Phil's Cars

Here is a listing of the cars which I have owned/driven throughout the years. I will list the cars and an approximate idea of when I had them. If the car name is underlined, you can click on it to see a picture. I will add more picture pages as I find the old pictures, but some of these may not have pictures available, either because they are too old or because I didn't feel they were important enough to take a picture:

1964 Chevrolet Biscayne 4-door owned 1973-1974
Yes, this was my first car - my parents gave it to me for nothing. It was a bland cream color which Chevrolet officially called "desert beige". It had 90,000 miles, it was all rusted out, and things were breaking all the time - it was an adventure. It had a 283 cubic inch V-8, but it was really underpowered. I sold it to someone for $20 and shortly thereafter the front end fell apart and they had to junk it.

1966 Oldsmobile Cutlass 2-door owned 1974-1976
This was my second car. It had a 440 cubic inch high-compression V-8 with a 4 barrel carburetor. When it was properly tuned, it was really fast. It had a two-speed automatic. Once a friend and I took it on a drive in a 65mph speed zone - I took off from the traffic light and just floored it. The car stayed in first gear until it reached 70mph and then shifted into second - this meant that it should have been capable of 140mph! The body color was originally metallic midnight blue, but the paint was shot by the time I got it - the car just looked black.

1976 Plymouth Volare Wagon owned 1976-1980
This was my first new car. My parents helped me select it from the dealer's lot, and also helped me finance it. The car did not have the features I wanted, and the color was what I referred to as "seaweed green" with simulated wood trim. There were quite a number of recalls on this car while I owned it, here are the ones I remember:
    The hood might suddenly open while you were driving.
    The driver's seat might suddenly move while you were driving
    The brakes might partially give out while you were driving
    The engine might become unbolted from the frame, resulting in a loss
        of steering control
The recall notice, after informing you of these horrible things which might suddenly occur while driving, would add the sentence "under certain circumstances, this might result in a loss of driver control, possibly leading to a hazardous situation" or some such wording which actually came across as being rather humorous in a tragic sort of way. The only recall above which I experienced first-hand was one day when I was driving with a friend and my hood flew open. I continued to drive by looking through the little space between the bottom of the windshield and the bottom of the hood. It was a very memorable experience! I drove this car until it had around 80,000 miles on it and then decided to get a new one. Just before I traded it in (I had already ordered a new car) someone pulled in front of me on a rain-covered road causing me to lose control and crash into a telephone pole.

1980 Pontiac Phoenix LJ Hatchback owned 1980-1983
This was the first (and to date the only) car I ordered custom-made from the factory. It was really an experience, picking up this car and seeing all the options which I specified should be installed in the car. Maybe that's why thus far it is my favorite. It had everything which I wanted, and nothing which I felt I didn't want. It was also my first front-wheel-drive car with a transverse-mounted engine and front transaxle, my first four-cylinder car, and my first hatchback. It was two-tone blue, light blue on the top and dark blue on the bottom with a gold double-pinstripe which separated the two paint colors. I cannot remember having any problems with this car.

1981 Pontiac Phoenix Hatchback owned 1983-1983
This was my dad's car which I inherited when he died. It was bright red. I sold my Phoenix which only had 60,000 miles (what a mistake!) and started driving his because it had almost no miles on it. The car was a real lemon, the less said the better.

1983 Chrysler Town and Country Wagon owned 1983-1985
This was the most option-loaded car I have ever owned! It had power everything, computerized everything, and all of it kept breaking!! I had to keep replacing the power window motors, the engine control computer didn't work right, the trip computer always said I was getting 99.9 miles per gallon, and the dashboard made a loud buzzing noise when I drove. The talking computer knew how to say 11 messages, and if I would slam the driver's door the right way it would proudly recite all 11 of them for me as I sat there in dumbfounded silence. I had it to the Chrysler people several times, but they had no idea how to fix it - they just kept replacing the spark plugs. It was a brown car with distinctive-looking (some would say gaudy) simulated wood trim. I think this is my least favorite of all the cars I owned - it was so expensive and so full of promise, but was nothing
but a big headache. This is the only car I ever had with wire wheel covers. Financially speaking, this was a terrible deal - the car was so expensive and I traded it in to get rid of it after only two years.

1984 Pontiac 6000 STE owned 1985-1995
I bought this car when it was a year old because I really wanted an STE but they were so expensive I couldn't afford a new one. The STE was the Special Touring Edition, they were manufactured in Canada, and were rumored to be a much higher-quality vehicle. It had tons of standard features (power windows, power door locks, cruise control, automatic ride leveling, power antenna, AM/FM cassette stereo with graphic equalizer, high-output 2.8L V-6, fog lights, driver information center, all electronic digital dash board, built-in tire inflation system in trunk). As a matter of fact, I think the only two options were a sunroof and leather seats - I had the sunroof. This was a two-tone car, silver on the bottom and black on the top. It was sort of like a big luxury sports car. I drove it until it had 144,000 miles (I wanted to get my money's worth out of it to make up for my last car) with very few problems. As of now, I would say this is my second-favorite car of all those I have owned, right behind the 1980 Phoenix.

1995 Plymouth Grand Voyager Minivan owned 1995-1999
This was an important vehicle to have at a time in my life when I needed it, but we had a number of quality problems with it, and the vehicle drove like a truck.

1999 Saturn SL2 owned 1999-2002
As of this writing, this car is only a few days old. I purchased this mostly because of the Saturn reputation for quality and customer service. It is pretty much fully loaded, and is gold.

2000 Saturn LS2 owned 2000-2002
This is actually Koleen's car, but I drive it a lot of the time on the weekend and thought I would add it here just to have it.

2002 Saturn L-Series Cars owned 2002- 2004
We decided to get two new cars to take advantage of the 0.0% financing for 5 years. It was too good a deal to pass up!  Koleen drives the blue sedan, and I drive the white wagon..

2004 Toyota Camry LEs  owned 2004 -