philosophyonwheels.com

I had a friend approach me with a dilemma.  Her current car is possibly on its last legs and she has decided she is in the market for a new one.  Immediately I was overly enthused and began spewing specifications for the BMW 535i xDrive.  After a few deep breaths I then came up with some realistic parameters for her search.  My friend is a beautiful and smart twenty-something, fresh out of a prestigious school and into her career field as a budding professional.  With a firm monthly allowance for a car payment, we would be sticking to cars under $20,000.  It will be her first new car!  That’s possibly more exciting than a first car which is typically clunker.  This kind of choice will reflect on a person’s image for years and there are just so many things to consider.  Let’s get started.

If my friend was of the most beige complexion of practical, she would have first concluded that a Toyota Corolla is the car for her.  Compact, cheap, and efficient: this car makes the most financial sense to a young woman starting her independent life.  But this car’s problem is that it screams compact, cheap, and efficient.  Sure there are Kia hatchbacks out there that cost less, but because there are so many Corolla’s on the road it makes them seem like a fleet of four-wheeled conformity enforcing sentinels.  A first job can be exciting, but who wants to commute to work for the 50th time and hop out of a Corolla…ready to finally fit into that round hole.  This might be the day!  (Conformity sentinel: “Why aren’t you wearing Gap and listening to NPR during your commute!?”)

Volkswagen Jetta.  This car is truly instant entry-level-chic.  Can anyone remember when the Jetta wasn’t in style?  That doesn’t happen by accident.  When you enter into the “das auto” culture with the purchase of a VW, the Germans offer their appreciation by the precision tuned upkeep of the brand.  All of those meticulously crafted TV commercials featuring hip young people continue to reinforce the cool factor for VW.  That’s why it is so easy to imagine you and three friends in a silver Jetta, windows rolled down, and driving on an open road to the beach or any other random destination.  The Jetta is fun and it’s very good at staying that way.

My friend may want to consider a Subaru Outback, but she will then quickly remember to which type these are nearly exclusively reserved.  Next car…

Mini Cooper: too small.  This is a Tic Tac with a white roof.  The Cooper would be right only if you were absolutely certain you would not move during the time you owned this car.  Using just some basic math I calculated that to move an average 1-bedroom apartment’s amount of stuff would require 12 million round trips in a Mini.  And with only two doors, at some point your friends will become annoyed trying to squeeze into the rear seats.  Don’t let a Mini Cooper ruin your friendships.

Honda Civic.  This car might be right for a young professional who is really into Techno and/or raves and has an overly exuberant sense of sarcasm.  I envision a future where children seizing from too much Pokemon will be whisked away in a Honda Civic badged as the Epilepsy Ambulance.  If my opinion for the Civic hasn’t been made clear yet, I will just say that it continues to dance on the line of acceptable techno-fad styling.  And Honda changes their cars’ styling so much, you can expect the Civic to be redesigned five minutes after you are done reading this paragraph and your Civic will have been rendered old and boring.  

Now for a surprise: the Ford Fusion.  I like the way this car was redesigned for this year.  It actually says to me that Ford management’s idea coalesced into a sensible product.  It looks sharp with a hint of aggression.  The engine is not puny but has a sensible balance of efficiency and power.  The interior craftsmanship is still slightly behind similarly priced foreign sedans, but it exudes a certain humility.  It’s as if Ford was saying “we know we’re not great at the interior quality, so we’re going to do simple and not get caught with something painfully contrived.”  Unfortunately the biggest thing going against this car is the negative stigma lingering over the Ford logo.  (That I think is symptomatic of a much bigger problem concerning America and patriotism: far too big a subject for the scope of this post.)  

So there’s some of my analysis.  Did she pick a car yet?…nope.  Stay tuned for an update.  I promise.

Nobody ever forgets their first.  My first car was a 1991 Volkswagen Jetta: red, stick-shift, manual windows and sunroof.  It wasn’t the most reliable car.  I remember when there was a massive leak in the cooling system.  Of course it happened at 2 am coming back from a party…I mean my friend’s house.  I could drive for exactly 30 feet then had to pull over and let the car cool down and try somehow to look cool while standing next to my car with the hood up.  (When a car came down the road I would bend over the engine and pretend to adjust the windshield-washer reservoir cap.)

I was a bit naive back then too.  While bombing down a bumpy side road there was suddenly a lot of rattling from the undercarriage.  Whatever was rattling fell off and I watched through the rearview mirror as it skipped off the road.  I found it in the woods and brought it to the mechanic the next day, sheepishly handing it over, waiting for the sting of the bad news.  The mechanic immediately chucked it in the trash and said “heat shield, don’t matter.  You’re all set kid.”  Of course.

The ‘91 Jetta had the kind of seat belt with the shoulder strap separate from the lap belt.  The shoulder strap was attached to the pillar of the door and the car wouldn’t start without the buckle inserted.  One day before a soccer practice I disconnected the shoulder strap so I could sit and change into my cleats.  After practice I was all set to head home but the car wouldn’t start…hmm.  In such a situation, my car not starting became a project for the entire team.  Jump starts, push starts and numerous ‘expert’ visual inspections of the engine were executed.   After about twenty minutes I realized it was the shoulder strap.  I nearly blurted it out but wisely kept silent and stealthily reconnected the shoulder strap.  And the very next push start worked!  “Thanks guys, that last push start definitely looked better than the other ones.  That must have been the difference.”

When you retracted the sunroof a one inch tall wind deflector popped up in front of the opening.  It blew my mind how much of a difference that little piece of plastic made on the highway.  I can still imagine some German engineer doing extensive wind tunnel testing to minimize the amount of aerodynamic noise coming into the cabin, screaming “Nein!” every time he wasn’t satisfied.  While on the highway I would reach up and hold down the wind deflector to appreciate the difference.  Then I began experimenting.  For any given speed I could find an optimal height for the deflector to be deployed, resulting in increased aerodynamics and fuel mileage…obviously.  Then the deflector became one of my drumming instruments.  (It was really satisfying to have the air pressure of the cabin pulse to the beat of Lenny Kravitz…saved money on buying a woofer!)  I did that trick one too many times and the spring in the deflector flew away.  

Shifting was tricky to get used to.  With the clutch depressed, the engine’s revs would dive almost as quick as you could lift your foot off the gas.  The revs wouldn’t ‘hang’ in the vicinity that you left them, waiting for the next gear.  It required an intimate feel for the gas pedal to drive that Jetta smoothly.  It probably saved a bit of gas by not having the engine spin needlessly.  But gas was cheap back then and nobody cared too much about that.  (86 ¢/gallon during my senior year of high school!)

That Jetta met its demise the day before Thanksgiving.  The temperature was 30F degrees and raining.  I would take a long curved bridge to get home and that night I was creeping over it at 20 m.p.h.  Suddenly there’s a full-size pickup in my rearview mirror and all I could do was cringe.  Anyone who has ever been in an accident will tell you it is paralyzing when you realize in a split second that there is not a thing you can do.  In my case there wasn’t even a tire screech.  Just the impact.  Luckily the only injury I had was some moderate whiplash.  The pickup didn’t even stop to see if I was alright.  Their destination was the higher priority or maybe they just didn’t have insurance.  The Jetta’s frame was irreparably bent.  Serious bummer.  Accidents are really unfortunately things in life, but hit-and-runs can crumble any faith you might have left in humanity.

Conclusions:  cheap gas is nice, heat shields aren’t necessary, don’t hit and run, and it can come in handy to know how to push start a car…definitely.