Ok... I'll post a few pics of my old cars.... I usually trade for something different as my tastes change.... my philosophy is to stay true to my wife... but love lots of cars.
2011 Infiniti G37S sedan - Wonderful car, comfortable, but the automatic transmission was horrible.... if I had bought the 6 speed manual, this would have been a keeper. I liked the luxury, and it handled very well and was fast... but manually shifting the car with the paddles was frustatingly slow and normal Drive mode programming was poor. Sport Mode was fun but harsh. Traded on the STI, which had 3 Pedals like God intended and just as much interior space.
2017 Mazda MX-5 RF - Fun to drive, but not legal for track days without losing the ability to open the roof. Very small and no storage space and I was a tight fit. It made the BRZ seem spacious. Loved driving it with the top open but I'm a big guy so I always got asked how I fit in there. Needed a turbo or supercharger and i started down the slippery slope of putting a lot of aftermarket parts on it and still not being satisfied. Also traded on the STi.
2006 Porsche Cayman S 350 HP at the wheels with chip and exhaust... it was a blast to drive and I loved it. I think that every enthusiast needs to own a Porsche at some time if they get the chance. This is what convinced me that instead of buying a car and spending a lot of money trying to make it perform... I should spend that money up front on a car that has the performance I want out of the box. Started to get expensive to own at a time that I had a lot of back trouble and couldn't work on it myself so it was traded on the RF.
2013 Subaru BRZ - I'm actually not a fan of the BRZ/86 because in my mind, it was very rough... it needs more power and a lot more refinement... it was fun to drive and it was nimble and handled well.... but wasn't very comfortable and that lack of refinement really showed living with it on a daily basis... It really felt like it was built to a budget and once they hit "okay" and "acceptable" they stopped and worked on something else. Totally different from the Outback, STi, and the WRX which were well-engineered so I think that Toyota's involvement had a lot to do with it. I hope the 2nd generation car allows Subaru to bring it to the level it needs to be. Traded on the Cayman after dropping almost $8K in aftermarket parts trying to improve it to where I was happy with it. I was also in my mid 40''s and I think that if I was younger, I might have not minded the lack of refinement as much.
2008 Honda Civic Si - One of the best cars I've owned, and the K20 engines is one of the best production 4 cylinder engines. This was the last version with VTEC on both the intake and exhaust valves. Aside from the stereo, I left this car stock and drove it. It had a helical limited slip differential and was probably the best handling front wheel drive cars of that era and compared very favorably with the Integra Type R. At the time I was done with tuning and modding and this was a great car out of the box. Traded it on the impulse buy of the BRZ and it's probably the car I regret giving up the most... and probably the standards set by this car influenced my opinion of the BRZ considerably.
Finally, my 02 WRX wagon. I bought one of the first ones available and it was special... back in the day, it was common for the car companies to build tweaked ringer cars to give to the magazines for performance testing. And they would get passed around to the various magazines who would record impressive numbers and win comparisons and such, then when the promotional period was up, then they would quietly destroy the cars and nobody would be wiser... But in their rush to get me a car.... all of the wagon "magazine cars" were black and because I wanted a black wagon, one of the dealerships wound up accidentally getting one of the magazine cars and selling it to me. I have a ton of stories that I could tell, but our first inkling came when I started to modify it and got a COBB Accessport and the car wouldn't run right on their off the shelf maps and it was mildly modded with an uppipe, downpipe and exhaust. I took the car to Doug at TopSpeed in Atlanta with a few buddies for tuning and he wound up having to completely rewrite the fuel maps because it was acting like it had bigger injectors. When we were finished, the car was making some 40HP and 25ft-lbs more than cars with the same mods and spooling up boost almost 750 rpm sooner in the powerband. And once Doug redid the tune it ran fine and was quite fast.
I finally stopped driving it when I got the Civic and it sat in the garage for about 6 months when I decided to sell it. I sold it to a kid who promptly rolled it a few months later. I hear from Doug a few months after that because somebody else bought the wrecked wagon and brought it to him to rebuild the engine and drive train to swap into another car. He opened up the engine to find that it was a fully decked EJ207 from the JDM STI with forged rods and pistons and a balanced crank... the heads were ported and polished EJ205 heads... the injectors were STI injectors painted the stock color, and the housing had been milled out and stuffed with a bigger wheel... and he confirmed that the factory seals and marking were all in place and undisturbed. Doug remembered that at a certain point of the tuning session the car seemed to want more boost and timing but we didn't want to push it too hard.... and all along it could have taken it.
Except the G37... the rest were all manual transmissions, and I dread that the day is coming soon that I won't be able to buy a new car with one.... and that will be a sad day.