2001 Acura EL Premium

A 1998 Acura EL was the second new car that I have bought in my life, replacing a 1994 Acura Integra that was my first new car.

My Integra was a really nice red coupe version with a manual transmission and it was great fun to scream up the highway on-ramps in it.

I was very reluctant to part with it, but since buying it I managed to get married and my first child had just been born. Sadly a little 2 door sports car just wouldn't cut it as family transport.

At that point, we still weren't resigned to the idea of buying a minivan (yet), but we did want something that would allow us to easily stow our little critter into his car seat in the back.

We were still quite smitten with Acuras (and Hondas in general) so when we saw that Acura was introducing a new 4 door sub-compact car, we decided to give it a look.

The 1998 Acura EL that we ended up buying was an emerald green sport trim level version that had the same 5-speed manual transmission and VTEC engine as my old Integra, so I didn't really compromise too much in moving up to something that was more family-friendly.

It was a very faithful servant for my family and when we traded it in 7 years later, it had almost 400,000 kilometers on the clock and was still running like a top.

The EL was a bit of a unique car in that it was produced for the Canadian market only and shared the same internals and a lot of the body of the Honda Civic.

In fact, the EL was assembled at the Allison Ontario plant, which also produced the Honda Civic. At the time that I bought my EL, I had it on good authority that the Allision plant only built EL's on the last week of the month, spending the rest of the month building Civics.

This particular EL was the top of the line Premium trim level, which had the leather seats and steering wheel as well as fake wood trim accents (versus the black plastic of my lower-trim level EL), among other features.

This EL has a 1.7-liter four-cylinder VTEC engine (versus the 1.6-liter engine that my EL had).

This particular car had seen a lot of Canada since it started its life on the road in the Vancouver area of British Columbia, some 2,600 miles away from its final resting spot.

It had spent about 13 years roaming the roads in BC before it made the trip back to Ontario in 2015. This EL continued to roam around Ontario until it finally it got it's well-deserved rest here in the junkyard in 2018, only about an hour's drive away from its place of birth.

All told this car spent 17 years on the road. Based on my experience with my own EL, this is something that does not surprise me in the slightest.