NB: This column originally appeared in Business to Business, a publication of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.
I’m a big believer in driving cars until they just won’t go anymore—and sometimes a while beyond that. In college, I drove a 1978 Peugeot for several years, and the last nine months I had it, the transmission was on its way out. Reverse was the first gear I lost. A word to the wise (and broke): It is possible to drive in Missoula with a car that cannot go backwards, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
The fact is that I would rather spend my money on almost anything other than a car. New cars are shiny and pretty and smell nice, but I just don’t have the hunger that some people do to replace one perfectly good automobile with another. It’s never been a priority or, really, an option. I am, in short, the car industry’s worst nightmare.
That doesn’t mean I neglect the cars I have—far from it. I want them to last as long as possible, so I make sure they get the routine care and maintenance that makes longevity more likely. Unfortunately, all that care and concern are worth nothing when your minivan hits a deer at 75 miles per hour or when someone hits you in an intersection. It’s almost as if someone out there doesn’t want us to keep driving our cars forever. (Lee Iacocca? Is that you?)
In both cases, nobody was hurt and thank heavens for that. Both accidents had the potential for serious injury—or worse—so I concentrate as much as I can on that small miracle. However, both accidents also resulted in insurance companies—first ours, in the case of the deer collision, and the other driver’s in the second—telling us that our cars were so decrepit that they didn’t merit repair.
Not to us.
Our minivan, a lovely, late 1990s lilac Chrysler Town & Country, was judged a total loss, and the settlement the insurance company offered us wasn’t even enough to pay off the loan we had on it—let alone give us a down payment for a new (used) car. After a little haggling, the offer improved slightly, but the out-of-pocket costs for that accident ran well into the thousands of dollars, and we had to again depend upon the gracious help of family to bail us out. I sure would rather have spent that kind of money on something else. (Although, in hindsight, it’s probably better I didn’t invest it in a college fund or something. At least we got a car that runs most of the time out of the deal.)
In the more recent accident, the other driver’s insurance company also wanted to total our beloved Saturn—which we have had since 1997 and actually stored for the four years we lived overseas because we liked and trusted it so much—but we balked. For what the insurance company was willing to give us for the car, we would barely have been able to afford a Yugo. Instead, we turned it over to the body shop we trust—believe me when I say that I never, ever wanted to be on a first-name basis with the owner of a body shop, but here I am, and thank goodness for Dalen—and are paying extra to have the car repaired.
By fixing our car, we know better what we’re getting. Even in this age of Carfax and other electronic record-keeping, there’s no substitute for personal knowledge about what a car has been through. And after having mixed results with the new (used) car we bought after the first accident, we knew the pitfalls of buying someone else’s problem.
Once we get the Saturn back—good as new, Dalen assures us—we can continue to take care of it and hope that it will last us a good long time, deer and dodgy intersections notwithstanding. Sorry, Mr. Iacocca.
Want to know more about the columns I write? Visit this post on my professional site.