The Persnickety Project's Lessons Learned: Car Ownership

We would have been better off
 with the Gobot

14 years.  6 cars.  That's our career driving record.  Take out the one that lasted 5 years and we're averaging a destruction about every two years.  So, following a telephone call in which the dealer informed us the necessary repairs, i.e. a new engine, would cost us double the worth of the car thus ending both the life of our Xterra and our era of pretending be be outdoorsy ("We can fit two kayaks on the roof rack.  We're pretty rugged."), we decided to take stock and try to figure out what the heck went wrong.  We thought we'd come up with 2, maybe 3, things we could of done differently.  We came up with 9. 

Strap on your seat belts people, it's time to get your learn on. (Safety belts are essential during such activities as getting said "learn on.")

1.  Bad Luck Ain't Bad Luck

Who cares if half the time we bought cars from what was essentially the clearance rack of the TJ Maxx?  Or that the rest of the time we spent wildly beyond our means?  Or that we did our maintenance less than routinely and drove 50,000 miles a year.  The fact that we're now shopping for our 7th car is obviously a sign of bad car luck, right?  Wrong.  At some point, you've got to assess the situation and realize the past mishaps and accidents weren't just random acts of the universe but deliberate acts of your own stupidity.

Chalking up the brutal murder of four cars (and the assisted suicide of two others)   

2.  Don't Be Afraid of Chang(ing Your Oil)

Apparently oil, and the changing thereof, is an important part of car maintenance.  Or so we've been told.  But nobody really believes all those scientists and Castrol commercials talking about "viscosity and thermal breakdown" and other mumbo jumbo?  It's obviously just a scam to get us to spend our hard earned money.  We can't afford to be wasting the few hundred dollars over the life of the car it takes to keep it running.  We have car payments to make.  And it's not like we had the time.  Our lunch hour is reserved for sitting in the Wegman's parking lot eating soup or bagged tuna steaks and being annoyed by Mike Francesa's pomposity.  These types of things CANNOT WAIT.

3.  Don't Buy a Car That's Been "Road Hard and Put Away Wet"

Those are the words our father so eloquently used to describe our first car - the 1984 Dodge Daytona.  Unfortunately, at 17, we couldn't quite grasp the full meaning of the metaphor.  Not that we would have given a shit.  The car was red (!), had Turbo(!!) (is there a cooler word in the English language than Turbo?) and T-Tops (!!!) and it was cost only $400 (!!!!).  Forget sensible, it was like a 4 layer Dumb Teenager Cake that was going to let us ditch the bus in style.  Three months and our first blown engine later, we were back on that bus  (Sitting in the front, of course, since we were intimidated by the loud freshman.  We were not cool in high school.)  Now, some 14 years later, while we're still not quite sure what he was getting at, we're pretty sure dear old dad was trying to tell us "Don't Buy This Car You Idiot."

4.  T-Tops = Convertible?

About those T-Tops.  We were going to look so cool driving around with the wind blowing though our prematurely receding hairline (Hello Ladies!!) blasting some Sublime or Reel Big Fish.  You could almost smell the envy from our fellow students in their totally characterless BMW's and Jettas.  Germany couldn't engineer this level of badassery.  It's just like a convertible, right?  Ummm....no.  A white trash convertible maybe.  You see when your glass roof comes off you have to constantly worry about little details like where you're going to put those extremely fragile panels (the answer:  under your grandmother's bed of course) and what happens when you get stuck in the rain (the answer:  Goodbye Ladies!!).  Little did we know that that our experience with the white trash convertible would ultimately inform another of our epic car buying mistakes later on.

5.  You Never "Deserve" A Brand New Car

So you just graduated law school, passed the bar and started your fancy pants new job at the big law firm.  You've got an apartment and for once in your life, some money.  After all that hard work and deprivation of having to drive a used car all those years.  It's time to treat yourself and what better way than to get that convertible you've been convinced would make you cool since the T-Top days.  You deserve it, right?  Wrong.  That kind of thinking is how you ignore a Staten Island Landfill-sized pile of debt and end up paying $600 a month for a brand new, just released, hard-top Pontiac G6 convertible that you paid ABOVE STICKER for.  We deserved was to be beaten about the head and neck.

6.  If it Sounds Like a Blown Engine and Drives Like a Blown Engine ...

It's a fuckin blown engine.  A car makes a rather distinct sound when it's on death's doorstep.  It's a sound so elemental that, even if you've never heard it before, the moment it happens you now exactly what it is.  It's the kind of sound that can only be drowned by your own denial.  The kind that convinces you an oil change is all that's in order when the car can't get over 40 mph and the "Check Engine" light practically begs you to stop.  In the battle between reality and denial, denial wins yet again. 

7.  Don't Ignore The "Signs" Before You Buy

We never really put much stock in the universe or god or whatever giving us signs telling us what we should do, putting our faith in randomness rather than reason.  But when you drive up to look at a used car only to find the owners of that fine automobile in the middle of the street doing neutral drops and peeling out the tires and then, when you get closer, find a 2 inch puddle of water in the back seat, you probably should take that as a sign, by virtue of some universal plan or not, that it's not the car for you.  And, if for some reason, you ignore those red flags, when you notice that the rims of the car are PAINTED (PAINTED!!) the same ugly-ass redish, pepto color as the car, so they match, well, that's certainly god trying to tell you to run the hell away.

7.  No Job, Bad Credit, Big Problem

After brutally murdering our first three cars in various ways - a blown engine, a melted engine block and a random and still unexplained stalling problem that often left us doing 80 without power steering or breaks on the parkway while trying to restart the car - you might have thought buying something a bit more reliable (read: expensive) would have been a good idea.  And on many accounts it was, the car lasted 5 years and became our favorite car ever, except for that pesky issue of how to make the 5 years of car payments when we didn't exactly have a job.  So, who ended up making the payments for us? Capital One.  And Bank of America.  And Citibank.  And American Express.  And us, for 5 years after that.

8.  A Disaster of a Drive Is a Drive To Disaster

As best we can tell, in our working life, we've only lived less than 40 miles from our job for about a year.  We'd love to call commuting our curse or use some other blame shifting term but that would be dishonest.  (see Decision Making, Bad at #1.)  If you're going to set out to drive back and forth to such great distances, you might not want to drive your brand new convertible or the SUV that gets 18 miles per gallon.  If you value those cars, you'd be better off driving them off a bridge and ending the misery straight away before you end up selling the convertible after 2 years and barely breaking even and then getting scrap value for the SUV.

9.  Go Green Before It's Too Goddamn Late

That's right.  It's time to quit screwing around.  The economy still sucks and the world is obviously ending.  The commute isn't going to get shorter and gas sure as hell isn't going to get any cheaper (talking about when it was $0.98 a gallon is the new "we used to walk to school, up hill, both ways, in the snow.")  We're getting a goddamn Prius.  Used.  Yeah, it's not cool.  And yeah, it's a glorified golf cart.  And yeah, it makes us look like a either a tree hugging asshole or a pretentious Hollywood actor.  But you can call us Ed Bagely, Jr. all you want but hopefully when we look back in 10 years we'll find that the sensible, gas sipping (ugh!) car was the one that started us on a better path.  Some cars say you're cool, others say you're rich, we're just hoping this one says we make good decisions.