How My first Car Broke in Half
I'm lucky it happened as I got home or else I could have been overtaken on the highway by the rear end like something out of Herbie.
A few years ago I was about to get my learners permit (Provisional Licence in the UK) and I needed a car, now I had driven before on the farm in Canada, but these were all left hand drive automatics So I wanted to get something with a stick shift, now some might consider it rather difficult to switch to a manual after driving automatics but think of it like this, cars in Britain are right hand drive, so I had to learn to drive stick shift on the other side of the car. It was safe to say I hurt my right hand a few times trying to change gear. Because of this, I was confident that something would go wrong, so while I was learning I bought a Fiat Punto on a farm sale for £350 which included 12 months road tax and 12 months MOT. It had a 1.2 liter 4 cylinder that made about 60 BHP, it was blue with a red interior, featured an AM FM cassette radio and get this, electric windows. So that’s about all the exciting things about it. I pretty much learnt to drive stick in that car and it was fairly fun to drive, in fact I’m sure Evel Knievel would have loved this as a daily driver, every corner was a dance with death thanks to the awful tyres it had that made even the safest roads feel like a bobsled course. Once I came around a corner quickly and the front right wheel hit a pothole and the hubcap came off and overtook me like a scene out of a 1970s car chase movie, At one point the radio on it packed up and got stuck on this religious station on medium wave, I couldn’t use the tape deck or even switch it off, so for about a week, I drove around listening to passages from the bible and Christian folk music until I found a radio in a car boot sale for £30, which was plug and play with the Punto and worked really well with the 100 watt amplifier in it.
By next February I had to take it in to have its MOT test, so I took it into the local garage which my family’s used pretty much since we moved here and they were always trustworthy, but like a lot of places around where I lived if a 17 year old kid shows up alone they assume you don't know much about cars and will likely try to rip you off, a year later I went there alone to have some new tyres fitted and they tried to pull the old blinker fluid trick on me, so I got my dad, who knew a lot more about cars than me at the time, to come along. Now I knew the clutch was on the way out and would need replacing, but that wasn’t the only thing that needed doing, oh no. The mechanic said to us “there is no way that vehicle should have passed its previous MOT test or the one before it with the rust on that chassis” he showed us the undercarriage and the chassis was pretty much gone. He could weld it back together though, but he wanted over a grand which for a car that cost £350 there’s no point in it so we took it home and I began looking for a new car. Our mechanic though didn’t deem it unroadworthy on the report and so I could still drive it until the previous MOT actually ran out. Safe to say I was pretty annoyed when it happened I remember thinking that these are the same guys who own Ferrari so you’d expect it to be a well built automobile, but now when I think about today, that car did have over 6 owners and 140,000 miles on the clock, so it wasn’t really a surprise that it happened to me, it was at the end of its life when I had it. One day I was coming down our driveway and then I lived on a small farm, so it was half a mile long, just as I came into the yard there was this big clunk sound coming from below me, fortunately we have a service pit on the yard which was empty so I drove it straight on top of that I got out and first thing I saw was the body seemed to be a lot lower in the middle than the front and rear ends so I got my dad and we looked at the undercarriage. Several crucial parts of the chassis had split in half, so now the only thing holding that car together was the pretty much the fiberglass body. So that was pretty much the end of the Punto, I put it up for sale but there wasn’t any interest in it and the price of scrap was really low then, the best I could get was £30 so I just reversed it into the back of the barn and that’s where it's stayed since. About a week later I bought a Corsa as a cheap runabout but that’s a whole other story.
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