R&T rarely had anything good to say about anything manufactured in the USA and seldom doled out positive judgements for Japanese cars, either, except for perhaps the odd Honda or Datsun. Besides that, a new car with an actual warranty could be had for not much more than a low-mileage domestic with fair to middling fuel consumption.Īt the time I remained a dedicated reader of Road & Track, for reasons lost in mists of time. Fetching my slide rule, I crunched the numbers and found that if I could find a vehicle that earned really good gas mileage, it might pay for itself in the long run. Furthermore, my daily commute was 40 plus miles. The only remaining question was what kind of replacement could I come up with that would ease our financial burden? A used Chevy Nova, Dodge Dart or something of that stripe appeared to make a certain kind of sense, but in the midst of early ’80’s recession, gas prices had jumped all the way up to $1.30 a gallon, which of course we would die for today, but that was equal to around $4.50 in 1980 dollars, few of which seemed to be floating in our direction. So, it was either get rid of the Lancia Beta or enter a twelve-step program for delusional gear heads. Needless to say, an emotional attachment to a bank account draining Lancia could no longer be justified on any level. The night we moved into our new house, Linda sat down on the bare hardwood floor and wept. Plus, mortgage interest rates in the fall of 1980 hit 18.4 per cent(!!!). An extremely modest 1200 square foot 1940’s three bedroom, one bath fixer-upper cost double what our two-story late ’70’s cracker box palace had sold for. Our move to leafy suburbs of unincorporated King County, Washington brought us up short financially as we discovered the cash windfall we had recouped from the sale of our two year old house in the wilds of northern Utah was laughable when matched against home prices in the Pacific Northwest. To recap our story up to this point, my odd European automobile predilection had reached a breaking point…the Lancia was eating us out of house and home at a point when we could ill afford it. Seriously? A Toyota? Is this what the world had come to?
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