B541 AMD
1984 Honda Prelude 1.8EX
Bought: March 1999 for £925, 94,000 miles
Sold: November 2000 for £300 (trade-in), 125,000 miles

Check out this baby for a pimp wagon. I bought it from a bloke with a Bentley. No really I did. He'd sold a Merc and bought the Bentley which needed some repairs (ha - buy Japanese if you want reliable!), so bought the Prelude from a friend who'd had it for years as a runaround. The fact that he was loaded meant I could haggle a bit. I got £75 off, but this was well before Right Car Wrong Car was on the telly showing us all how to haggle loads of the price of a car. The car was really nice for the price too, with no rust to speak of, diddy alloy wheels, a four-inch thick stack of bills to back up a full set of dealer stamps in the service book, and the original, crazy Japanese-English owner's manual. The only thing letting it down was fading paint on the roof and bonnet, and a bodged repair to the driver's seat, but it still brushed up well - the photo above was taken on the day I traded it in.

I did a lot of miles in this car, it only let me down once (my fault - the alternator went but gave me two days' warning, like an idiot I just ignored the battery light on the dash until it was too late) and was lots of fun to drive - not because it was very powerful, but because it was small and light. Dubbed "The Pimpmobile" by my friends, it had lots of cool features like pop-up lights, the world's biggest sunroof and a spoiler on the boot made from foam rubber, which went "booooooooiiiiing" when you shut the bootlid. No room in the back, but quite a big boot - I used to sleep in it if I went out drinking and had nowhere to stay. It was quite shallow though so you couldn't turn over if I recall correctly, and you had to be careful not to put the backseat up or you'd be locked in. You can also have sex in the back of a Prelude but I'd recommend finding a Travelodge instead if you have a high libido as you'll do your back in eventually, although you might be OK if you are both midgets.

Despite trying to replace it twice, I could never get rid of the thing (I tried to sell it, I really did, but nobody wants them any more), so in the end it got traded in on the Civic. Rudely, the dealer who took it didn't make it Car Of The Week on the forecourt, but apparently put it in a landfill site! A sad end to it's pimping days on the road. They've all rusted away now, but there still seem to be a lot of the later ones around (E-J reg) which look almost the same. Cheap pimping fellas - what are you all waiting for?

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