Saturday, December 31, 2011

End of the road

In the fall of 1977, my parents decided to splurge: they bought a new car. Lest you think these Depression babies were throwing caution to the wind, note that their thrift showed through: they waited until the end of the model year to be able to negotiate on the price, and they eschewed nearly every option--including a radio. It was also only the second new car either of them had purchased.

It was bad enough from a teenager's viewpoint that the car was so incredibly sensible (shoulder belts before they were mandated), but the radio was insult to injury. Still, it meant my brother inherited the old one--a 1968 model, and I got to learn to drive in a new car.

It turned out to be one of those models that never had any major issues along the way, and when I returned to the US with a husband in tow in 1989, my parents gifted us the car to serve as our second wheels. All we needed was a house with a two-car garage. It was still shiny, with a just a few dings and rattles, but still, no major issues.

Our family grew, we purchased a wagon, and the old Volvo became Darling Husband's classic ride. The Mom-mobile changed a couple of times over the years, but the blue beast kept on going.

We bought touch-up paint in increasingly larger containers and gave up trying to wax it to shiny. In 2001, after a fellow blue wagon got totaled, it gifted its front seats and floor mats to the '77.

For its 30th birthday, we bought the car a tank of premium and new classic car plates, along with a lifetime exemption from renewal and tailpipe checks. It purred and kept going.

This year, with a teenager, we joked that if it was good enough for me to learn to drive in, it was good enough for him. And so Jr. Firefighter slipped behind the wheel and learned to drive.  He dutifully noted that the turn signal on one side wasn't always lighting, so we took it in for some work. We ended up rebuilding the taillight, since no new replacement part could be found.

And then, four days after Jr. Firefighter earned the magic piece of plastic, the car spiked a fever. No amount of coolant seemed to help, and the mechanic found the cancer had spread to several areas. Words like "machining" were uttered. Like the old Quaker carriage, all the parts seemed to be failing at once. I think, said the mechanic, it's time.

Right on schedule, the first of the seven stages of grief, denial, kicked in: we could just fix it, really, it just needed some quality time and some new parts. But when we started attaching numbers to the rather long list, it became clear that this car had come to the end of its run.

A charity that specializes in fixing up old reliable cars declined; even for a Volvo, they said, we don't think it's worth it. The guy in Ballard who does electric conversions said it was too young (!); he only takes pre-1975 Volvos. So today, we shall take a last family photo in front of it one last time, and sign papers to release our interest in it to a salvage yard. It has been a very good run.

But it has also been a model of bucking the trend, a manifestation of our values: maintaining a car is always less expensive and more environmentally friendly than buying new.

New, the car cost $7900, and we are actually getting a few dollars from the yard: $256. That averages to about $225 a year for car ownership. If we had followed the national average and replaced it with the equivalent new model every five years, we would have spent over $130,000; if we'd bucked the trend and waited 10 years between cars, we would still have spent close to $75,000.

Driving it until it can no longer be driven and sending it to a pull-a-part yard is "using it up, wearing it out." Its parts will help keep others in its model (made until 1993) alive, as we eke out as much use before it ends up in a crusher--to be melted into steel and recycled into a new car.

As we considered replacing it--because a three-driver family needs three cars, right?--we quickly realized that we will never be able to repeat this performance. Darling Husband will keep an eye on the classifieds, but for now, we shall remain a two-car, three-bus pass family with a healthy savings account and a clear conscience.