Nonsequitur Life

Don’t betray them by becoming familiar…

Previously on Ye Olde Blog…

Joel the Obstinate and Cursed Jetta (TM) was retired and Sara had an emotional breakdown over it.

Then wrote a wall of text about it.

Here’s another one…

We’ve been having serious conversations about replacing my car for a few years. We’ve forked out thousands of dollars in repairs on the damn thing over the years and we figured when it started costing more than the car was worth, we’d look into replacing it. We’ve been recharging the A/C at the top of summer every year for the past few years and true to form when the first hot day rolled around this year, the A/C did not blow cold air. So we took it in and they finally found the leak. Two leaks, to be exact. And it was going to cost $2,000 to fix. And that didn’t include the problems indicated by the Check Engine light that’s been on for three years. They finally figured that out too, and that showed a problem with the temperature sensor on the engine, but they couldn’t fully diagnose it without taking the whole front end apart. In other words: NOT CHEAP.

So we decided we’d get the A/C recharged and actually start car shopping. We planned to take the summer to research and test drive and be ready to buy by fall.

The A/C repair was done on a Friday and it worked fine. The following Wednesday when I went to drive it again, the fan would only blow on top speed and it was only hot air. After many expletives and rude gestures, the following weekend we went out to start looking at cars in person.

I knew I wanted to upgrade to a small SUV for cargo purposes. We both have tiny cars and countless times we’ve lamented how it would be nice to have something bigger to haul things around in. I didn’t want anything too big because I am so bloody short and our garage is also tiny. A VW Jetta and a Honda Civic fit well enough, but anything much bigger and you’re not getting out the passenger door inside the garage.

We knew we wanted to look at Honda and Toyota. I did entertain looking at Volkswagen again, but twenty years with Joel has made me very wary of German engineering. VWs are notoriously expensive to fix and obnoxious to work on. Honda and Toyota are better known for their longevity and durability (exploding air bags notwithstanding). Bob’s car is a 2006 and we have barely had any problems with it by comparison in all these years.

In the current horrifying state of the world, it is an absolute HORSESHIT time to buy a car. New cars are in short supply because of supply chain and labor shortages. Used cars are even more scarce because people don’t want to wait for—or can’t afford—new ones. The auto industry is a criminal organization on a good day, but the cost is up in places a minimum of 40% compared to pre-pandemic both for buying and repairing anything. We could have sunk more money into Joel to try to get another couple of years out of him before we finally buy, but who knows what the market is going to be like next year or later? Also my paranoia of the damn car just up and dying on me on the freeway has only gotten worse with time.

Anyway.

I test drove both a Honda CR-V and a Toyota Rav4.

The Honda experience was very low-key and laid-back and the sales guy encouraged us to do our research and look at other options.

The Toyota experience was…not that. While doing 70mph down the freeway in four lanes of Saturday traffic, the sales guy kept leaning over my shoulder from the backseat, fucking with the cruise control on the steering wheel to demonstrate its “smart” capabilities and I was convinced I was going to crash a vehicle that was not mine. He also pushed us to put down a (refundable) $500 deposit on a car we weren’t even guaranteed to get before the end of the year, if at all. Toyota has apparently cancelled thousands of orders they decided they couldn’t fulfill.

Another drastic contrast between the two was the showrooms. The two dealerships were right next to each other on shared property, owned by the same parent empire. The Honda showroom was open, bright, and QUIET. The Toyota showroom was claustrophobic, dark, and REALLY LOUD. Honda felt like everyone was talking in hushed tones and Toyota felt like sensory overload. Honda had a receptionist that called a sales guy up when we said we wanted to shop. Toyota had guys waiting at the door ready to pounce. It was incredibly jarring and really weird.

We went home and perused a few more options online (Subaru and Mazda and…maybe something else?). We talked about the options we’d been presented at Honda. They had single-digit inventory, but it fell in our specification range, yet the price was iffy. And after a lot more discussion, we went back the following weekend ready to buy.

Our timeline of take the summer and buy in the fall was blown out the window, but we knew what we wanted and so we went for it. Did we rush it? Maybe, but who’s to say what the inventory or price situation would be by fall? Could we have gotten a better deal somewhere else? Maybe, but after all the tacked-on fees and taxes and every other bullshit charge they work in, we were going to be paying a shitton of money regardless of where we bought so…

We weren’t completely set on new vs used. We were leaning more new, but the right used option could work. We ended up buying a Certified Pre-Owned vehicle that was actually brand new. It was listed on the website as used, but it only had 12 miles on it. The story goes that the dealership gets a certain number of new vehicles to use as service loaners—the cars they loan to people while theirs are in the shop for repairs. But since inventory is so limited, they’re just setting aside the new vehicles until a given amount of time passes and they become eligible to sell. The dealership held the title on it (instead of a bank) so it can’t be sold as new, but it has barely been touched. By default these loaners are upgraded with tinted windows and all-weather floor mats and other over-priced, nice-but-not-necessary bits, but it is, of course, rolled into the price. It works out cheaper than if you were to buy a car and get it after-market from the dealership, but still. $$$

We ended up paying more than we wanted, but we are fortunate to be in a financial position that the higher price tag won’t completely kill us. We’ve built up some savings specifically to go towards a car purchase (or Joel’s perpetual high dollar repairs), so we were prepared for a big hit to the bank account. It still sucked to fork over a large sum of money. And we won’t be making any other big ticket purchases anytime soon. Hopefully we get at least another five years out of Bob’s car so we can get this one squared away first.

