Automobiles

A 16-year-old car is a slice of history; excavating its contents is like going on an archaeological dig. Here’s what I came across when I went to shovel out the Dog Chariot before forking it over as a trade-in.

• A disintegrating Ziplock bag filled with quarters, for use in pay phones
• A dime dated 1971
• A fistful of city and state road maps. MAPS! Remember those?
• One nonfunctional flashlight, sealed shut by battery corrosion
• Two tire gauges, never used; one dates to the Early Devonian
• One wing corkscrew for emergency wine bottles
• Two pair of nonRx shades
• Several emery boards
• Half a roll of Rolaids, age unknown
• One forgotten comb
• One rarely used hairbrush
• One fold-up umbrella

The new car has TWO big storage compartments between the front seats. These will more than accommodate the junk I carry. The van, alas, had nothing to speak of in that line, and so I had two flat cardboard boxes and a basket in which I carried around things like shades, antacids, a notepad and pen, packet of glasses cleaner, junk, junk,  junk, and more  junk.

It’s going to be so tidy inside that car, it’ll look like…like it belongs to someone else! 😀

Have you ever excavated a car? What did you find in it?

It’s HERE! The new vehicle has taken up residence in the garage.

Having decided the time had come to replace the beloved Dog Chariot., I went over to Bell Road Toyota, a large dealership where a friend of a friend is fleet manager. There I spent the entire afternoon wrestling with Toyota staff and ninnies at the credit union’s lender and on and on. It was amazingly awful. The piles of incomprehensible papers they make you sign rival the stacks of contracts you have to sign to get a mortgage.

So which is worse? Getting a mortgage or buying a car?

My own money is on the car transaction. Mortgage officers don’t try to pressure you to buy things you don’t need or want.

The car is a so-called “Certified Pre-Owned” (CPO) number, which means the dealer has refurbished it from front to back and provides an extended, fairly comprehensive warranty: 100,000 miles or seven years. They’re very proud of this and happily tell you all about it, over and over…until you get to the financial guy to whom you’re supposed to pay up.

He spent the better part of an hour trying to persuade me that I had to buy additional warranty coverage, lest God Only Knows WHAT might happen — liberally emphasizing the cost of replacing a fuel filter installed inside a gas tank. Much of this threat was laid to the federal government’s unreasonable demands for lowered emissions.

Ultimately I passed on the expensive extra warranty: it looked like a scam, sort of like those extended warranties peddled by appliance stores and Best Buy and the like. He finally gave up.

It really is a nice car.

So the bad news is, the car’s alternator crapped out in Tolleson, an alarming little burg where the term “low rent” means “gentrified.” The good news is, I just replaced the alternator in June, so it’s still on the warranty. The bad news redux is that you can’t buy a new alternator in the aftermarket. All aftermarket alternators, even if you buy one from a car dealership, are rebuilt. And, Chuck remarked as he was chauffeuring me home from his shop, “they crap out.”

Yeah. Well. Dude! It woulda been nice if you’d clued me to that before you charged me for a piece of junk that lasted all of four months and stranded me for five interminable hours in a QT parking lot inhabited by drug addicts!

Not wanting to repeat that adventure, I’m now actively in the car market. After much study of Edmunds, Car & Driver, Carfax, and Car Guru, the choices are narrowed down to a Toyota Venza or a Honda Santa Fe, 2012 – 2015.

The Venza is a kewl little crossover, unfortunately discontinued in 2015. My friend KJG and her DH own one, and they love it. I test-drove the Venza the last time I fell into a car-driving frenzy and really liked it, too. With a V-6, it’s quite the little rocket, and it has plenty of room for dogs, estate sale finds, and friends.

The Santa Fe is a larger vehicle but it has much to recommend it.  The regular Santa Fe is a full-sized SUV, but there’s a “Sport” model that’s shorter, with only five seats. Edmunds calls the Santa Fe the “true winner” in its class. You can’t get a six-banger in the Sport, but you can get a turbo-charged four-banger, which is almost as good.

Also much admired by Edmunds — and given a higher “grade” — is the Honda Odyssey. But I have the same problem with it now that I did when I got the Sienna: it seems like WAY too much truck than I need.

WhatEVER. We’ll see what the broker comes up with. He said he knew someone who was trying to unload a Santa Fe, and he thinks there’ll be a selection of Venzas. I didn’t find the latter to be true on Car Guru or Edmunds — to the contrary, availability of the Venza is limited. It was discontinued in 2015, so I expect a lot of owners don’t want to part with theirs. Or something.

I’m prequalified for $22,000 at 1.9% through the credit union. It will cover certified “pre-owned” cars between 2012 and 2015. Looks like a Santa Fe dated 2013 or 2014 is likely to run $17,000 to $18,000. I think the Sienna is worth about $1200 on trade-in (can no longer see Kelly Blue Book, because they now demand that you disable your AdBlocker, which I ain’t a-gonna do). If I don’t resurface the pool this year, I should be able to disgorge about $4,000 as a cash down payment. Let’s say I can get the loan amount down to 15 grand (holy sh!t): over five years, that’s $262.26 a month.

That would be precisely $262 more than I can afford.

So…needless to say, I am not pleased at the prospect of being chained to an auto loan for the next five years. However, the credit union will let you pay down principal, so once again — as happened the last time I had to get a car loan — I’ll throw every windfall large and small at the thing, and it will probably go away in a lot less than five years.

