A sentimental listing of my senior vehicles current and past.

I’ve never been a car guy. Probably that’s due to growing up dirt poor. It’s not like I had a choice there anyway. But it’s more than that. A lot of guys connect their whole identity or sense of masculinity to a set of wheels. I never did that. Never cared.

Sometimes, I wish I could be a car guy. One of those guys who waxes eloquent about this engine or that engine. But for me, a car has always been a metal box with wheels meant to get me from one point to another.

I currently drive a “senior vehicle,” as I’ve written about in the past. Which is a nice way of saying it’s a beater. Even though I could easily afford a new car in cash, I choose to keep driving like I’m broke. I love my old Saturn. She’s a stick shift coupe with almost 200,000 miles. She’s semi-retired now. I’m fortunate to have a work truck I use to get to where I need to, you know, work. And because I live in a small town, I really just use my car for grocery store runs, and the occassional day trip across state. Even in brutally cold winters and burning hot summers, my senior vehicle has just kept chugging along on her minor assignments. Eventually the day will come when she’ll finally give out. When that day comes I’ll give her a Viking funeral for her many years of service. For now she just keeps hanging on like a loyal dog.

Just yesterday I calculated about how much I’ve spent on vehicle purchases over the course of my driving life so far, and I was shocked. I’ll itemize all of my car purchases in a moment, but I’ll just state the number up front here to get it over with. This is approximately how much I’ve spent on cars over 26 years of driving:

— — $12,500 — —

That’s it. From age 16, when I bought my first car, until now, at age 42. Not even thirteen grand. That wouldn’t even buy half of a new base model Honda Civic nowadays after taxes and fees. This absurdly low number is an aberration when you consider that most people are driving around with ginormous car payments and cars that cost as much as houses. I know a guy at work who got a raise, then immediately ran out and financed a $65,000 SUV. That’s more than 5x more than what I’ve paid for vehicles my whole life, just on ONE purchase. Insane.

My first car was a 1982 Buick Skylark. Cost — $200

The same make and model and year even of the car in My Cousin Vinny. I bought it from a mechanic who was a friend of the family. You always remember your first time. My Skylark had a weird tick where it needed to be warmed up for several minutes before it could be driven, or else it would stall out. So, everytime I started it I had to sit there and let it idle before I could go anywhere. Not the worst feature, really, as I used to smoke at the time, and I was a teen with not exactly the busiest of schedules. I’d sit there and smoke a Marlboro, then take off.

My Buick wasn’t exactly a hot rod. But it only cost two hundred. Eventually, when it became impractical to fix, I wound up donating it to some veteran’s charity. I wish I had taken some pictures of it, or at least appreciated it more while I had it. That car represented a big life transition for me. I moved out of my parent’s house at 17 and graduated high school in that car. I miss it sometimes, but I’m glad it was able to go to help people in need at the end of its life.

My second car was a 1987 Toyota Celica. Cost ~ $1,200.

Aw man, I was hot shit driving this around. This was an upgrade. ’82 to ’87. A whole five years! It was a coupe, too, which meant it was practically like a race car.

I kid, of course. I liked this car, but I was never under the illusion that it was anything other than a semi-reliable hunk of aluminum. This car’s tick was an issue with the flywheel. Every so often when I went to start the flywheel would SQUEAL loudly. This made it super embarassing to drive, of course. So, I used to always look around to see if anyone was around before cranking the ignition.

I remember this car more because of how I bought it. I found it in the paper (this was the year 2000, mind you), advertised by this wealthy Main Line physician. It had been his daughter’s college car, and he was just looking to offload it ASAP. After agreeing to buy it, we went to the title and registration, where he proceeded to lie about the price of the car, saying it was $200 instead of the agreed-upon $1,200. This was to save money on taxes and other fees. I was kind of a naive kid at the time, so someone blatantly doing this just to save a couple bucks was a surprise. You mean people LIE to save money? OMG.

This car helped get through a few years of community college. It wasn’t the worst vehicle to have. But it’s not really a car I miss.

My third and fourth cars were 1990 Toyota Corollas. Cost ~$2,200 (combined).

Madonna had her goth phase. Western Civilization had its Romantic Age. I had my Toyota Corolla Era. This was a gilded period where I happened to luck into two very reliable Corollas of the same year back-to-back. The first was a plucky automatic that safely manuevered me across the country in a move from Pennsylvania to Tennesse, and then back again 14 months later. That one was about $1,000.

The other was a stick shift that I didn’t even know how to drive when I bought it. I was a quick learner, though. I’d practiced previously in other vehicles, and so was able to get this back home, only stalling out a few times in the process. This one set me back about $1,200.

