Close to getting first car, best for around $5,000

[niky]

At just $5k, you're looking at the crash-and-burn lawsuit Explorer era trucks.

Go for a "safe" car, and you can get a pretty nifty 1998 Accord. IMHO, 98-00 were the best looking Accords ever. Get one with a stick and save yourself some headaches over the stupid automatics.

And there goes my ideas about a mid 80's Golf.

Some things are worth dying for. Mid-80's Golf, maybe not. A Mark I GTI? Hell, yes.

 

[Azuremen]

Cool, but when a 5,000 LBS car hits a 2,500 LBS car, which is more likely to go flying into the oncoming lane or ditch? That's simple physics right there..

You say to the former Astrophysics student...

Sadly, you don't understand how crumple zones work or elastic collisions, nor do you seem to understand intrusion into the passenger compartment. Cars are not pool balls, they don't just bounce off each other. The number of variables playing into a collision is fairly immense, and the mass is honestly far less a factor than the impact angles or the velocities involved. Size matters, as Niky said, in the sense that is allows greater areas of the vehicle to be compromised during an accident without intrusion into the passenger compartment. However, old cars, especially those from the 70's, have damn near no thought put into this and thus just crumple uniformly, or worse, intrude massively into the passenger space due to the straight rails at the front of the car.

But I mean, by all means, continue to preach "physics" to us, the entertainment value is high.