July 6th, 2006

Several ‘riced out’ Toyota Corollas and Honda Accords are expecting an easy day on the highways.  They routinely zoom around big slow SUVs and cut in and out of traffic with ridiculous ease.  It wasn’t a fair fight.

But out of the rear view mirror comes a dark blue blur.  An alien design never seen on the roads before.  Its menacing gaping shark’s mouth grill growing ever closer.  The little engines in the Corrolas and Accords struggle but it’s no use and all they can do is get out of the way while the blur passes them by.  The driver, wears a pair of wrap around dark glasses sneers disdain as he passes by.

Ok, that never happened, but it could have.

I had begun my research on a new car six months earlier.  I needed a replacement for my Rodeo.  Isuzu had dropped the ball and replaced the Rodeo with the Axiom, a more expensive and smaller vehicle which to me was unsatisfactory.  So I made up a list of all possible contenders.

My list considered anything and everything.  I looked back at Saturn, at a Chevy pick up truck, a PT Cruiser, and even a Mercedes.

I had heard of the Charger but had not really considered it.  “I’m not a kid anymore” I reasoned.  I needed a ‘grown up’ car.

But the Charger had grown up.  The design looks like your father’s old sedan had taken steroids and now had a mean attitude.  Muscle Car purists argue that a 4 door sedan can’t be a true muscle car.  To which I say if ya want two doors, go get yourself a Pony Car.  The new Charger lives up to the spirit of a big American car with lots under the hood.

I kept looking and looking, hoping to find something that would catch my eye.  Somehow I kept circling back to the Charger.

On July 4th I got in my Rodeo and just drove until I was at a Dodge dealership.  I immediately had a salesman chase after me and start the hard sell. We walked the lot looking at various Chargers.

If I had to dramatize the moment in film, it might have looked like this.  Ok, that’s probably going too far, but you get my meaning.  And then he showed me my car.  That just sealed the deal right then and there.

So we got to haggling over price.  We went back and forth for 45 minutes and three salesmen did everything short of chaining me to the floor to keep me there.  Finally I got the price discounted and squeezed them for every penny I could for the trade in value on my Rodeo.

I did feel a pang of guilt as I watched my old Rodeo driven away, but the old cargo hauler was getting on in age, and each trip I took in it might have been my last.

I got in my new Charger and drove home.  I found myself in a dream like state.  Something akin to the science nerd who suddenly finds himself going to the prom with the head cheerleader.

“Was this really my car?”  The Charger handled like a dream.  The pungent new car smell mixed with the aroma of the leather seats.  I could dash past anything on the road, and had to restrain myself from going flat out on city streets.

The Charger was ‘the’ car of 2006.  Everywhere I went there was this “jaw dropping” reaction.  People would actually stop and stare as I drove past.

I came out of the supermarket and on the windows was a row of little nose and handprints where little kids had pressed up to look inside.  An older lady in her 50s at my office asked to sit in it because she remembered her boyfriend in the 70s had a Charger and this was way more comfortable.

Time has passed.  We have had many adventures and have spent many miles on the highways of Texas.  Mainly though I drove the 50 mile round trip back and forth for 4 years between my home and office piling up many miles.

I still have the Charger and I plan on keeping it for now.  I may however get something small for in town use and let the Charger out on the weekends to enjoy the rush of the highway.

Zeitgeist is a term that gets bandied about when people try to sound smarter than they actually are.  So it’s no surprise that I’m going to use it here.

But there was a bit of a zeitgeist as far as cars went at the turn of the millennium.  SUV’s were hot!  Little one’s, monster one’s, military one’s.  Everybody seemed to want that oversized monster in the driveway.  We were still feeling the afterglow of the mid 90’s economic boom and we wanted that big car but we also bought into that rugged outdoorsy image that we were convinced could be bought at the local dealership.

