End of an Era

There is a critical point in the life of a car where it makes more economic sense to get rid of it. Mike Clark once told me that this happened around 80K miles.  Today’s cars are more reliable (this was circa 1989 that I received that tidbit) so I think I would bump that to 120K.  The GTI spent its first 100K miles without a hitch.  A few sets of tires, new brakes, new timing belt, and a wheel bearing were the only maintenance items beyond fluids and these could all be considered wear and tear.  After 100K, other stuff started to go.  I had a big service that hit the credit card hard and after I started hearing some unusual valve noise I took it back in.  The call came into my office with $1800 worth of stuff ranging from vacuum pumps to plugs.  The car was at this point Cristin’s commuter car and she found every reason possible not to like it.   I had to weigh both the possibility of it breaking down on her way to Boston and maybe of greater concern, the possibility she would have something new to complain about.  So I called the dealer and told them to do nothing with the car and then called Cristin to see if she had a car in mind given that we were looking at 4 new car payments to keep the GTI on the road.  Surprisingly (not really), she already had one picked out.  We headed to Audi on the Cape the next day and came home with the car below.  This represents more or less the end of a 20 year streak of me owning a Golf/GTI  and the end of manual transmissions.   My first was a 1984 MKII that I bought for $400 from a postdoc leaving Princeton.  It was a very robust vehicle and survived 20 or so trips between New Jersey and Chatham.  It was also extremely economical and could do the trip on one tank of gas.  The car had some quirks but it served me well until I left Princeton.  I waited until the last day to deal with it and ended up calling a business called “Scarpacci Bros.” or something like that which advertised they would take your car without title which was good because I did not have the title and there was no way I was going to the Trenton DMV which is possibly the most miserable place on the planet.  Vice does many programs on sad desperate places around the globe but they have never been there.  I think even the Vice reporters will not go in there.  I biked to where the car had been sitting abandoned for sometime to clear out any personal effects.  I noticed right away that there was a lot of bee activity near the car and once inside my ears led me to come to the conclusion that they had built a hive in the door.  I was worried the Scarpacci Bros. might turn me down so I put it in neutral and pushed it across the parking lot.   I stood there as they came and left towing that poor car to some unknown fate.  Actually, I know the fate because I had seen it first hand.  A VW-specific junk yard full of cars that were all missing the exact set of parts you needed to keep yours running.    Anyway, Cristin loves her new car and almost made it a week before being pulled over on Rt. 6 in Fairhaven.  She had the kids in the back and they were on the way to Friendly’s so the officer let them off with a warning.  This is, of course, a kind of profiling but not the kind that makes news.