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Sunday, September 09, 2007

The Best Damn Car Ever Made
Posted by Jill | 10:08 PM
In response to Time's celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Edsel by naming the 50 Worst Cars Ever Made, I bring you....the Best Damn Car Ever Made.

Ladies and Gentlemen....for your consideration...the Dodge Dart.

Now I know that Tom and Ray Magliozzi love to bust on the Dodge Dart, particularly the 1963 model (which was my first car), but for my money, the Dodge Dart is the most reliable car ever made.

I bought my 1963 Dart used on the day I graduated high school. It looked like this, only it was blue:



It had a push-button automatic transmission (demonstrated here by Tom Magliozzi, whose Dart is the color mine was), a radio that worked, it cost me a hundred and twenty-five bucks, and it was MINE.

Two weeks later, we had heavy rain, the car was parked in front of the house, and the street flooded up to the car windows.

Oh, I drove that little fucker for a year, but I had to keep the heat on all the time and always have a jug of water in the car because the flooding had corroded the radiator and as a struggling college freshman I had no money to replace the radiator.

After a year, my mother decided to buy a newer used car and passed onto me her tan (slightly darker than the one pictured here ) 1965 Dodge Dart, otherwise known as "The Rust Bucket." She'd been hit pretty hard in the front fender and had never gotten the dent fixed, so even though it was now something like 1974, the car was already rusting out. It was rusting, it was ugly as sin -- but at least it didn't require the heat to be blasting even in summertime, so with great regret I sold the 1963 Dart with the corroded radiator and was now living in the lap of luxury.

I drove the Rust Bucket from 1974 to 1977, when, flush with the riches that only a princely salary of $8500/year from an exciting career in retail management can generate, I bought a 1972 Dart Custom (not the Swinger, alas), used, in bilious green. I would have driven that car till it died, had I not been rear-ended one night in 1978 or 1979 while stopped at a traffic light by a kid changing radio stations. This bent the frame, which made the car a total loss. I sold the totaled car for $250 to a used car dealer who offered me cash for it in the parking lot of an A&P in Linden, NJ, where I lived at the time. There were still aftershocks from the 1978 oil crunch, so the only car I could find in my price range was a 1973 Pontiac Ventura with a 350 V-8 engine. I had wanted another Dart or a Chevy Nova, which was also a good, solid, reliable, if unsexy car, but a car that got 25 miles to the gallon was not to be found. So I was stuck with this monstrosity that got 8 miles per gallon on a GOOD day. I later met Mr. Brilliant, we traded the Ventura in for a 1982 Datsun 210, and we've been driving Japanese cars ever since.

But every now and then you still see one of these Little Slant Six Engines That Could on the road. This guy has one. So does this guy, and his Dart is the same one mine was, only mine was a darker green. I once ran across a busy street in Fort Lee to tell a guy who had a 1971 or 1972 Dart how much I loved his car. He must have thought I was crazy. A kid at the local gas station has a 1972 Swinger in electric blue. He has over 200,000 miles on the damn thing.

But in true American carmaker fashion, a car that could go over 200,000 miles couldn't be tolerated. So in 1976, Chrysler in its infinite wisdom shitcanned the most reliable car ever made to that point, and replaced it with the excreble Dodge Aspen/Plymoth Volare pair, which SHOULD have been on Time's list and is an unforgivable oversight.

So when you celebrate the anniversary of the Edsel this week, don't forget to hoist a cold one for the anti-Edsel; that little homely car with the slant-6 engine that would run forever if you just treated it nicely....

The best damn car ever made: The Dodge Dart.

(Everything you never wanted to know about the Dodge Dart is here. Customer loyalty is a wonderful thing.)

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