[I’m looking after a spouse suddenly sick amidst the severe heat and wildfire smoke that moved in today, so this week’s post is a shorty; the intended feature-length piece is deferred to next week.]
A few months ago, I hinted at hoots involved with the replacement for mother’s 1992 LeBaron; now the time has come.
It was 2001, dad had been dead for about a year, and the LeBaron was getting a little on the old side for mother. Still plenty of life left in it, but stuff was beginning to want attention more often. I agreed to help her find a new car—I was some kind of masochist, maybe, and/or I had a roaring case of Stockholm syndrome , and/or maybe it just hadn’t yet occurred to me that others’ expectations don’t necessarily become obligations just because they’re shouted or taken for granted.
She’d been happy with the LeBaron, so first we went to a Chrysler dealer. She pointed at a car and said “Yuck, what is that thing?” The newly-launched PT Cruiser. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those; it’s hideous!”, she huffed. She tried out a Cirrus instead and felt she—all of about five feet (152 cm) tall—couldn’t see rearward on account of the high deck. Back on the lot, I edged us back toward the PT Cruiser. The closer I got, the more mother disparaged it.
“Well, I’d like to try it out”, I said to the salesman. “Mother, would you like to come along?” Grudgingly she sat in the passenger seat as I adjusted the steering wheel and mirrors. The dealership’s driveway wasn’t more than half a block behind us when she said “Hey, the visibility’s really great in this thing: I can see all the way around with the back window being at the back of the car like that!” We swapped places, she tried it, she liked it, and Chrysler were still pricing them as though the PT referred to Barnum (“There’s a sucker born every minute”), so no PT Cruiser for mother.
Next stop was good ol’ Deane Buick, who’d added a Saab franchise when GM assimilated that maker. The Buick sedans gave her the same can’t-see-rearward feeling as the Cirrus, so those were out. There were plenty of late-model Saab 900s on the lot, and we tried one of those. She liked the rearward visibility, but found both sides of the turbo lag disconcerting—too slow, then too fast—and I had serious doubts, probably valid, about the day-in/day-out dependability. So nothing from Deane Buick-Saab.
All of a sudden, an idea struck me. I drove us to a Subaru dealership and pointed mother at a ’98 or ’99 Legacy wagon. “Are you nuts? I don’t have little kids; what would I need a station wagon for?” Instead of taking the bait, I remarked approvingly about the amber rear turn signals. A saleslady approached, said “They are nice lights” (I’ll take ‘awesome pickup lines’ for eight hundred, Alex!) and asked how she could help us. I indicated mother and said we were shopping for a car for her, and wondered if we might test-drive this green wagon. “I don’t want to test drive it”, mother said. “I don’t want a station wagon.”
(All together now!) “Well, I’d like to try it out”, I said to the saleslady. “Mother, would you like to come along?” Once again, the frothing and fulminating from the passenger seat. Once again, not more than half a block from the dealership she started marvelling at the excellent sightlines. I pulled over, we swapped seats, she tried it, she liked it even better than the PT Cruiser, but she still didn’t want a station wagon. It would make her look silly, she said. She’d think about it, she said.
We drove home in the LeBaron. All the way, she was fretting about how ridiculous she’d look driving a station wagon. I’m still not sure whom she felt would care what kind of car she drove. Certainly not the ladies who lunch; she wasn’t one of them. And we’re talking about a woman who turned up her nose at the Red Hat Ladies: “Ugh, no; they like to have fun” (no foolin’; direct quote!). By and by, she came round to the idea that maybe easy sightlines might be more important than unspecified random other people’s nonexistent opinions. But maybe a new car this time, she thought, rather than a used one.
Well, alright, we’re making some progress and homing in; let’s see where this leads us. At another Subaru store I found a nearly-new 2000 Outback, with very low miles and lots of warranty, at a significantly lower price than the practically identical ’01 models. We went looking and driving, and she liked it almost just fine, except she wasn’t quite ready (“Are you sure people won’t laugh at me for driving a station wagon?”). So we thanked the salesman for his time and left the lot.
