Car Talk

Several days ago, arriving at a political reception for Senator Mark Warner and gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds, I found myself parallel-parking between a midnight blue Lexus LS460 and a beaming black BMW 750, taking extreme care that my own vehicle -- the identity of which I am not yet prepared to reveal -- give those two impressive front and rear ends as wide a berth as possible.

Intentionally or not, the owners of these elegant motorcars are making a statement -- about their lifestyle, their pocketbooks, the level of success they have achieved -- although they themselves might contend that, since they can easily afford it, they simply want the smoothest, quietest, and most luxurious ride available. Regardless of motive, far be it from me -- who has over his lifetime driven off dealers' lots no fewer than ten new cars for his personal use (not counting several purchased for spouses) and has recently graduated to one classified (at least by the manufacturer) as a luxury sports sedan -- to disparage or rebuke anyone for enjoying the fruits of his labor and intellect.

In fact, it's reassuring to see these royal chariots rolling through the neighborhood, to know that, in spite of a brutal recession that has seen sales plummet from an annualized rate of 16 million in 2006 to 10 million in 2009 and prompted industry gurus to sound the death knell for America's love affair with the automobile, for many Lynchburgers, the thrill of a new car -- even a $70,000 one -- is as alluring as ever.

Pity the plebeians -- and there must be millions of them -- who have never tasted the sweet intoxication of ravishing a virgin-on-wheels, an unblemished beauty never soiled by a stranger's touch (other than a few demonstration miles), proudly flaunting her sparkling metallic paint job, her shimmering wheel caps, her immaculate interior, her instantaneous start, her powerful, purring engine, and, of course, her musky new car smell. And, no matter the make, model, color, or price, she's uniquely yours, because you picked her out from all the bewildering options that were presented to you as you cruised, inspected, caressed, admired, and test-drove -- until you finally embraced your steely soul-mate.

For many, of course, constrained by economics or informed by a mundane pragmatism, an automobile is merely a utilitarian machine, a convenient (and necessary) mode of transportation. For others, it is a reflection or expression of personality (or one aspired to), and it doesn't take long for an individual to be identified with the car he drives.

My father, for example, loved convertibles, and drove them from the age of forty until his death thirty years later. Cruising topless down Rivermont Avenue in his vintage 1961 white Ford Galaxie -- his shirt-sleeved left arm perched comfortably on the window sill, his wavy locks blowing in the wind, his penetrating gaze mysteriously shielded behind dark-green sunglasses -- not only put his iconoclastic, free-spirited persona on display; it mirrored his social nature, his aversion to solitude.

While he drove that cherished Ford until the wheels fell off, I stood in awe and envy of a childhood friend whose own father was a dedicated car buff -- trading them like baseball cards, desperately searching for the newest all-star, in spite of some bizarre incongruities. I remember him exchanging a stunning, classic Buick Riviera -- which my friend, much to my dismay, refused to borrow one night when given the opportunity because he was embarrassed at its ostentatiousness -- for a tiny, manual-shifting Honda Accord, which he claimed, with remarkable prescience, was the wave of the future.

Another friend had a father, a veterinarian, who was equally foresighted. Needing transportation for his four-legged patients as well as his own barking menagerie -- this in the days before an epidemic of hulking four-door trucks and suv's infested the highways -- he found a body-shop craftsman skilled enough to conjoin the front end of a serviceable Ford sedan and the flatbed of a disabled Dodge pickup, and thus give birth to the first Chevrolet El Camino. Needless to say, it was the most unusual vehicle in town, and drew a slew of wild-eyed stares when my friend and I took it out for a joyride, but, alas, not much interest from the opposite sex.

The other car I remember from my youth -- besides the second-hand baby-blue Falcon, which was my first, and its ill-fated successor, the muscular wine-dark Fairlane GT I wrote about previously in this blog (The Muscle Car, September 19, 2007) -- was another friend's venerable Model A roadster, which, in its perpetual state of loving restoration, fit its owner's eccentric personality to a "T" and became as much a part of him as his winsome smile and habitual skirt-chasing.

