QOTD: What Was Your First Showroom Vision? Receive updates on the best of TheTruthAboutCars.com
There’s not a soul in here who doesn’t, from time to time, go and make a nuisance of themselves in a dealer showroom. I’m not talking about wasting the time of the sales staff, or even helping themselves to copious amounts of free coffee during scheduled maintenance. No, I’m talking about simply wandering through the showroom, looking at all the metal merchandise.
Today, it’s easy. Drive or hoof it down to the brand of choice, examine whatever’s caught our fancy at this minute, and hightail it back out again once the Dealer Principal starts giving you the evil eye. It wasn’t that simple as a kid though, whether it was thanks to being chased out by surly managers or simply living far enough away that one depended on the parental unit to drive them there.
Which brings us to today’s question: what was the first car you remember seeing in a showroom? Given the photo above, one shouldn’t have too much trouble guessing my answer.
Tom Woodford Limited operated out of a unique two-story building located smack dab in the middle of a parking lot for the area’s largest shopping mall. Hawking Chrysler products, the parts and service departments were on the ground floor, along with the main entrance. A wide, winding staircase led customers up to the second floor showroom.
Traipsing up those stairs at the ripe old age of 10, I vividly remember laying eyes on a 1990 Eagle Talon TSi. Having to ascend steps to the showroom assured kind of a slow reveal, with these car-obsessed eyes seeing the black Talon gradually appear into view with each riser climbed.
Turbocharger feeding eleven pounds of boost. All-wheel drive. Just under two hundred horsepower. I had the specs memorized after reading Car & Driver‘s Ten Best article upteen times. This is not something a gearhead forgets.
We asked a version of this question back in 2016, to which my answer was this same car. This time, we’re not interested in the car that hooked you into being a gearhead … but rather the first car you remember seeing in a showroom. Was it a sport compact? Some sort of Detroit barge? A bruising truck? Surely you’ve all a story for our comment section.
But not before one more picture.
[Images: Chrysler Corp.]