Back at home, we checked with AAA, I think it was, about their car-buying service. Pointed them at the ad, and they quoted an out-the-door price for that particular car. We felt it was only fair to give the salesman a chance, rather than have him show the car and then go buy it elsewise, so we went back to the dealer and found him. I’m usually no damn good at negotiations, but this time I had the advantage of it being a deal (or not) involving the purchase of somebody else’s car with somebody else’s money. “This is the car we’d like to buy, and we’d like for you to get the commission on the sale of this car,” I said, “but we’re not doing a drawn-out negotiation, so you’ve got one chance to quote your lowest out-the-door price or we’ll go buy it through AAA”.
The salesman said “Well, let’s see where we’re at! How much are you looking to spend on a car today?” Oh, sorry, was I speaking Swahili without realising it? “Thank you for your time”. We went home, mother called AAA back and made the arrangements, and a couple days later the car was hers.
She had to get used to the massively-overgated shifter (those were an obnoxious trend at the time), and to having a lot more features and gadgets and seat adjustability than she’d ever before had, but she quickly became downright evangelistic: fantastic sightlines! Great big sideview mirrors! Neat folding stowaway cupholders! Loading and unloading stuff is so much easier than with a trunk! Why on earth hadn’t she started driving station wagons years ago?!
So she liked her new car. Very fine. By and by she left Denver and moved back to the Washington DC vicinity where she grew up. One day she had a little oopsie: she tapped a parked trash truck, she said, which sounded like a parallel-parking incident perhaps involving a bent licence plate or maybe bit of a paint scuff on one bumper or the other. She was spitting mad at the [unseemly adjectives were here -DS] cop who’d had the nerve to write her a careless-driving ticket.
More details I got, more apparent it grew that her word “tapped” was loaded well beyond its rated weight. For openers, her car had to be towed to the Subaru dealership for repairs; that sounded to me as though her tap-its were rather in need of adjustment. About a week later, she called me in a huff. The dealer was lying to her, she said; they were claiming they had to order in the parts to fix the car, she said, which had to be a lie because they’re a Subaru garage and her car is a Subaru and so obviously they would have the parts.
I told her I’d call the dealer’s service department and see if I could figure out what was going on. I identified myself to the service manager and said “I am really very sorry you drew my mother as a customer. I don’t wish that on anybody, and there is nothing you can say about her that will offend me. If you’ll tell me what’s up with her car, I’ll try to get her off your case about it.” I could hear the poor guy’s blood pressure and cortisol and adrenaline levels returning to normal. “Well, we don’t stock timing sprockets”, he said, “and pretty much nobody else does, either, because they just about never fail. But one of them’s shattered on your mother’s car, and there’s a pretty long list of other parts, too”.
Turns out I tapped a parked trash truck in the mother tongue translates to English as I did nearly ten thousand dollars’ damage to the car by hitting a parked trash truck hard enough to end the front bumper, hood, one headlamp, the A/C condenser, radiator, radiator fan, front and rear engine mounts, front timing belt sprocket, a goodly list of other parts, and require some involved straightening work before the new engine mounts would line up to be installed. That NHTSA permission letter of hers probably spared the car being totalled; if she’d not had the airbags disabled, they’d’ve surely gone off and taken the economic viability of a repair with them. Whee!
Eventually the cam sprocket came in, the car got unbent and reassembled, she got it back—the new headlamp, despite being an OE item and not a cruddy aftermarket piece, was even more poorly focused than the original, and impossible to aim correctly—and she drove it for a bunch more years. In 2016 she decided it was time for a new car. This time she knew exactly what she wanted: another Outback. I advised her on worthy options, but regrettably, Subaru of America were being a bunch of greedbags: the upgraded (HID) headlamps could be had only on top-trim 6-cylinder cars. She didn’t want or need a 6-cylinder engine. Had she gone buying the car in Canada, she could’ve had the HIDs on a 4-cylinder car, no problem, which makes it all the more infuriating: same cars, built on the same line in the same factory to identical regulations and almost identical specs (km/h versus MPH speedometer, Transport Canada rather than DOT certification plate, bilingual airbag warning and unleaded-fuel labels…trivial little differences like that). This was pure greed, nothing else. Oh well; halogen headlamps. Better than the ones on the 2000 model. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
She likes the ’16 model, but it, too, had its tapped-a-trash-truck moment. This time it was a mishap in a car park: she reversed without looking carefully, fast enough that a car approaching from her left hit not her bumper, not her quarter panel, but her left rear door. She was livid that the insurance company blamed her and raised her rates. “It wasn’t my fault, it couldn’t have been!” she said. “My car has a warning thingy that beeps if there’s another car coming while you’re backing up, and it didn’t beep, so it was the other guy’s fault!”. Oy vey. At least this time I didn’t have to serve as a mediator with the repair shop. The car got fixed, and she’s still driving it. I’ve never actually seen this car, and I reckon that suits me just about fine.
