I bought this car in July of 2009 while living in western MA. The only good reason I can come up with is that I was bored and needed something to keep me busy.
I found the car via Craigslist on Cape Cod. The original ad is below.
The seller(s), who were also the original owners, used the car sparingly during the summers at their vacation home on the Cape. It consequently avoided much of the road salt and deterioration cars see in the Northeast. It's still a salty environment, being a couple hundred feet from the water, but these cars were built with thick steel and lots of undercoating so things have aged well.
The car had just under 80,000 miles on it when I bought it. Many (most) of these cars have had their odometers roll over by this point, but the sellers insisted this one had not. There is supporting documentation, although during an annual inspection a couple years prior a service technician assumed it had rolled over and recorded the mileage as 17X,XXX. This gets reported to the DMV, so the car now carries an odometer discrepancy title.
I drove out and looked at the car one weekend, and bought a 1-way Greyhound ticket for the next weekend to pick it up. Driving 150 miles home on the Massachusetts Turnpike was probably about as much use as the car had seen in the previous year or two. The car made the trip fine, although in hindsight, I probably should have made sure the brakes and cooling system really were up to snuff before getting it up to 65 on a public highway.
The sellers did insist I call them when I got home, so they'd know I made it home alright. I still correspond with them via email and snail mail on occasion.
This is the second day I owned the Smallvo, after it's first wash.
The car was in good enough shape that I could drive it while tinkering with it, which is exactly what I was looking for. I enjoy driving the car a lot more than I like working on the car. The condition is good enough that it turns heads and provides a satisfactory driving experience, but not so good that I'm afraid to put miles on it or get a rock chip in the paint.