When I bought a Camry on time — back when I had a job…remember those? — that strategy paid off a five-year loan in 18 months.

We just deposited the current Required Minimum Withdrawal from Fidelity into my checking account. I believe I’m about $5,000 the good this year. So I could probably come up with as much as 5 grand in cash — though I’d rather not.  There’s a certified pre-owned Santa Fe with 30,300 miles on it on sale right now for $17,400. If my car is worth around a thousand bucks and I paid down $5,000 in cash, then I’d only have to finance about $11,400 (plus, plus, plus…). That’d be $200 a month.

Marginally affordable.

Car Guru shows only three 2012-2015 Toyota Venzas for sale in the Phoenix area. Two of them are graded as not good buys; the one they think is a pretty good deal is $18,598, for a 2013 vehicle with a V-6 engine and 46,364 miles on it. Holy mackerel.

LOL! Here’s a Santa Fe that looks like it’s orange! I’d have to paint yellow and black flames on the sides….

Ugh. I’ve never bought a used car before. This doesn’t look like a very safe prospect. But I sure can’t afford new-car prices.

Damn George Bush and his handlers for wrecking the economy and putting me (and everyone else) out of a job! I’d have  bought a new car six years ago if it weren’t for those shenanigans…and would easily be able to afford another new car right about now. That’s “new” new, not “new to me.”

After 16  years of faithful service, the Dog Chariot’s alternator finally gave up the ghost.

We knew several months ago that it was on its last legs…or bearings, or slip rings, or whatever alternators have. But we decided to let it run, since replacing or fixing it is expensive and I was, as usual, thinking about buying a new car.

Welp. I didn’t buy a new car. In fact, I decided I don’t want a new car — druther do the driving myself, thank you. So the car has been tooling along just fine ever since that initial diagnosis.

Yesterday as I’m was driving home from the FedEx office the radio cut out.

I figured it was time to buy a new cheap radio.

But…uhm…then the ABS light flickered on. And the thermostat said the engine was a whole lot cooler than it oughta be. The air conditioning gasped and wheezed.

Shut off the AC, opened the windows. The ABS light went off. Radio cut in and out. Shut off the radio.

Got stuck behind a moron on a two-lane road that I’d turned onto by way of avoiding traffic and construction. Knew there was enough room for the six-banger to get around the idiot, so FLOORED IT and flew past the bastard like an X-wing with a TIE fighter on its tail.

The poor guy in the oncoming lane apparently did not understand why one has a six-cylinder engine. He was visibly terrified…as in he almost climbed up on the sidewalk. Tsk.

After that blast of power revved up the engine, the radio came back on and the ABS light went off and things seemed to work OK again. But I left the AC off and drove straight back to the Funny Farm.

Problem is, both of Chuck’s master mechanics are out — one with an injury and the other because he and his wife bought and paid for a trip to a destination wedding five months ago. His shop is very busy under ordinary conditions — with three guys working, they have all they can do to keep up with the work. But summertime is when cars love to crap out around here. So their lot is overflowing.

I felt terrible to foist a repair job on him right at this moment. We should have changed out the alternator when we first noticed it was sickly.

Anyhow, because of the craziness down at Chuck’s, the car probably won’t be back on the road before tomorrow. That’s OK, because I’ve got plenty of food in the house and my son is back in town.

Unfortunately I went off and left my purse in the car, which was parked in the alley behind Chuck’s. We called down there to tell Harold to snag the thing. Haven’t heard anything from them to the effect that some bum already found it. So I guess it’ll be OK. Without a car, one doesn’t need a purse…

That was stupid. Don’t even know why I took the damn purse, other than force of habit. There’s a spare driver’s license hidden in the vehicle.

We drove back to my house in a Chevy Suburban. I was reminded of why I don’t want a new vehicle.

Here’s what I want in a car:

• To get from point A to point B with the least amount of hassle, expense, and distraction possible
• To drive the car all by myself
• To be reasonably safe — i.e., inside a car heavy enough to withstand a collision or a rollover
• To run trouble-free at least 100,000 miles
• To have a radio that brings in NPR and a cowboy station
• To possess an air conditioner that actually works. At all times.

There you have it. That’s it That’s all I want.

Admittedly, a functioning air conditioner…that’s asking a lot. My car has one of the old-timey functioning air-conditioners, one that actually cools the car and does not pretend to practice passenger-by-passenger “climate control,” and that is one reason I don’t want to give it up.

Here’s what I DON’T WANT:

• A car that nags me any more than the Dog Chariot already nags
• A car that tells me to turn left an eighth of a mile ahead
• A car whose windshield wipers turn on at the first hint of a raindrop
• A car that can sense a red light ahead and puts on the brakes for me
• A car that’s connected to the Internet in any way, shape, or fashion
• A car that doubles as a cell phone
• A car that arrogates driving functions unto itself
• A four-banger whose makers fool us into imagining is as powerful as a six-banger
• A course in jet airplane navigation to learn to use the dashboard

What I really would like is to keep the Chariot on the road until such time as I can no longer drive. By then, Google and Tesla’s self-driving vehicles will be past the first and second generations and so should be less of a headache to own than the first versions will be. I’d like to be able to trade the Dog Chariot in on a self-driving car that goes faster than 30 or 40 miles an hour, that can run on the open highways, and that will last until I topple over into the grave.

That, I figure, will keep me out of the nursing home by making it possible to get daily necessities and run to the doctor without having to hire a taxicab for the purpose.

I hope.