rslitman

No one as yet has come up with an explanation of what that PE-0 or PE-O actually means. If anyone has any idea, please feel free to jump in here.

Anyway, I don't know how much longer I am going to keep this car. If Acura were to announce tomorrow that they're coming out with an entry-level car available with automatic transmission that runs on regular gas, I'd probably be the first one in line to buy one. Well, that's probably not going to happen, but I may start investigating the closest thing under the Honda name that approximates what I have had in 20 years of Integra ownership.

I remember something from when I first got my license in 1971. My father knew it was time to go from being a two-car family to a three-car one. We had two late model Pontiacs. My father always bought new cars (a practice I have always followed, too), but the one time he considered buying a used car was at this point.

We went to a dealer's used car lot and looked at a Plymouth Valiant from the mid-1960s. My father had always heard good things about Valiants and their Dodge Dart twins. In fact, I think the business he owned had a Valiant for deliveries to customers, and some relatives had them, too. The two of us went for a test drive with this car. If any of you were around back then, you may recall that by 1971, FM radio was starting to be more of the place to be than AM radio had been. This car, like the two cars my family already had, as well as just about every car I knew except my aunt's next door neighbor's Cadillac, had only an AM radio. I told my father while we were driving around that if we bought this car, I'd eventually be replacing its radio with one that had both AM and FM. He told me that this would not be worth doing in a car that old.

I've kept this in mind whenever I've had a car that was more than a few years old for which I would have liked to have upgraded the audio system or some other nice-to-have thing.

For one reason or another, my father didn't buy that Valiant. Instead, he bought a new 1972 Ford, the only time he pre-ordered a car rather than buy it from dealer stock. When it finally came, it became "Mom's Taxi". My sister, who had also recently gotten her license, and I shared the 4-door 1969 Pontiac that had previously served in this role. My father continued to use the 2-door 1967 Pontiac for commuting to work. Although only five years old, it had a lot of problems, and one day he went to a Chrysler-Plymouth dealer and traded it in on the spot for a 1972 Valiant.