worrying and learn to love this new GTI, and I ordered a Cobb Accessport (a computer that allows owners to flash modified tunes on their cars at home) to get some of the old flare of my APR Stage 1 tuned 2013 back. I set it up, and was super excited. Then I went to an anime convention and two days later came down with a heavy case of COVID (for the first time, as far as I’m aware). Feeling awful and running a 102 fever, I drove to my mom’s house in Virginia to quarantine there so someone could bring me food and medicine more easily (thanks mom). After a few days into the disease and I was feeling slightly better, I decided to go out and admire how gorgeous my car truly was — under the summer sun in that moment, it took my breath away. And then I noticed; the rear bumper panel was a slightly darker, duller shade of red than the rest of the body.

I knew since the day I got it that the GTI had received “minor damage” (per Carfax) in an accident at some point under prior ownership, but I never knew where that was, and the car had always looked remarkably clean at six years old. But under that August blaze, I learned the hard way where exactly the car had been damaged, and apparently had a panel replaced.

I returned the Cobb Accessport for a full refund, and sold the car within a month (possibly even on the exact date two years after I had sold my first GTI). It’s not that I refuse to own cars with flaws (just wait for my current car), although I will emphasize my strong obsessive compulsive tendencies. It was the juxtaposition of hope and reality that did me in. It was that the substantial imperfection of the discolored rear panel dawned on me at the precise moment in which I was emotionally overtaken by the beauty of the car — the beauty that I had hoped for since I bought it very specifically in response to the red Saab 900.

That, and my purchase price for the car (including the substantial loan I took out for it) had been over 4/5 of my yearly salary after taxes. I challenge you to find one financial advisor who will recommend you to buy a car that is 4/5 of your yearly net income. I’m waiting.

I am also a major public transportation booster and live in a city with one of the best subway systems in the country (although that’s not saying much), and I wanted to give carless living a sporting try. I live 10 minutes from a Metro station and most of the places I usually went at that point were also Metro-accessible. I did not need a car, and so I sold mine.

I did have some adventures in that GTI. A road trip to New York City to visit friends and my graduate school alma mater; a drive to southwestern Virginia for an academic conference; two trips to western Virginia to visit my partner; a late-night cruise home after seeing the Mountain Goats in Richmond; it was a cool place to be. But so it goes.

2017 Volkswagen Passat (B7)

I buy Volkswagens, in case you couldn’t tell. I like Volkswagens. Someday I’d like to own a car that isn’t a Volkswagen, and most of my favorite cars are not Volkswagens, but I always come back to the old Fow Veh (that’s German for Volkswagen). My great-grandfather drove Jettas from the 1980s until his passing in the early 2000s (see Figure 0), my mom only owned Volkswagens for 25 years, and I learned to drive on a late-2000s Jetta (back when I was terrified to put the shifter into “sport” mode because it seemed like living life too close to the edge). Volkswagens are, from my own life experience, exceptionally safe cars (as cars go), and I like their understated design (this from someone who thinks the FK8 Civic Type R is one of the coolest cars ever made). Plus, I once drove a rental Corolla on a trip to St. Louis and it felt like it was going to tip over every time I changed lanes on the highway.

After a few months into my car-free lifestyle, I started getting super restless. I didn’t have the money for another GTI or equivalent, but I wanted a car. It turns out that most of the places I like going are actually not metro accessible; and regardless, DC’s Metro is still not that great and so I found that, instead of simply taking more public transportation, after I sold my car I just stopped getting out as much. Which really doesn’t feel good, particularly during the winter.

I went and test-drove a 2017 Golf Alltrack in mid-January, which was really cool (wagons are cool) but still too expensive — and it had a leather steering wheel and shift boot. Not having a car for a few months made me realize I really wanted to find a car with no leather in the interior; animals should not be used for car parts, or food, or anything else that involves humans killing them or forcing misery on them. I recognize that likely no car exists that does not contain animal products in some capacity, and it is exceptionally hard to avoid steering wheels and other trim made of animals. My impetus to avoid interior parts from animals had been one of my main drivers for buying GTIs with cloth seats, although I also maintain that the GTI’s classic Clark plaid upholstery is one of the coolest and most iconic pieces of modern enthusiast car design, and anyone who would choose leather over them is utterly tasteless.

On a Saturday in late January 2024, coming off of my second case of COVID in six months, I went and bought a CPO 2017 base model VW Passat. The car has no leather in its interior that I can tell; it had been in a prior accident and was covered in dings and dents; and nobody in the market wants Passats anyway, so they were practically giving it away. A two-year factory warranty on a cheap old beater car is an enthusiast’s dream — hell, I think it’s most every car owner’s dream. I can park it in the city, bump into it, back into lampposts, and it doesn’t matter. I got rear-ended pretty hard (albeit, by a Mazda2) at a traffic light a few weeks ago and everyone in my car was fine (except for some hurt necks) — my rear bumper got all scratched up but I just took the cash settlement rather than a free repair because no one will even notice the scuffs under all the dents and chips that were there before. It’s still a fun car to drive, I can go 400+ miles on a single tank, and I get to keep some money in my savings account. Plus, I can do an APR tune on it later and give it some basic GTI-level G-forces. And it’s got ice on the dash, straight from the factory. I like this car. #PassatGang.