Last week, I was telling my mom about my upcoming press trip and let her know that I’d be driving the Corvette C8 Stingray in a performance driving school. I could see her eyes glaze over with the memory of forgotten dreams, but she smiled and told me, “That used to be my dream car.”
At first, I was kind of shocked — but it didn’t last long. When my mom remarried, she became the patron saint of beefy SUVs because suddenly she had five or more people to carry around everywhere she went, and as us kids grew, so did the size of her vehicles. When I think of my mom, I usually think of a massive, gray SUV that drives more like a land yacht than an actual vehicle and that many Jalopnik readers would consider to be the plague of the universe.
But it didn’t take long before I remembered that, no, this wasn’t always who she was. For the longest time, she drove a two-door 1989 Pontiac Grand Prix Turbo, and she generally had access to the driver’s seat of the new cars her GM-worker parents brought home (although those were usually trucks). She was never deep into cars, but she could always hold her own at the mechanic and, apparently, even had a big-name dream car once upon a time. And when I made a goofy tweet about getting to drive her dream car, no one actually guessed it correctly.
It got me thinking about what other folks’ parents wanted as a dream car, and whether or not those people ever got them. My mom has consistently sacrificed her own wants and needs to give her children the things they want and need, so I don’t know that she’s ever actually bought or owned a car that she really, truly wanted. Did your parents have better luck? I want to hear all about it in the comments.
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