Whatever my own car-buying proclivities might reveal about my personality, I will leave to the judgment of my faithful readers -- other than to suggest that some disfunctionality is obviously evident in the startling appearance of a sports car amidst a host of staid sedans and in my perverse fixation on this parade of vehicles that trails behind me, like markers in the rhythm of life.

For example, getting married (in 1971) and settling into my permanent career at Schewel Furniture Company (in 1972) signaled that it was time to put away childish playthings -- specifically, my twice-wrecked, but still potent, throaty muscle car -- in favor of a prosaic, less pretentious, early-seventies Pontiac T-37 (actually, a sporty label for a Tempest), having been convinced by some clever GM marketers that moving from a Ford to a "wide-track" was a step up in status. The car was a depressing muddy brown and sent pangs of regret piercing through my heart whenever I passed a stablemate of the Ford Fairlane GT I had impulsively abandoned.

Having learned a lesson -- temporarily -- I tried to recapture some of that lost glory with my next car, a two-tone, red over white, 1976 Pontiac Le Mans (another racing moniker), purchased for me by Schewel Furniture Company when I began traveling to outlying stores. A happy man, I drove it mercilessly across the state for six or seven years, belying the canard that American cars of that generation were built to fail, egregious examples of planned obsolescence. The only thing that stopped it was a garbage truck, in a cataclysmic denouement that will become a common theme of these motorized musings.

Returning from the Schewel store in Farmville one hazy afternoon, I cut through the Old Concord Turnpike, which runs past the City Landfill, and fell in behind a gargantuan tortoise creeping that way. With the impatience of an aggressive thirty-year-old, I yanked the car across the double yellow center line and mashed the pedal to the metal -- just as the rolling roadblock started to turn left into the landfill.

I learned a couple of lessons that day, the first of which is that in a battle between an invincible garbage truck and a defenseless Pontiac sedan, the sedan loses. My front end crumpled like a paper bag, while upon close inspection, hardly a scratch was visible on the immovable object which had been met by a not very resistible force.

With my seat belt securely fastened, I had not been going fast enough to incur any injury. Extricating myself from the battered car, I gingerly approached the garbage truck and its two semi-shocked occupants, smiled, apologized, accepted responsibility, and proffered my business card. I glibly persuaded them to refrain from calling the authorities and beat a hasty retreat from the scene of the crime and any meddlesome law enforcement investigation.

An hour later, I was safely ensconced in my office, smugly congratulating myself on escaping any nasty citations, when my tranquility was rudely interrupted by the receptionist announcing that I had a visitor. I do not recall whether he was a state trooper or a town cop, only that he was much gentler than he had cause to be.

After I explained the circumstances of the accident, he asked me just how fast I was going when I tried to pass the truck. "About thirty-five," I said, which seemed as reasonably close to the speed limit as I dared confess -- but not very realistic, or convincing, I realized, when the officer calmly informed me that he had measured a fifty-foot skid mark, a dead giveaway to excessive speed.

At that point, I was sure he was about to throw the book at me -- for speeding, for reckless driving, for taking flight, and for just plain lying. He asked me to accompany him to the parking lot, where the sight of my mangled front end -- the pathetic result of my foolish attempt to wrestle a garbage truck -- apparently struck a sensitive chord in his normally impassive heart. Perhaps concluding that I had suffered enough, he dismissed me with a stern lecture and a pregnant warning, condemning me only to a guilty conscience.

I ultimately paid the price for my flagrant misbehavior, as the accident haunted me for many months. Schewels and I decided to trade the car "as is," and, when I took it to a Buick dealership a few days later, the manager on duty offered me what I intuited to be a very generous allowance -- too generous, as it turned out, because when I went back the next day (I had not wanted to make another rash decision) the day manager informed me that his associate had forgotten to deduct for the $1300 damage to the car's front end.

Inexplicably, probably out of frustration, I bought the car anyway -- a stodgy, squared-off Buick Regal or Skylark or Century, coated in an insipid yellow-green that combined the worst of the Harvest Gold and Avocado that were popular on home appliances back in those days.

