Warning. What you are about to read is ridiculous. I wrote it a few years ago. It is mostly true, but I may have misremembered a few things due to brain damage from getting knocked out several times as a kid. I blame Jackie Chan and Dragon Ball Z.
Your dream car - if money and sensibility weren’t a restraint - what would it be? Classic muscle car? Exotic European hypercar? Super-sized SUV on tank tracks?
Well, whatever it is, I’m here to tell you that your dream car’s dream car is something I drive daily. A Mazda MPV.
Yep, I said it, and I know you’re a bit triggered already, but you know it’s true. Real Men drive minivans.1 And Really Real Men drive 'em 'erday. But not just any minivan. We ain’t talkin’ no punk Plymouth Caravan or some milktoast Toyota Blah, Blah, Blah over here. We on that Zoom Zoom kine stuff in this family. Oh, you don’t know what I’m talking about.
It’s that thing that happens when we fly by you on the highway, and you look up in your rearview mirror at your three year old back in the carseat. He gives you the look like, “Geez dad. You just a buster in this whack Odyssey. I wish you could grow a beard and drive like that dad in his sweet Mazda. Wish I was adopted.”
I know it hurts, but you’re just gonna have to get over it and accept that this black Mazda MPV is always gonna be better than you. And your family already knows it. Don’t believe me? Aight, that’s cool. I used to be like you, a hater.2 But keep reading and you’ll come around.
You’ll see.
So while the Jeep was doing its (mostly) faithful thing, kid number four showed up and made this fateful union between my family and this Japanese thoroughbred a necessity. Without further ado, here’s the story of our family’s '04 Mazda MPV.
This ain’t it.
Aight, so here’s the backstory on things from our end. We were given this blue Mercury Villager years back when twins were joining the team, and it was pretty awesome in it’s own way. It was some strange parts bin conglomeration of Nissan and Ford scraps, so that basically meant it was a R34 Skyline GTR3 dumped in the bed of an F-150…and the classic minivan shape is the result if you put those two things into one of them Me+You babymaker apps on your phone.
Yet, one day when this little guy was coming home from his day job at the lumberyard he noticed a serious problem…
Got the minions together, and they quickly diagnosed the issue. “This thing ain’t got enough horsepower, downforce, or seating capacity for four car seats.” I looked at them like, “What are you talking about? It’s got VTEC, yo! And I’ve only got three kids.”
After smacking me in the face with his purple plastic wrench they broke it down real slow. “Dad, if you were half the man we think you are you’ll march your butt right into that house and make us another brother. Cuz what self-respecting man only has three sons?!”
And you know what? They were right. And while they finished replacing the apex seals in the rotary engine, I proceeded to set things in motion that could not be undone…and therefore needed to start the hunt for a better minivan.
Or I could wait nine months to start…
Anyways, I was sitting in the delivery room awaiting the birth of my fourth son, and just so happened to be surfing Craigslist…cuz that’s what gearheads do. Onto the screen popped a black, dilapidated nugget, and it was like I just knew that this would be the kind of ride or die, faithful to the end, jump on the grenade kind of steed my family would need in the apocalyptic future we were in store for.
I looked up at my amazingly in labor wife, and she said, “Boy, you better go rescue that mighty MPV before that punk ass Obama ships it off to the Cash for Clunkers crushers.”
Dang…it’s talk like this that’s the reason why we’ve got so many kids.
Now for the backstory on the MPV. Sorry in advance for the lack of pictures here, but they’re still sealed as part of some bogus CIA investigation into weapons of mass destruction in Iraq…anyways, write your Congressman if you can’t deal with all the words and stuff on this post.
Now, best as I can ascertain from the records, this thing was purchased back in the day by a farmer so that he could ferry around his eleven children and for delivering cattle to market. Since it didn’t come from the dealership with the tow package this meant that the cattle had to ride inside with the kids. “Great!” I thought. “Sounds like it’ll fit four car seats no problem then.”
After trading and marrying off his eleven or so kids the cattle rancher got into the ice cream truck business, which meant that this poor old warhorse was put out to pasture on the side of a mountain. Literally. Then after a year or so this farmer discovered that you could sell off things using the internet, and that’s where our stories met.
The timeline from here gets a little hazy, but I do remember that test driving this thing was a bit of an issue. Years old gas, plus an engine that was full of end of service life OEM bits, meant that it was a handful on the country roads around the owner’s ranch. The thing missed, hissed, and bucked about. And who could blame it? It’d been ridden hard, and parked soaking wet in the middle of a bloody pasture for the past year. I’m surprised it didn’t take control of the steering and try to run down its previous owner for spite.
I eventually talked the rancher into letting me borrow his big dually farm truck and trailer to tow this thing into town. I wanted a mechanic to look over the guts to see if there was anything irreparable or criminal going on. He smacked the fender and ensured me that this old thing would run good as new once I put some fresh gas into it. A clump of cow patty fell out the wheel well, and I should have taken that as a sign that this schmuck was a professional bull shitter likely in league with the rancher.
I had a decision to make, and after looking over at that heap of dented and rusty potential, abused and robbed of its purpose in life, I decided that the best thing to do was to adopt it into my growing family.
Best worst decision I ever made.
January 2015 | 116,900 miles
Meanwhile back at the hospital my wife was ready to get picked up in the ten-second car I promised her along with baby boy number four. She was gonna be so proud of me after this thing decimated all at race wars…after I proceeded to dump a truckload of overnight parts from Japan into it.
Stay tuned.
Real men know how to love a woman in the kind of way that makes a minivan not only an option, but an inevitable requirement on the way to the Sprinter-sized school bus.
If I may quote the distinguished Dr. Doug Logan Jr. of Grimke Seminary.
Actually it would be better to say it was a Nissan 300 ZX, since the two shared the same engine (sorta) - the legendary Nissan VG…though the 300ZX needed twin turbos in order to be as cool as the minivan configuration.