Don’t be Taken… Go Someplace!

There are plenty of good reasons to drive an older car. You just like old cars. Maybe you’re too poor to buy a new car… you might even be a grumpy, old fart with an aversion to the new cars coming out… or like me – you’re  an elegant and handsome combination of all three.

Old cars… better yet, lets say ‘elder’ cars offer an opportunity to drive something a little different. Something that stands out from the bar-of-soap banality offered today. Efficiency and practicality have become the industry mantra. Cars are now engineered first, designed second. Cars have become appliances. Efficient and practical are not the catch words that ignite the soul or send you lusting after some rolling toaster. Is that what the world is going to become? A populous trained to appreciate things based on their efficiency and usefulness? Soon we will be a society that gazes upon Bellini’s “Madonna and Child” only to exclaim, “Yes, that will do nicely.” An oblivious civilization that debates the flow rate of Duchamp’s ‘Fountain.’

I’m not against new cars. Far from it. New cars are the elder cars of tomorrow. It’s just that we spend a great deal of lives in our cars. They are active expressions of our personalities and say a lot about us. I want a car that speaks above the monotonous drone of a thousand silver-grey Civics. I don’t want to be taken anywhere… I want to go some place. Older cars are fun and entertaining on the way there…  that is what a car is meant to be.

The Great Government-Auto Industry Conspiracy

I have never been one for conspiracy theories. All my paranoias are based in fact. But as the ravages of winter chew their way through my car my mind turns to what I believe could be the most insidious deception since the extended warranty.

So here it is. I have become convinced that the governments of Ontario, municipal and provincial, are in cahoots with the automobile manufacturers to destroy our vehicles. It is a concerted effort to speed up the natural disintegration process. If you think about it makes perfect sense and it is cunningly simple, in an enormously convoluted and abstract way.

The process goes something like this: a car company (let’s give it a factious name like General Malevolence) needs to make money, so General Malevolence builds a car and sells it to you. Once the car is bought and paid for, the car company no longer can make a profit on it. To fix this problem, car companies created the 5 year/ 80,000 kilometres (the metric version never quite had the same ring as 5 year 50,000 mile) warranty program. What a great idea! If anything goes wrong during the first 5 years or 80,000 miles General Malevolence will fix it for free. All you have to do is bring your car in for regular scheduled maintenance. And pay for it.

Now General Malevolence continues to make money on your car after selling it to you. Now General Malevolence knows it can’t keep this up forever. The longer it offers to fix anything that goes wrong on your car, the greater the chance that it will have to fix something that goes wrong on your car. So General Malevolence cunningly ends the warranty program just when your car reaches the age when its components are pretty worn out and will need replacing. That is the first step of this conspiracy — General Malevolence has designed the components of your car to last the length of your warranty. Sure the odd part will break early, but for the most part the majority of the components on your car will last 5 years or whatever is the length of your warranty.

Now you would think that General Malevolence, having made a respectable profit from you and not wanting to spend any money on you, would just cut you loose. This is where the next part of the conspiracy comes to light. Every winter throughout the length of your warranty program (just every winter, actually. This is an all encompassing conspiracy theory, and not just about you. Get over it) the government has been peppering our roads with excessive amounts of salt in an effort to speed up the disintegration for your vehicle.

Why? Under threat from General Malevolence, natch. It would be unethical and, more importantly, too expensive for General Malevolence to go to your house and damage your car in person. So they subcontract that task to the governments. How? By threatening to move their manufacturing facilities elsewhere. You’ll notice that the threat to pack up and leave happens every time a new government comes to power. When a new government comes, General Malevolence gives a fiscal shiver and announces that it doesn’t like the current economic climate and working people are just to greedy and maybe things would be better elsewhere. After all they’ve had so many invitations and that Mexico is such a nice country. Maybe things would be better there.

Hearing this, the government, like some horny teenager, panics and tells General Malevolence that they’ll do whatever General Malevolence wants. Just don’t leave! General Malevolence sighs and says, oh I don’t know maybe if you could somehow get people to buy more new cars that would make me stay. And rid of all those cars I already sold to those people. I don’t want them to go out and buy a good used car at a reasonable price. That does me no good – oh, and some money would be nice, too.

And so the government salts the roads to speed up the corrosion, establishes a safety inspection program to make sure their nefarious activities are effective, and finally, promotes a retire your car scheme to make sure nobody can get their grubby little DIY hands on these awful, awful vehicles ever again. That’s it.

The end result of all this is the early death of many useful cars, less affordable transportation for those of a lower income, a loss of a source of useful used parts for automobile collectors and….

I am the Automudgeon!

Why are you here?

I mean, why are you reading this blog… not why are you on this earth? The grand purpose of your existence is your own problem. But if you came here expecting to join in some sycophantic prattle about the latest Lamborghini or Ferrari or whatever the current adolescent wet dream is… for get it!

Don’t bother me with statistics about auto racing. although I am open to anyone who is putting together a petition to change the name of NASCAR. National Association of Stock Car Racing? Really? Stock cars? What f&#@ing dealership lot did they drive those stock cars off of?

Nor is this the place for baby boomers to talk about how much money they threw at their pasts in order to relive a time through some motorized bucket they coveted as a teenager. It doesn’t matter if you did imitate the factory overspray or perfectly copied on long dead line inspector’s grease marks. It isn’t factory. What you have is a 1:1 scale model of a something a factory may or may not have produced. So it can cover 1320 feet in under 13 seconds at over 100 mph and under 8 mpg. There is no way it’s worth more than a Duesenberg. This baby boomer greed is ruining the collector car market normal people, just like it ruined the economy.

I’m here to talk about the real world of cars. Cars that we own, have owned, will own and realistically hope to own. Cars that we fix ourselves, have fixed or tried to fix. Cars that squeak, rattle and groan. Cars that leak, smell and rust. And to bitch and moan, praise and love then as we drive them every day.

If you agree… or understand a bit… or begrudginglywill allow me to live — welcome. Just remember one thing: I am the Automudgeon… and this is my world. Er… make that two things.