Buyer's remorse and a subconscious death wish (for the car, that is) quickly set in, which, as much as its poor handling, led to further misfortune within two short years.

Once again, I was in a hurry, returning from Front Royal after taking inventory for a computer conversion -- I had the voluminous reports on board. Navigating the swerves and swales that characterize the two-lane Rt. 231 which connects Sperryville and Madison, now slickened by a steady rain, I took one curve a little too fast for that lumbering Buick. The car did a 180 (or maybe it was a 540, spinning one-and-a-half times), crossed over the highway (where, thankfully, no other car was in the vicinity), slid into a ditch, and slammed the passenger door against a tree -- leaving me miraculously unharmed. A passing car or nearby resident must have called for help (this was in the pre-cell-phone era), because I remember being transported back to the Front Royal store and borrowing a truck to drive home -- with the precious inventory in hand, of course.

Months later I saw the unlucky vehicle. It had been towed to the nearest body shop, repaired, and consigned to the Schewel store in Danville, where the carpet department put thousands of miles on it, shuffling back and forth to customers' homes for measurement and installation.

By that time, I was ready for a change of life, a change of wife (as it turned out), a change of scenery, and a car I was to own and treasure for twenty-six years, a 1983 Mazda RX-7, a pseudo (that is, economical, or poor man's) sports car.

It was classically beautiful, then and now, a low-slung pony with a cramped interior you crawled into like a cockpit, to look out over the long sloping hood and knife-edge front end, on either side of which single headlights would blink open at the twist of a knob attached to the turn signal. It had a detachable sunroof you could crank up for a breath of fresh air, but behind that the cowl-shaped roofline was all glass back to the taillights. The exterior was metallic silver -- the best color for a car; the interior parts -- the leather seating, the plush carpeting blanketing the floorboard and rear platform, the functional dashboard -- were all red, except for the black leather-wrapped steering wheel and five-speed shifter protruding from the center console.

The styling was timeless, evoking as late as five years ago this remark from an elderly woman who was obviously clueless: "What kind of new car is that?"

I bought it (or Schewels did; it was only $13,000 back then) -- why? To give myself a new image, to attract women (I would get a divorce three years later), to express my individuality -- who knows? Except that if it was for any of those reasons, none really worked. It got the looks, all right, but these were probably generated as much by the unlikely person behind the wheel as by the car itself. All I can say with certainty is that it was fun to drive, which I did for about 120,000 miles, up and down the Shenandoah Valley and into the far reaches of Southside Virginia and eastern North Carolina.

Even though I would occasionally pile in my three kids -- one in the passenger seat and two laid out the rear storage area, gazing skyward -- the Mazda wasn't designed for families larger than two, which necessitated my purchasing another vehicle when my ex-wife made off with our station wagon. Struggling to economize, I made another poor choice, a low-mileage two-door Cutlass Supreme, white with a red vinyl top, which our Schewel Credit Vice-President was happy to unload on me so that he could buy a used Jaguar. The car drove reasonably well, but hauling three kids and all their miscellaneous equipment around in a coupe is a daunting task; entering and exiting the back seat, where there wasn't much room to begin with, brought them into dangerous contact with each other, and with me.

While liability undoubtedly rests with the driver rather than the vehicle, attentive readers will easily guess the fate of this GM product. I was an hour north of Myrtle Beach, heading home, bantering with my two sons, aged 13 and 7 at the time, passing through the tiny hamlet of Raemon, North Carolina, dodging thunderstorms, when lightning struck (figuratively speaking, that is) . Once again, rain had dampened the asphalt, and, once again, failing to learn from past misadventures, I swept around a curve on a deserted country road a little too fast for the driver, the car, or the conditions.

We did another 180, took down a state road sign (which I was later billed for), and, deja vu, ended up in a ditch. Although slightly shaken and stirred, each of us was belted in, and no one was hurt. We trudged a mile or so up the road to a quaint country store and called for the requisite tow truck. This time the car was operative, a good thing, since there was no Schewel store within hailing distance.

