Store Your Mustang, Buy a Beater!
How a Beater Car Can Make Your Mustang Dreams Come True!
Gather around fellow Mustang enthusiasts, because I’m going to tell you a story about why getting a beater car is the best way to help you find your ‘Stang mojo. The video above lays out a bunch of different reasons why owning a cheap car is a great way to go. And I can’t help but agree, under certain circumstances.
If you don’t have a Mustang, but have the desire to purchase one, a beater car can help you save your pennies for someday down the road. If you have a Mustang and live in climates that see snow and salted roadways, a cheap commuter can help avoid corrosion and undue wear and tear.
Many years ago, I was in college and desperate to feel the roar of a V8 Mustang under my right foot. College and the expenses that go along with it are crushingly debt-inducing. Not exactly conducive to vintage muscle car ownership. So I was forced to retire that idea for some time. Rather than spending all of my hard-earned cash on something less worthy, I found the best bargain I could.
A friend of mine offered his beat-up, but still road-worthy (barely) Ford Aspire for the princely sum of free. The car didn’t have a rear window, the windshield wipers didn’t work, the transmission would not operate in 4th gear, the front engine mount was missing, and it had a number of electrical gremlins, but I still decided to make his problem my own, to save a few greenbacks. I managed to fix all of the issues — a few of them with a bit of hillbilly engineering — but it was mine.
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For all of my senior year of college as well as the year following graduation, I drove that beat-up little Aspire thousands of miles. I picked up a job delivering Chinese food around campus during my non-school hours. I loved that dumb little car because it was expendable, I didn’t have to care about every little scrape or door ding, and I didn’t care if someone hit it with their shopping cart. It was inexpensive to insure, it was cheap to run on regular gasoline, and parts for it were practically free, as I mostly only used junkyard parts to fix it.
I socked away every dime I could in order to get my Mustang. Ultimately, because of my years in an Aspire, I ended up with a 1968 Mustang GT fastback with a non-original 302, ladder bars, and rusty floor pans. It wasn’t perfect, but it was mine. The point is, that beater car got me to my Mustang goal, and a beater might be able to do the same for you!
Via [CarThrottle]