6 Years out of college and I’m finally making decent money.  It was 1999 and I was ready for a small spending spree.  SUV’s were the big thing and I was ready for mine

I didn’t want those tiny ones like the Geo Tracker or the Suzuki Sidekick.  Those were for the teenagers going to the movies on a Saturday night.  I certainly didn’t want a Suburban as I had no kids soccer team to pick up and take to get pizza.  So I went the middle way and chose the Isuzu Rodeo with a shiny black glossy paint job.

My family was outraged.  “Those things are overpriced!”, “They flip over easy!”, “What about gas prices?”  Every reason under the sun not to get one.

But I had made up my mind.  It was a handsome design that Isuzu had come up with.  Refined from the days of the old Isuzu Trooper and Trooper II.  When Honda wanted to sink its claws into the SUV market it borrowed the design and slapped a label on it calling it the Honda Pilot.

For its size it could carry a massive amount of cargo.  Chairs, tables, boxes, anything you wanted.  It was soon a family and friend favorite for moving stuff.

The height advantage over normal cars was impressive.  It almost seemed you were floating high over the surrounding traffic and it had allowed me to wade trough the worst of tropical storm Allison.

Isuzu however had made two blunders.  Or rather they made one and I made one.  They installed a 139 hp V4 engine in the S model I bought, and I was dumb enough not to notice.

This engine struggled with the weight and was almost paralyzed when the air conditioner was on.  It was a bad, bad idea.  The truck lacked acceleration.  I called it the “black bomber” because after years of small cars that could zip in and out of traffic like jet fighters, this handled like a plodding old bomber.

On top of it there had been bad luck.  The Rodeo was and is a reliable design and if you look online or in newspapers you will still find old Rodeos with high resale value.  However I blew two head gaskets in 7 years of owning it.

Don’t get me wrong I still loved the old Rodeo, but after 7 years it was time.  So I began 6 months of research looking for the next car.

On a dark and stormy night I wound up in front of the Saturn dealership. Saturn was a fairly new car company at the time. The basic premise was to give people a higher level of customer service and a decent car without any of the typical high pressure sales pitches or haggling sessions that were the norm for car salesmen before that time.

My dad came along with me and gave me one piece of advice.  Get a standard transmission.  They will be much easier to maintain and cheaper to repair.

My main criteria was price. Just out of college and making very little money, I couldn’t be picky. The sales lady showed me a Saturn SL1.  The cheapest car on the lot with a standard transmission was a gold champagne colored car.  I mentally groaned.  A gold car.  I would have preferred dark blue or black.  I even would have accepted red or white, but gold?  In my mind only flashy people had gold cars.

Finally I decided that whatever the color was, I had to take it. After half an hour I had completed the paperwork and it was all set. Part of the down payment included my old car.  I had to dump some stuff out of my old car so I would return the next morning to pick up the Saturn. I have to admit I was reluctant to give up the old Nissan. You will always have a soft spot for your first car just as you will always be fond of your first love. So the next morning I took an extra long drive and took the car to the dealer.

Now something happened that nobody had thought of. I had no clue how to drive a standard transmission. I knew about shifting, and the clutch but had never done it before. The car made some terrible grinding noises as I tried shifting.  So starting and stalling, starting and stalling I slowly drove away from the dealership. I eventually got back home, parked the car, and walked away.  I was almost ready to return it right then and there.

Over the next few days I slowly got used to shifting. I found that I enjoyed being able to shift up and down and control the power.  The manual transmission suited my more aggressive driving style and the little 4 door sedan was truly nimble.

Overall it was a very well made vehicle and I found it had many features that previously were considered luxury items; power windows, AM/FM cassette, keyless entry, and a brand new airbag system.

The Saturn was a great new car for starting out after college. The car never had a single mechanical problem while I owned it.  Despite its gold color, I found it to be unobtrusive and not flashy at all. Yet it was sharp enough that I could take it anywhere.  After 3 years though it was time to make a change into something more substantial. It was time for the SUV.