A few months later, I dumped the Cutlass on some unsuspecting soul for a paltry $1500.

As for the Mazda, it suffered a less violent demise, succeeded by an improbable resurrection. For three hundred miles to Wilmington, Delaware, taking my wife to visit her parents, and for three hundred miles back, I blithely ignored an overheated warning light, just barely limping home before the engine expired altogether. When my mechanic soberly informed me that this was no simple repair job, but required replacing the supposedly indestructible rotary engine I had burnt out in my stubborn negligence, I was compelled to ponder long and hard. Should I say grace over the silver bird and bury it forever, or should I resuscitate it with a rebuilt motor? I chose the latter, of course, manifesting some crazed affection for this inanimate machine.

The trouble with an extra car -- which the Mazda was now relegated to, since I felt neither safe nor comfortable chauffeuring it much further than the five miles between my home and my office -- is that, if one doesn't drive it very much, its parts get rusty: batteries die; plugs don't spark; starters freeze up; tires dry rot.

I lost count of the times I had to have the Mazda towed from my house to the repair shop. Trying to crank it up after a week's respite, especially during the winter, was always an adventure. I would put the transmission in neutral, pull out the choke (in the last year, with a pair of pliers I kept in the car after I broke off the plastic cap), turn the ignition, pump the gas pedal, grit my teeth, and pray. The engine would cough, moan, whine, and sputter -- and turn over about fifty per cent of the time; the other fifty, it would flood, or wretchedly die out, leaving me cursing, resigned, and frustrated, wondering why I continued to submit myself to such punishment -- and expenditure.

Even when it started, the Mazda was snakebit.

My wife always knew when I had been driving the Mazda because I would waltz through the door trailing a telltale odor of burning oil, which was being consumed at such an insatiable rate that I always carried an extra quart or two. A full tank of gas was good for about 100 miles (figure that out). One particularly irritating problem was the unreliable motor that raised and lowered the side windows. Sometimes a helping hand would suffice, but too often I would ride home on a cold evening freezing to death because I had inadvertently lowered the window and wasn't strong enough to pull it back up.

Although manual shift cars aren't supposed to move when in gear, it's advisable to engage the emergency brake, a precaution my elder son David overlooked one evening after driving the car and leaving it parked on the hill in front of our house. A few minutes later, my wife watched helplessly from the kitchen window as the Mazda started to roll gently down the slope towards a neighbor's wooded front yard, rapidly gaining speed. Fortunately, it didn't have far to go before a wall of shrubbery abruptly ended its runaway career. Perhaps, in the long run, I would have been better off had it rushed headlong into a tree, and put us all out of our misery.

Its clutch would burn out at the most inopportune times. One morning I was calmly cruising through Madison Heights after dropping off my laundry when I was overwhelmed by a sudden, sinking feeling: the transmission was frozen in second or third gear, and I realized that, wherever I came to a stop, I was destined to remain. I guided my wounded baby down the Madison Heights hill and across the John Lynch Bridge, maintaining just enough momentum to roll up Fifth Street to Church, veer left at Sixth, coast downhill to Main, execute another left turn, and come to rest in a made-to-order parking space across from the Holiday Inn Select -- from which I could walk six blocks to my office and call for a tow truck.

The crowning blow was delivered not long after that when I was on my way to a morning workout at the YMCA and noticed a suspicious lack of pep emanating from the accelerator. Staggering up Bedford Avenue, I managed to maneuver the car over to the right hand curb just as the engine gave up the ghost, appropriately enough, alongside a cemetery. Was someone sending me a message? The logical course of action (or inaction) would have been to perform a secular burial ceremony and then abandon the body to the neighborhood vandals, who might have uncovered something of value in this shell on wheels. But, one more time, nostalgia trumped common sense, and I put it back in service.

The Mazda needed an owner who could restore its ancient nobility, and, by accident, I found one, a Schewel manager whose avocation was bringing antiques like this one back to life; in other words, he was a grease monkey. My ears perked up one day in his store when he asked me if I still had that old RX-7, and, in short order, we made a deal. To quote the famous bard, "Parting is such sweet sorrow," especially after twenty-six years, longer than either of my two marriages -- yet whenever my heart felt as empty as the vacant parking space in front of my house, I would console myself with the thought that the car was in the shop for another repair job, from which it just wouldn't be returning any time soon.

