Remember that exhilarating feeling—of getting your license, your first car, the freedom to go anywhere—and squandering it by hanging out for hours in parking lots with your friends? This faux-vintage video titled “Car Meet Consisting of S***boxes” distills that feeling down into just under a minute. And if you came of age during the early YouTube, pre-Instagram years of the late aughts and early 2010s, it’ll hit you harder than most.
Filmed with a skatepark aesthetic, this expertly-curated 57-second video has all the ingredients of a good time circa 2012. There’s a Pontiac Grand Prix holding its own in a drag race against a WRX, a Ford Five Hundred stepping up to a Fusion, and an almighty Chevy Cobalt. Hell, there’s even an ‘80s Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. The Pontiac, Olds, and Fords are exactly the kind of parental (or grandparental) hand-me-downs you’d expect, and it’s easy to imagine a teenager picking up weekend shifts at Chuck E. Cheese’s to scrape together payments on a two-door Cobalt or quick Subaru. Most of the cars are modified in early-2010s fashion, with windshield stickers, lowered suspensions, and aftermarket honeycomb grilles. Thankfully, there are no Instagram handles visible.
My favorite ride is the Mk5 Fahrenheit Edition Volkswagen GLI. The only vehicles that seem sorta out of place are a pair of B8 Audi A4s—a wagon and a sedan—which would’ve been nearly new, and both too expensive and too mature for this crew at the time period the video is going for. The sedan exhales a puff of black smoke at 0:14, likely from its failing piston rings or a cheap aftermarket tune. That snaps us back to the present.
With the second the bass hit and the camera panning across an overgrown parking lot, I was transported back to Thursday evenings spent in the In-N-Out parking lot in Northridge, California, and the Shake Shack lot in Newton, Massachusetts, where I made several lifelong friends. It took me back to ripping canyons in my mom’s diesel A3. And I wasn’t alone; when the video was posted in The Drive’s Slack, Chris Rosales said it brought him back to rev-match downshifting his Dad’s automatic Accord, and elder Millennial Andrew Collins remembered “shooting hours of videos like this unironically” with his buddies on MiniDV tapes. Luckily, he says, they will never make it onto the internet.
This video brought The Drive back to our misspent youths, and I hope it does the same for you.
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