Growing up in the 1980’s I found that cars had already become a necessity of life in Houston.  Previous to this I had hitched a ride to school with a friend who eventually discovered girls and was no longer available.  I then temporarily tried school buses and found the experience less than satisfactory.  By the end of my junior year I knew that I needed something to drive.  So hitting several used car lots I found a dark blue 1982 Nissan Stanza hatchback.

The car was already 6 years old by now and had over 60,000 miles.  It was thoroughly used.  The grey cloth interiors were somewhat stained, the previous owner had been a smoker and for some reason had melted candle wax in the center console.  This certainly wasn’t a “chick magnet” but for $1400 hard-earned dollars, produced by my time at the local supermarket, it was mine.

“Transportation!  That’s all you need.” is what my dad told me.

Driving home I passed by Sherry, one of my school mates, and she was kind enough to “ooh and aah” at the “new” car.  This was about the kindest thing that anyone ever said about that car.

Well it got me through high school, and more than that it gave me freedom.  Freedom to explore new areas, to get in and out of trouble.

I used the car to get me to public libraries to do research.  I was now able to work past 9 P.M. at the supermarket and make more money.  I could go to intramural science competitions in far distant parts of town on the weekends.

It expanded my social life of course.  Going to see “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures” with friends, going to the “Montrose” area (which at the time was a thoroughly disreputable part of town), drinking with my friends behind the high school at 1 AM (yes I was underage, and no I don’t approve of underage drinking or drinking and driving, I was a lucky 18-year-old punk that got away with it).  I remember driving a friend to the downtown post office at 11PM on a Friday night to mail off their application to Duke University and barely getting it postmarked before the deadline.  I once drove a girl to a pharmacy to pick up an emergency supply of insulin.  I packed a lot of living into that last year of high school thanks to that car.

It got me to college.  I stuffed every last inch of it with things I thought I would need at school.  It stood by while my mom cried her eyes out about “her baby leaving the nest”.  This was my classic American “leaving for college” moment.

But soon I was out on Highway 290 headed out-of-town into the open country.  The wide yawning vistas of the central Texas prairies opening up for me, seemingly a metaphor for the possibilities opening up for me in college.

My college friend , Mark, dubbed it the bat mobile (since Batman the movie had just come out that year).  Since he didn’t have a car it became the focal point of our social lives in that little outpost of civilization in the middle of nowhere.  We took trips to Houston or to Waco for a few hours sightseeing or for the weekend, for “laundry runs” home.  We went to Oktoberfest in New Braunfels our senior year.  I remember a ridiculously frightening lightning storm that we drove through once and the purple after glow of a bolt that struck just yards from the road as we passed by.

Through it all the car was getting beat up.  It had survived being hit twice by drunk drivers, people kept breaking off the car antenna, and the front axle had nearly rusted through.

This last was the worst.  Here I am in a college town, in my sophomore year in school, with very little cash to spare, and a busted car.  So I had to get it repaired.  With a lack of spare parts and in the middle of nowhere, the car mechanic took a full month to find a compatible front axle.  In the meantime I walked to school from my apartment every day, no matter what the weather was like.

The walking habit got so deeply ingrained in fact that even after I got the car back I continued walking to school no matter the weather (blazing hot summer day, in the middle of a tornado storm, or zero degree weather in January)

My last year in college.  By this time the bat mobile had 120,000 miles and had suffered another breakdown.   The transmission this time.  Using my last penny I got that fixed and finally graduated and got back to Houston.

By now the car has seen me through 5 years of service and now it took me to and from my first job.  The electrical system was malfunctioning.  I had to keep a wrench in the car to adjust the front windshield wipers after every rain storm.  A brake line burst and sprayed brake fluid on the red-hot front disc and caught the wheel on fire.  Everyday I was more and more worried about the car dying on me.  Each mile became a strain.  Soon I was at 145,000 miles.

It became more than clear that I could no longer go on this way.  I needed a new car.  It was 1996 and I heard about a new car company called Saturn.

to be continued.