With the Mazda available (when it started) for brief exhibitions of youthful fantasies and idiosyncratic behavior -- there's something to be said for arriving at an event in the oldest car in the world -- I felt safe reverting to form: an economical, unobtrusive, banal mode of transportation; and thus in 1988, or thereabouts, embarked on a twenty-year relationship with Ford Tauruses -- cycling through four iterations.

Yes, I was one of the millions who helped make the old bull America's best-seller -- until an inept redesign and Ford's failure to capitalize on the brand enabled the Toyota Camry to charge past it. Actually, all four -- white, white, silver, and red -- turned out to be excellent cars: roomy, comfortable, smooth-riding, fuel efficient, and dependable -- up to 130,000 miles. And is it not conceivable that the front-wheel drive and improved handling of this new generation kept me accident free -- or was it simply due to a cautionary attitude borne of maturity?

I always maintained that I would never purchase a foreign-made car new, insisting that the American ones were just as good. But a year ago I found myself in a quandary.

The lease on that last Taurus had run out, and as I looked around at Ford's ungainly new version and at the crowded field of family sedans that ran the gamut from Ford Fusions and Chevrolet Malibus and Impalas to Buick Lucernes and Chrysler 300s (My wife drove one for two years, and she and I both hated it), I felt decidedly uninspired. When I finally considered stepping up to a luxury sports sedan, I surrendered to the market-dominating imports, silently acknowledging that they had long ago vanquished their Cadillac and Lincoln competitors. But even there, I thought the full-blown Lexus and BMW too expensive for my taste and the smaller Lexus and Infiniti too derivative of their Toyota and Nissan counterparts.

In the midst of this star search, mired in indecision, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal touting the amenities and value of the Hyundai Genesis, the Korean manufacturer's headfirst dive into the domestic luxury market, which the reporter described as comparable to the Lexus LS460 (if one could get past the car's tainted badge) for half the price; in other words, it was a poor man's Lexus.

I drove my four-year-old Taurus over to the local Hyundai dealer to engage in some serious car talk.

He had one in the showroom -- naturally silver. It was love at first sight, as I was charmed by the styling (particularly the Mercedes-like grill and the BMW-borrowed taillights), the size (roomier than a Cadillac CTS, Infiniti G35, or Lexus GS350), the interior, the features, and the sticker price -- $34,000, except the dealer had added a $2000 premium.

"Is there any discount," I humbly inquired. "No sir," said the sales manager. "Hyundai is importing a limited quantity of these vehicles, and they are already in great demand. If I bought one myself, that is what I would have to pay."

"Well, then," I said, "Can I take it for a test drive?" "Only if you make a deposit," was his cordial response. "This is a luxury automobile, and we do not want to put any unnecessary miles on it."

You also don't want to sell it, I thought to myself as I walked out.

I found another model at a dealership in Christiansburg. It was red -- a color I didn't like -- but it didn't matter. I wasn't permitted to test drive that one either, although I could buy it at the sticker price.

A few days later I wandered into a Hyundai showroom in Greensboro, N.C., where I met a salesman who acted like he wanted to sell a car -- maybe because he had four Genesis on his lot, including a silver one identical to the one I had admired back home.

"Can I drive it?" I asked him. "Sure," he said. "Hop right in. I'll get the key, and we can take it out on the highway." And when I asked him for his best price, and he came back with $34,000, $2000 off the sticker price, I bought it.

But only after I took a die-hard Lexus owner to check out the one in Lynchburg -- and the sales manager initiated a frantic telephone and e-mail campaign offering me progressively steeper price cuts when I told him I had gotten a discount from another dealer.

It's a fine car -- jumps off the block, handles superbly, gets 30 mpg on the highway, is so quiet I have walked away with the motor running, starts with the push of a button, and looks quite nice parked between a midnight blue Lexus and a black BMW.