Freeway on-ramps were an adventure in that car, for sure. I looked to see if I could find acceleration times, but only found manuals. The five speed took over 17 seconds. But remember it was the seventies and there was no shortage of slow cars, though the auto-equipped B210 was the slowest car tested by one of the auto magazines for a few years. My father was working in Sacramento one year while we were living in LA. Every other week he had to drive that thing up the Grapevine (to a non-Californian that’s the stretch of I-5 from the San Joaquin Valley south of Bakersfield that climbs up to 4,000 foot Tejon Pass in not many miles.) I did the trip with my dad a couple of times and it was miserable, stuck over in the truck lane going about 30 and sounding like there were a thousand hamsters on their wheels under the hood. It made it every time, but I was so relieved when we finally got rid of that car. Even the Renault Alliance that replaced it was far quicker (and it was seriously underpowered.)
I live in southern California, so I know what the Grapevine is
What was more miserable?
Going so slow?
Or having to breathe in the fumes from the trucks?
I have a 1994 Geo Metro which is essentially a Suzuki Swift being sold by GM. This has been a dead product for a long time but you can still get parts online or special order through a parts store. Do not count on being able to just walk into any parts store to buy an alternator, radiator hose, water pump, timing belt, or other parts when they are needed. Also, some mechanics probably won’t be too keen on working on this.
Now, I am relatively good with working on cars and swapped the motor in this by myself because the first one was junked. I went ahead and changed the timing belt, water pump, and seals for good measure while the engine was out. I made sure to keep the old parts just in case I broke down and needed to limp home on the used parts until new ones arrive.
I also plan to change the radiator hoses with new ones but have an extra set of used ones I carry around with me until that time.
Mostly being tightly packed into a lane with vehicles that would squash you like a bug if the driver got careless. The snake of trucks up the Grapevine was often quite dense. Remembering back I think I did it twice, both times just before Christmas in damp, gray weather, once with a bit of snow at the top. Luckily, not enough to close I-5. That happened to us another Christmas trip. It was snowing pretty hard at the top so we got detoured down the Antelope Valley to Lancaster, then back via Soledad Pass. All of I-5’s traffic, trucks and all, detoured onto a two-lane road, in the rain, with limited visibility. The truckers were in no mood to slow down, either, and that stretch was downhill, so they didn’t need to. They were trying to get back on schedule knowing the detour and bad weather added at least 90 minutes to the trip. The next year it was in the nineties on Christmas and the trip down was quite different.
That first was one of the least safe days I’ve seen for driving, right up with tule fogs in the Central Valley where you can barely see the taillights of the car in front of you. I missed one of those pileups of dozens of cars by about five minutes once (I was ahead of it) on the causeway from Sacramento to Davis. The detour around that is a long one, too. I had to do it once or twice. I think I’d take snow over tule fog any time.