our old cars

There’s a reason we haven’t gotten a new car in fourteen years. It’s hard to spend tens of thousands of dollars on an object that will depreciate by a thousand or so as soon as you drive it off the lot, will lose value like a leaky valve in the months and years after that, and is made to fall apart within a decade or two. It’s the apex of free market economics, the car racket. The earliest cars were made to last forever. It only makes sense. They are, after all, made of metal. Durable, right? And yet somehow not. Now cars (except perhaps the Volvo) are built for obsolescence and consumers are programmed to want the latest, greatest, sleekest (or boxiest) new lines within a couple of years, thus thickening Detroit's – and Tokyo's – executive's Golden Parachute lining by the minute.

So we drive our two-door 1987 Corolla and our (also two-door) 1988 Accord year after year after year while the car shapes have changed around us, from the low-slung lines of our cars to the bubble cars you saw everywhere in the ‘90s to the current big-boned SUVs and the latest trend, boxes-on-wheels like the Honda Element and the new Mercedes G500 SUV. Ours are good little cars, not so sexy perhaps, but pretty damned reliable. Yes, maybe I feel a little embarrassed pulling up outside someone’s house for a party in my car with its chipped paint and its accumulated dents and dings, as if I’m announcing to the world, “empty pockets here,” even when we’re not as poor as all that, but it just hasn’t been a priority. We’d rather have decent computers and weekly dinners out and a mortgage and even, yes, a small nest egg for lean times and potential show cancellations. But you can’t exactly set your PowerBook on the dashboard of your now-ancient vehicle, the new(ish) with the old. And there’s this other part of me that’s proud in a perverse, reverse sort of way. Look at us, we’re not into conspicuous consumption, we’d rather get full value, run our cars throughout their full useful life and not litter the environment with more hunks of metal junked before their time. Aren’t we cool in our non-cool sort of way?

But the cycle of life demands change sooner or later. And the fact is, our creaky two-door low-slung cars don’t serve our needs too well anymore. As Dan said to me yesterday, he and I don’t just get into a car and drive off these days. We move in. Sometimes when I drive Damian to school, I’m carrying his lunch bag, my lunch bag, my bag of healthy snacks, my huge water bottle and his bag of sippy cups and milk boxes for the rides to and from school. Also my computer bag, my daypack (inevitably stuffed to the gills), my camera, a change of clothes for each of us or at least an extra sweatshirt or two, and maybe a bag of books to return to the library on the way home after school. And most of this has to go on the passenger seat. Because I may need access, you see. Sometimes I add Damian’s friend C’s lunch bag and jacket to the now-huge pile because we’re carpooling these days. Then after I drop Damian (and C) off, I pull into a parking spot near the library (where I'll go after lunch) and eat my turkey-tomato-balsamic onion tortilla wrap in the car while reading a book. Relaxing? Sure, if you have room. In a two door hatchback, not so much. More than a car, we need a house on wheels. A comfortable house.

I think it’s time to go for it. We got the word last week: the show Dan edits has been picked up for the rest of the season and it’s doing well enough we expect a second season. In this kind of freelance career, you don’t get much more security than that. We’re not rich or even well off, but I think we can afford monthly payments on a reasonably priced new car.

We went car shopping yesterday, test drove two models (a Sienna and a CRV, if you must know, both with nicely low emissions). We almost bought a car but stopped ourselves. It feels like too much somehow. I know it’s perfectly logical and even okay and people do it all the time, sometimes yearly. Then why am I feeling panicked? But I am, as if it’s wrong to spend that money, wrong to have something new and comparatively luxurious when our old cars still run. But we’ll only be giving away one car (we plan to donate it – anyone have a good place to donate old cars?) and keeping the other, so this isn’t all that drastic. And we’re three now instead of two and we have carpool needs and bicycle transport needs and damnit all, we want something with a smoother ride and more breathing room. But the part of me that’s held out all these years wants to hold out a bit longer still.

Like till next weekend.

(to be continued)

Posted by Tamar at November 2, 2003 09:42 PM