YOU'RE DRIVING ME CRAZY

Henry Ford did not have me in mind when he popularized automobiles. I would have been happier to stayed with the horse. This tale laments my experiences with cars.

YOU'RE DRIVING ME CRAZY

I have never had the love affairs with cars that many men seem to have enjoyed, for a number of reasons. I am not at all mechanically inclined, and could never maintain a car properly. As a result, all my cars were subject to frequent breakdowns and costly repairs. I never had enough money to buy expensive cars. Given my indifference to maintenance, this was a good thing.

I bought my first car for $600 in the summer of 1949 while working at a resort near Green Pond, New Jersey. A 1939 two-door Plymouth coupe, it had seen better days. I earned $600 that summer, and put every penny of it into its maintenance. When I returned to school, I gave the car to my brother. After wasting even more money on it, he junked the heap and bought a new Chevy.

In 1951, I bought my first new car, a Studebaker Champion, for $1500. I put $500 down, borrowed $500 from a bank, and got $500 in cash advance from my employer. I kept that car for 13 years, much longer than I should have.

After marriage, my wife and I managed to live with just the one car. But after our first child arrived in our love nest, we had to buy a second car. A friend sold me his used four-door Ford sedan in 1959, but it went kaput shortly afterwards. Shortly afterwards, we bought another used Ford, this time a station wagon. I had no plans to buy another car. But, circumstances forced me to.

I enrolled in Santa Clara University’s MBA program in 1963. The Studebaker could not handle the commute. We sold it for fifty bucks and replaced it with a bright red 1964 Volkswagen Beetle. It cost about $1500, the same price I had paid for the Studebaker 13 years earlier.

When we moved to Arizona in 1967, we gave the old Ford station wagon to a neighbor and sold the VW. Neither had air conditioning and both were in need of repair. Fortunately, my new employer provided me with a company car, so we only needed to buy one new vehicle when we arrived here.

Not long after we moved, who should show up at our door but the neighbor to whom we had given our old station wagon. Mrs. Kane, recently divorced, showed up with a guy she insisted on referring to as her cousin, Jack. They left the car and flew back to California. We never saw either of them again.

We sold the old car and bought a used 1965 Ford Country Squire station wagon. It looked nice, but it needed to be repaired constantly. In 1971 we bought a brand new nine-passenger Plymouth Station Wagon. It managed to last three years, including trips back to New York with all the kids and to California for two summer vacations.

With the advent of OPEC, my company cut back on the number of employees to whom they would provide cars, and my job didn’t warrant one. I purchased one of the company’s 1972 Plymouth four-door sedans when we auctioned off many unneeded cars. It didn’t cost much, but it didn’t survive long. My daughter Ellen, rushing to take a SAT exam, tried to squeeze the car into a narrow parking spot. Ignoring the adjacent car’s bumper, she plowed ahead and indented the car from stem to stern.

In 1974, we traded in the ’71 and bought still another Plymouth Station Wagon, a very snazzy looking job, but it was as costly to operate as it was good looking. By 1977, I had to buy another new car, this time a Chevrolet four-door sedan. Like all our other cars, this one required lots of repair work to keep it going. By 1980, we had to replace it.

This time we bought a Honda Civic Station Wagon, for $6,000. I loved this little car. It was very inexpensive to operate for the first three years, but then it fell into a state of neglect and required considerable maintenance. Our son, Barry, needed transportation, so we gave it to him. He hated it, and sold it soon thereafter.

In 1983, we bought a Honda Accord four-door sedan, a luxury edition, so called because it came fully equipped with all the options installed. It was the most expensive car we had ever owned. We had problems with the leather seats (the sun caused the stitching to unravel), and the transmission failed. Our five-year warranty insurance helped pay most of the cost to repair it, about $2,200.

In 1987, we bought a 626 Mazda four-door sedan. It served us well for many years. However, in 1994 it became a total wreck when we collided with a motorist who made a sudden and ill-advised turn in front of us. I had to be hauled off to the hospital, complaining of neck pain. The police cited the other driver. We used the money from the accident to buy another Honda Accord, a four-door model with only one upgrade, a moon-roof which we never used.

In 1990, Ellen's company transferred her to work for two years in England. To help with the transition, we bought her 1986 Chevrolet Nova, a small four-door sedan, a sad kind of car, nondescript and underpowered. All our kids wanted us to sell it and buy something radical, like a boxy Volvo. We eventually sold it and bought a 1996 Honda Accord four-door sedan.

The thought of never again having to buy a new car ended when, in 2000,  A drunk driver smashed into me as I drove toward a neighborhood store, trapping me inside, and rendering the vehicle hors d’combat. I rented a Toyota while awaiting our insurance payout and liked it so much that after the check arrived, bought a 2000 Camry four-door sedan. I wished I had been driving the older of the two Accords, as the ’94 had more miles on it and needed more maintenance than the ’96 required.

For the third time in our lives, we experience yet another crash. A motorist crashed into Angie and totaled the Toyota. She escaped without injury, but the car had to be towed off to a demolition yard, completely totaled. We replaced it with a 2010 Toyota Camry four-door sedan.

I am like most Americans. I like the idea of owning a new car, but I am appalled at the cost. In addition, next to suicide, I cannot think of anything that inflicts more personal pain than having to go through the process of buying a new car. We purchased the new Toyota using the Internet to obtain quotations from three dealers. This made it easier, but I know we probably paid more for the car than others might have been able to negotiate. We pray this is the last car we ever have to buy.

Most of the American-made cars I have owned have been high maintenance low quality vehicles, with the exception of the Studebaker. I do not say that the foreign made cars have been trouble free, but I tend to rate them as being superior to the domestic ones I have owned.

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