A lot of adventures
The early days of my characters were severely visually impoverished. Shelley drives a bug because in 1998, pre-photo ref and Sketchup etc, the only car I had in my “office” was one of those pull-back Transformers Bumblebees (Goldbug?) to draw from.
I can recall my father once cutting up a set of metal storage shelves to get pieces of sheet metal which he riveted underneath his similarly afflicted Triumph Spitfire. I’m don’t think the road was actually visible, but then again I’m not sure there was anything but floor mats obscuring the view.
I couldn’t see the road through the bottom of my Beetle, but once when I drove through a puddle I discovered that it was only because I hadn’t been looking.
Is that the Ninja Car of Jesus? Or did it come later?
A bit later!
The NCoJ was right hand drive, as I recall.
They all are in this strip — including this bug.
Left hand drive, I meant.
Left hand drive. Sometimes described as “the other sort of right hand drive…only on the left, actually”.
I will admit that by the time I stopped driving my ’69 Camaro in… 2001? There were parts of the floorboard which remained intact primarily through force of habit
My brother had a mini. The floor said ‘Huntley and Palmers’ because it was made from a biscuit tin.
I had a Land-Rover 2a. If you lifted the middle seat cushion, there was the drive shaft and the road. The cushion had wood at the back – it wasn’t just a cushion stuffed in the hole. But it was a bit if a surprise if you lifted it looking for tissues.
You put that back! That’s a load-bearing cushion!
Bumblebee & Shelley Winters – now THAT’S a Transformers movie I’d like to see! 😀
Only barely on topic, in the 2010 film from India, “Kutty Pisasu” (which apparently translates into “Devil Kiddy”), “a generic off-brand version of Bumblebee” (copyright laws? what copyright laws?) teams up with, well, you might want to consult the review at braineater.com. I’d post a direct link but I’m not sure if that’s allowed in this particular forum.
My parents once told me about being on a road trip with me across Northern Ontario when I was two years old or so. I’d been asleep and quiet for a long time in the back seat, when suddenly they heard me saying “Bip bip bip bip…” every time my dad changed lanes. Turned out there were holes in the floor, and I was enjoying watching the dotted lines pass by between my feet.
It sounds like you were safe, for all that (whew), but was the hole very large…? (Sorry for my curiosity.)
Wait, is it the car that Erin is later seen driving in earlier strips? I vaguely remember one of HER co-workers being equally unimpressed with HER car.
My first car was an ancient Morris vehicle – 1100? And like many others here, I had fun driving through puddles and getting wet feet. The best family banger, though, belonged to my late husband, before he was my husband. A battered old Ford Escort with a loose gearstick. His favourite trick was to hand the gearstick to a back seat passenger, saying, “Here – you can change gear!”
I had a ’61 Chevy Bel Air (back when that didn’t conjure visions of vintage classic car) that required a sheet metal patch on the passenger side floor. The hole was (mostly) out the way of feet, but distressingly visible.
My mother got her driving licence when I was in my late pre-teens (late 70s), and our first car was a red VW beetle that was surprisingly more spacious than it looked. I’m pretty sure it had proper floors too. But just a bit over a decade later, some friends and I drove an old classic VW minibus down through the very recently opened DDR to the also very recently opened city of Prague, and the floors were boiling hot the entire time due to being right on top of the engine, and probably made of tin foil or something.
I absolutely had holes in the floor of my old Willys wagon that you could see the road through. To remedy this, I stole a road sign (speed limit or some shit) and hammered it into a shape I could pop rivet into the space where a floor ought to have been.
My – very – elderly Triumph Spitfire had cardboard over driver’s side holes; before trading it in I covered the cardboard with a rubber mat, which astonishingly fooled the salesman long enough for a very welcome trade-in price…