1984 Ford Tempo
I have to thank my mom for turning me on to this car. At $1500.00 it was the most expensive car I'd owned to date, but it also turned out to be the mileage king of all time. I got it at 98,000 and I had it until it had turned 170,000 miles. I was doing a fairly substantial commute at the time, and I think that this car had it the easiest of all my sets of wheels. It was a 4 door, manual steering, stick-shifted econobox and, being an ’84, it was carbureted. This made it an odd little car. All subsequent Tempos were fuel injected. I owned the only manual Tempo I’ve ever discovered. Many people malign this car as a crapbox and that may be true. Most were turned off by it's crappy automatic transmissions. I managed to avoid this feature of this car, with it being a manual and so it was very reliable. I had trouble with the carb that almost spelled its early demise due to emissions regulations, but I found a trick and got it through. It survived being backed into in a parking lot by a pre-licensed 15 year old on some sort of “Risky Business” escapade, several emissions tests, a frozen emergency brake cable, and a ton of freeway miles. It says volumes about the car that I drove for the longest, that I have the least to say about it. I sold it to an ape as a bearing was going out on one of the rear wheels. I told the guy that the first thing he needed to do was replace the bearing, but he didn't and the last I heard about this car is that the wheel had fallen off. A sad demise to a good car.
