Tell me about your crappy first car!

[Maitre]

Hopefully my Alero is more reliable than your old Cutlass. So far, so good. I've had it for 7 months and I haven't had a problem with it yet. It's a really fun car to drive too. I missed owning a car with a manual transmission. I think my wife secretly gets jealous and wants to drive my car, but she can't drive a manual and has thus far refused all of my offers to teach her.

I can't imagine that you treat yours as poorly as I treated mine. It lasted me about 5 years in total, and got me back and forth from school whenever I needed it to. I just couldn't trust it during the middle of the semester: that was always the time when something would go bad. My favorite was the transmission failure though: it was explained to me that one of the "gear sets" broke free of [something-or-other] and the resulting debris acted as a fragmentation grenade in an enclosed space. A suitably non-technical yet graphic explanation that served to convice me that the poor thing was just looking for a way out of whatever pain it was in. Unfortunately I wasn't ready to let it go, and so I paid the mechanic to bring it back to life.