Toyota Corollas are perfect little economy cars. It was such a shame I lost both of them due to accidents, neither of which were my fault. The first one I was rear-ended by a lady on my way to work. The other I was side-swiped by a tow truck. The cars were totaled each time. I miss those two cars, and I sometimes think that if it hadn’t been for the accident, I might still be driving the stick shift one. Oh, well. As my boss at the time said, “You can replace a car, but you can’t replace you.”

My fifth car was a 1990(ish) Toyota Tercel. Cost: $400.

I hate to speak ill of any of my senior vehicles, but this thing really was a piece of shit. It didn’t have a muffler, so it sounded like a jet engine driving down the road. It was coming apart at the seams when I got it, but I needed a ride to work, and so I had to get it.

Do you have any idea how nerve-wracking it is to drive on Route 76 from Philadelphia into New Jersey everyday on a rusted bucket of bolts that sounds like it’s going to rattle loose any second, leaving you sitting in the highway holding a steering wheel in your hands? It’s Heart Attack City, man.

Mr. Tercel only made it a few months before shutting down and needing a tow to the big junkyard in the sky. Good riddance, too, as he probably would have wound up killing me at some point.

My sixth car was a 1997 Nissan Maxima. Cost~$1000.

This was another short-timer. It’s issue was an ongoing oil leak. Bad, I know. Cars kind of need oil to keep running. Except I didn’t have any money to fix it. You might have noticed a recurring theme of low-income issues here. Just buying these cars themselves was breaking the bank for me. At the time I had to squeeze every dollar I could. I couldn’t afford luxuries like properly running engines.

I liked this car a lot when I first got it. It was smooth, roomy, and finally got me out of the year 1990, where I’d been stuck for almost ten years. Then the oil issue finally caused the engine to seize up on the highway, where I had it towed away for good.

My seventh and current car is a 2006 Saturn Ion. Cost ~ $7,500.

That brings me to my present senior vehicle. This was the first car I bought through financing. I’d never bought a vehicle other than through a private party prior to this, and always in cash, so this was a new deal for me. I was desperate for a car. I wasn’t happy to have to take on monthly payments for a vehicle. The whole thing felt alien and just plain wrong to me. Still does, actually. But I had once been a car salesman for Saturn some years prior, and I knew they were generally reliable vehicles. I happened upon a good deal for one in 2011, a month or so after my Maxima died, and with trepidation, signed for the loan on the dotted line.

I actually hated this car at first. She gave me nothing but problems the first year. She had some electrical issues that made the doors unlock and lock constantly. When it rained a leak let water in through the passenger side door. So during bad thunderstorms I’d come out and find the floor filled with water. She needed a water pump that cost me over $1,200 to fix. And she was a stick shift, too, which was a pain in the ass to drive in bumper to bumper traffic on the highways into work.

But looking back, my Saturn was one of the catalysts that motivated me to change my life and seek out better economic opportunities. See, between the auto loan payment and the insurance, I was paying over $500 A MONTH just to drive the thing. That’s not counting the cost of repairs, the maintenance, the gas, and the PA/NJ tolls. I was literally working just to keep the car, so I could use it to go to work to continue to pay for the damn car. A vicious, demoralizing cycle, to say the least. Plus, everytime something broke, I’d end up maxxing out my credit cards to fix it. Then pay off the card. Only for something else to break on it again and have to start all over. It was madness.

My Saturn got me out to North Dakota, where I eventually found work in the oilfields. She took me on a West Coast Tour, when I decided to use some time off to drive all the way from North Dakota to Washington to Los Angeles, to back home in Philly, to back in ND. She got me through my two last years in college. All while bravely surviving the brutal cold and winds of this upper midwest hellhole.

I paid my Saturn off way back in 2013. Her purchase price was something like $6,995, but after interest payments and such, it comes out to around $7,500 total. I wound up paying her off early, and then vowing never to finance another vehicle. I’ll ride a bike or thumb a ride before doing that. Fuck debt.

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My Saturn is semi-retired now. She still runs just fine when I need her on a day trip somewhere. I give her oil changes early. I never take her out in bad weather. Baby doesn’t get her shoes wet. If I were forced to take a job where I had to drive my own car back and forth to work, or if I were to move to a city, I’d have to upgrade vehicles. But for now I’m in a good and rare situation where I can keep her for as long as she’ll run. When I travel longer distances I usually rent a car or fly. My Saturn could blow up today, and she would have paid for herself many, many times over. Hopefully, whenever that day comes for her to finally give up the ghost, there will be a place I can park her in the Louvre, because that’s where she belongs. Frankly, I don’t think I could ever give her up. We’ve been through too much together at this point. She’s gray and unassuming. Her driver’s side window molding flew off a while ago. She doesn’t have anywhere near the pep she used to have. But she still starts when I turn the key. I love her a great deal. Perhaps I am a car guy, afterall.