Rare, One-Owner EK Hatch Pops Up On Craigslist

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1998 Honda Civic Hatchback

Sometimes the car of your dreams is hiding in plain sight.

One thing the muscle car guys have over us is barn finds: desirable cars, squirreled away for years until some lucky punk blows the dust off their dream car. For those of us into newer cars, though, our dream machines are hiding in plain sight. That’s definitely the case with this EK Civic hatch we found on Craigslist.

The proverbial “little old lady car” still exists, the one-owner car used and abused as a daily workhorse by someone who has spent the last two decades oblivious to the fact that they’re driving someone else’s dream car. That’s exactly what we’re looking at here.

1998 Honda Civic Hatchback

This 1998 Honda Civic, offered for sale in Norton, Ohio (a rural Akron suburb), has spent its entire, 200,000 mile life with one owner in the heart of the Rust Belt. It has its share of rot, along with an understandable number of mechanical issues. Most importantly, though, it’s a Milano Red hatch with a manual transmission. If you’re looking for a project car, you could do a whole lot worse.

1998 Honda Civic Hatchback

Even with the rust, we can easily imagine someone asking ten times the paltry $450 asking price. For someone who’s not afraid of bodywork (and we’re talking some seriously substantial body work), it presents a rare opportunity.

1998 Honda Civic Hatchback

Despite the car’s condition and the challenges presented by it, we predicted that there would be no shortage of interest in the car. Our assumption was proven correct when the ad was deleted less than five hours after it was posted. Thankfully, we were able to grab screenshots of the ad as a snapshot of someone else’s incredible opportunity.

Today, one of our own is the lucky punk, and we couldn’t be happier. Well, we could be…if the lucky punk was us!

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Cam VanDerHorst has been a contributor to Internet Brands' Auto Group sites for over three years, with his byline appearing on Ford Truck Enthusiasts, Corvette Forum, JK Forum, and Harley-Davidson Forums, among others. In that time, he's also contributed to Autoweek, The Drive, and Scale Auto Magazine.
He bought his first car at age 14 -- a 1978 Ford Mustang II -- and since then he’s amassed an impressive and diverse collection of cars, trucks, and motorcycles, including a 1996 Ford Mustang SVT Mystic Cobra (#683) and a classic air-cooled Porsche 911.
In addition to writing about cars and wrenching on them in his spare time, he enjoys playing music (drums and ukulele), building model cars, and tending to his chickens.
You can follow Cam, his cars, his bikes, and his chickens at @camvanderhorst on Instagram.
When he's not busy working on his Harley-Davidson bike, the vastly experienced writer has covered an array of features, reviews, how-tos, op-eds and news stories for Internet Brands' Auto Group and is also a co-founder and co-host of the popular podcast Cammed & Tubbed.

Check him out on Instagram at: Camvanderhorst.


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