Now I have a shiny new 2022 Honda CR-V.

Lunar Silver Metallic with gray interior. (Cloth seats, because I do not like leather.)

It’s the mid-level trim and like all new vehicles these days, it’s half computer. That worries me because technology hates me.

It has all kinds of “smart” features that are both neat and annoying. It has “Lane Assist” that shakes the steering wheel if you veer too close to the line. (Or drive through road construction where they move the lanes every other day and don’t fully erase the old lines.) It has blind spot monitoring and beeps loudly if you put your signal on to change lanes when someone is next to you. It gives you a big orange BRAKE warning if it thinks you’re not breaking fast enough with someone in front of you. (Or just a construction barrel on the side of a curved road.) It is a VERY NERVOUS DRIVER.

It has smart cruise control that will automatically slow down or speed up based on the cars ahead. The engine idles down when you’re completely stopped to save on gas and power and even allows you to take your foot off the brake while still in gear. It has a back-up camera with three different view angles and guidelines to show where you’re going to go which might actually help me learn how to properly back up a damn car. I cannot back up a car with any precision to save my life. (I failed the back-up-90-degrees-into-a-parking-spot part of the road test when I got my license. But somehow parallel parked just fine. Now I can’t do either.)

It does not have an ignition key. It’s just a push button on the dash. If you have the “key” on you, you don’t even need to push any buttons to unlock it, just touch the door handle and it unlocks. Same for the passenger side door and the back hatch. (Technically it has a key for manually (un)locking the doors and glove box, but that’s it.) I can connect my phone via Bluetooth (and USB) and answer/make calls through the car. (It also sounds better than talking on the actual phone.) I can use my regular music app to play whatever music I have on my phone. No data/internet required. No more dragging a case of CDs with me every time I leave the house. More than once I have suffered the extremely first world problem of my phone not connecting to the car properly and I couldn’t play my music and I had to listen to the radio like some sort of peasant. I just sat there screaming “I DIDN’T PAY FOR THIS” like a goddamn adult. Also—flipping radio stations on a touch screen is not easy to do while paying attention to the road. Life is hard.

It has remote start and automatic climate control so it will heat up or cool down the interior based on the weather outside. (I’m hoping the silver exterior, gray interior, and window tint will assist in the summer months of sweltering hell on earth. It’ll only be 900 degrees in the car instead of 1000 like Joel with his black interior JFC.) I’ll have to get used to the gas tank being on the driver’s side. (Joel’s was on the passenger side.) Also, there’s no gas cap. It’s just a self-sealing gasket. I haven’t had to put gas in it myself yet because Bob has been driving it every time it’s needed it. And even if I’m driving and he’s with me, he still fills the tank for me. Some one of these days I’ll be out by myself and have to fill the tank, and it’s going to take far more brain power than it should to make sure I get it right. Because I am good at things.

I realize all this new-fangled technology has been around for awhile now, but it’s all new to me. Also I am middle-aged and the interface of the dashboard tablet is not at all intuitive for me. Bob has no problem with it, but he has the mind of a programmer, he creates such things for a living. I do not. I do, however, know where the volume and forward/back controls are on the steering wheel so I can thumb that just fine to control my music without having to look at a screen. If I need to change my playlist however…not happening on the fly that’s for damn sure.

It’s been four months, but I’m not really used to driving it yet. Mostly because I rarely leave the house. And Bob has driven it as much as I have at this point. One, because new car! And two, because Joel was blocking his car in the garage when the battery was dead. It’s technically my car, but it’s in both our names. It’s the first vehicle we’ve bought together, so I suppose that’s some sort of achievement unlocked. I can’t park it properly yet. No matter how I go about it, I’m always way over on the passenger side line of any parking space. And I haven’t mastered getting it straight in the garage. But at least part of that problem was because of an ill-positioned, dead-batteried vehicle that was parked in the driveway for too long. And that’s finally been taken care of. It’s not too much bigger than the old Jetta, but it’s big enough that our giant-ass recycle bin won’t fit between the cars anymore to get it out of the garage.

(Seriously. That recycle bin is big enough to fit probably two and half adult corpses in there. We don’t need that much recycle bin space, but half our neighbors overflow theirs every two weeks and the garbage company was sick of overstuffed bins so they forced us to have the bigger ones. Yay home owner’s association.)

I’m also mildly concerned about cleaning snow off it in the winter because I am very short and can’t see over the roof like I could with my car. I do have a telescoping snow brush, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get there.

Anyway.

I might be a Honda driver now, but I’m still going to use my Volkswagen keychain.

I started writing this post back in June when we bought the car. And I keep writing car but it’s an SUV. I usually call it a truck, because that’s what my mom has always called her SUVs and old habits die hard. Bob thinks it’s more of a car than a truck and thinks it’s weird that I call it a truck, but we have agreed to disagree on that. ANYWAY. I started writing this in June when it was all new and exciting, but I found that I couldn’t focus properly on it while Joel was taking up so much brain space—and driveway space. I needed that to be dealt with first. All that stress was only compounded by the misery of sweltering heat and Summertime SAD. But now we can move forward. There’s probably a million other things I wanted to include here. (Both in this post and the last one.) But my Etch-a-Sketch brain is mush.

It hasn’t been that long since we sent Joel off for greener pastures, but it still feels weird to step out to the garage and see a different vehicle sitting there. Also there isn’t a third car sitting in the driveway. It will get less weird over time I know, but at least that cursed old bastard left his mark on the driveway before we made him someone else’s problem.

Goddammit Joel.

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F.N.T. Semisonic