We bought a new car.
I really didn't want one. Our old
one was fine with me, but it had over 260,000 miles on it and was beginning to
show its age.
The problem with age,
whether it is humans, animals, or cars, is that aging is costly. Our aging dogs are keeping the vet in
business and the same was true of our mechanic.
It seemed that every week I was taking the car in and saying, "we've
got to stop meeting like this." But,
just like any elderly person there was always another part that had to be
replaced in our elderly car. We decided there
were some things we could live with, like the driver's side door that no longer
opened, but when we received the prognosis that the brakes required another
$900 procedure, we decided to release it to automobile heaven.
So, we bought a new car, or a new used car I should
say. We found a 2015 model used car with
5,500 miles . Eureka! The days are long gone when I feel the need
to impress friends or neighbors with the latest new gadget or car, although
that was not the case in my younger days.
Like a lot of us when we were younger, the type of car that we drove was
always very important. In fact, the
first car I bought was the only other used car I have every owned. All the rest have been driven off of the
dealer's showroom floor, new.
My first car was a Dodge Dart, gold with white leather interior and a push
button transmission. I would never have
picked out that car. My father found it
for me shortly after I graduated college when I needed cheap transportation to
my first real job. My father always had
a fondness for Chrysler products. I
don't know why. He was a quality control
inspector for Ford for years, which might say something about the quality and
reputation of Fords in those days. He
found a good deal on a car that never gave me any problems, but, it was not the
car of my dreams. It wasn't me.
I drove that Dart for a couple of years while I settled into
having a steady paycheck and finally made my way to the Volkswagen dealer to
buy my dream car, a yellow VW convertible.
I loved that car, except in the snow. It got around great, but the top was not air tight.
I would find myself chugging up steep,
icy hills , passing other cars that were
spinning out, all the time being surrounded
by snow swirling throughout the interior.
That car was followed by another VW, a red Karmann Ghia
convertible, one of the most fun cars I've ever owned. A guy I worked with convinced me that I
needed to sell it to him and as a result, I ended up owning the first Toyota of
three.
The Toyotas were followed by two Hondas and then a Saturn,
which was followed by a Ford Ranger and then two Volvos, which were purchased
not for aesthetics, but because they were safe and reliable cars. When you get older, safety and reliability
become more important than whether or not your car makes a statement. The last two cars, the Volvos, were also the
only automatic transmissions that I ever owned with the exception of that push
button Dart.
Our new car is an automatic also, but it is not a concession
to age. I still prefer to drive manual
transmissions, but they are becoming impossible to find here in the U.S. Stick shifts are not only fun to drive, but
safer than automatics. You can't be a
lazy driver with a stick shift. You have
to think ahead. Then there is the
challenge of being able to idle at a stop sign on a hill without using the
brake. Automatics don't offer the same opportunity.
Our little old Ford Ranger has a manual transmission and we
will probably keep it until we die. It will
keep running until then as it has no electronic parts. There is very little
that can go wrong, unlike the cars manufactured today which purposely have
computer obsolescence built into them.
Our new car has all of these electronic warning systems, for
backing up or monitoring a blind spot.
It has GPS and Wi-Fi, but these luxuries are little more than computers
that can go bad at any time and where is the fun in that. The cars today may be as efficient as a cell
phone, but they will never provide the thrill of driving down a deserted two
lane highway in the middle of Western Kansas at 100 miles per hour with the top
down.
