My high school boyfriend was captivated by cars.  He could name every car on the road and had opinions about each one.  I assumed it was one of those boy things that he was born with, like a fascination with machines or sports stats, and I passively absorbed from him the ability to pick out Mustangs and Toronados and GTO’s of different years. But the appreciation of cars didn’t stick around after the boyfriend was gone, and I have to admit to a lifelong diffidence regarding cars.

I needed something more reliable. My hours were irregular, public transportation spotty, and I lived too far from the hospital to walk.  And it rained and snowed.  Any car that ran would do. That, plus my general ambivalence, is probably why my first car was such a clunker.

Maybe I got that from my mother, since my father had a bit more interest.  I think we had a Ford early on, that got totaled in a car accident in 1953, from which we all survived but retained scars.  In Vietnam, my father found a used Hillman convertible that was kind of jaunty, and then unintentionally won a lottery for a big Oldsmobile someone was leaving behind when their tour of duty was over.  The big black behemoth held the whole family well but had a habit of breaking down on longer trips, leaving us to scramble for repairs and alternate ways to get home from the countryside on the way to Dalat or Nha Trang.

When we moved from Vietnam back to East Lansing in 1959, he found out that it was possible to pick up a car in Europe and have it shipped back to the US at a great savings.  So he arranged for us to get a Mercedes 180 sedan at the Stuttgart factory, which we drove around France before circling back and putting it on a ship at Bremen.  The plan worked well except for the part about driving around in relatively recent post-war France in a German car, with German plates, full of a German-appearing family. Oops.  We got ”V” signs from people in the fields, and a notable thawing when we turned out to be Americans.

Back in Michigan, he turned us into a two-car family when he bought a used Izetta from someone at the university.  Cue the eyeroll from my mother.  It was a tiny and undoubtedly unsafe vehicle—the entire front of that car was the door, with just a bench seat for maximum two people or maybe three if children.  No seat belts or child seats of course.  Its main charm was that it was red, cute as a bug, and could drive on a sidewalk if needed after a Big Ten football game at Michigan State.  It also brought home the Christmas tree one year, the stump sticking down through the little sunroof, held on by one of the kids, while the top of the tree stuck straight up.

When we returned to Michigan from our next posting overseas, my mother drove our sensible and boring manual transmission Dodge K car while my father splurged on a cute Triumph.  It was terrifying on a highway in the fog as big trucks passed by, but he drove it for years until it became too hard to clamber in and out of the low-slung chassis.

In any case, I had neither the means nor need for a car of my own until I was twenty-seven and moved to Seattle for my family practice residency. I drove there from San Francisco in an old Rambler sedan with push-button transmission on its last legs/tires, gifted to me by my boyfriend of the day.  It was a bit of a boat that took oil at every gas stop, but it made it all the way to Seattle, where I heard it met its final demise after I sold it for a dollar to a young would-be filmmaker who filmed going over a cliff.

I needed something more reliable. My hours were irregular, public transportation spotty, and I lived too far from the hospital to walk.  And it rained and snowed.  Any car that ran would do. That, plus my general ambivalence, is probably why my first car was such a clunker.

There was a gas crisis going on, and cars were lining up at the pumps to spend over $2.00 a gallon—unheard of!  I needed something that wasn’t a gas hog and it had to be cheap.  Someone mentioned that an Opel Kadet might be a good choice, and I found a used one in a classified ad that fit the bill.  The kid who sold it to me accepted my $600.  It was a white squareback with a touchy stick transmission on the floor, poor suspension, plastic seats and a few minor dents in the white paint.  It had all the charm of a mobile tin can.  I didn’t care.

What I did mind was that, come winter, there was no heat.  I bundled up and accepted my lot with the crappy car and was just happy it got me back and forth the couple of miles to work. I didn’t have the time to take it on road trips anyway.

By the end of the three-year residency, the car finally died and wasn’t worth repairing.  But before it did, it coughed up a small surprise.  One day I was driving somewhere a bit further than usual and noticed a faint warmth coming from a vent. Could it be? I had been cursing the lack of a working heater for a couple of years but there it was—clear evidence that it wasn’t entirely dead after all!  It was just so anemic and took so long to warm up that I had never even noticed it.

When I moved from Seattle back to the Bay Area at the end of the three-year residency, I took all the money I had scrimped together and bought a new Honda.  Everything worked, for years.  Although I can appreciate the allure of flashier vehicles to some extent, I still find that the most important features are practicality, reliability, economy and now low emissions.  I finally sold my Honda the first year the Prius came out, and now drive electric.  It is a bit sad that car culture has been promoted at the expense of saner and less environmentally-destructive transportation and urban design policies.  I’m sure that there are better alternatives, and that machines can still be fun.