Can you or someone else explain the AAA setup to me. How can they ensure in advance what the dealership has to sell it for? I’m from Denmark and somewhat familiar with the AAA but not this purchasing setup. Sound weird to me.
Love your writing as mentioned before. A definite highlight of every week.
I drove one of those 900s/9-3s as a loaner recently and it’s just so nice. I was really surprised at how nice a car it was and how solid it felt. The engine was the n/a one of (if memory serves) 150hp and that was just right for it. It’s the very rare car that I could see myself driving for years. Not my wife, though, so…
It is a benefit for AAA members. As I understand the program, they will contract with particular dealers and get a commitment for sales at a certain markup from invoice that would represent a fair deal to a buyer. The benefit to the dealer is that AAA will guarantee some level of exclusivity in the area so that everyone who buys, say, a Ford through AAA will get the deal done through that dealer.
Costco has a program like that too for members, and I suspect there are others.
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for elaborating.
My parents LOVE Subarus. They also discovered them late in life. I think their first was a stripper 2012 Forester, white with a grey/beige interior of no particular color, with a stick. They have had a WRX (not sure why on that one), two or three Legacies, another Forester, and currently have a 2020 Outback. They do live where there is a little snow, but I am otherwise unsure what the attraction to the Outback is. No dogs, no small grandkids, etc. I am sure nothing has ever been in the cargo area.
Interesting tidbit about the WRX: They hated the black alloy wheels that were standard. They talked the selling dealer into putting steelies and plastic wheel covers from some other Subaru on there. I guess he could tell they were not going to explore the limits of WRX performance.
high seating position without going full-on Canyonero SUV, is probably a solid guess.
Another great read Daniel, you’ve become my weekend staple as I sip my freshly brewed morning iced coffee. Fascinating to see how you have evolved over the years and how you handle your mother. Your dad, may he rest in peace was clearly a saint. Sadly, we can’t pick our relatives, and the closest we can endure only in small doses, if at all.
My dad was easily the most honest, ethical person I’ve ever met, and one of the most intelligent, kindest and most decent—to such a degree that it could be to his own detriment. It wouldn’t occur to him to lie or take advantage, so sometimes he just didn’t (couldn’t) see that others would do so to him. He was not a saint, though; he was as flawed and imperfect as the rest of us.
His mother had many fine qualities, but she also had mental-health and personality issues that caused her to fly into baseless rages, change her mind capriciously, throw blame around like grated parmesan cheese on spaghetti.
Dad’s father was a hell of a fine man and a very constructively engaged father, but he was as emotionally stunted as many of his generation were—perhaps more so, having grown up in North Dakota under a strict German father himself.
So my dad learned early to keep his mouth shut, his head down, and his feelings under lock and key.
Years ago I found a cassette tape in grandpa’s den, labelled “Aug ’68”. I brought it home with me, popped it in the tape deck in my office, and hit Play. It was one of grandma’s tantrums, recorded about a year and a half before they separated—grandma stayed in the house, grandpa rented a small apartment. She didn’t drive, so every day he’d come take her wherever she wanted to go. He’d eat with her, shop with her, travel with her, whatever; he just couldn’t live with her. He honoured his vows, carried on providing for her, and made it work, which I have always found highly admirable. These days she would probably be diagnosed with something along the lines of paranoid delusions, and maybe there’d be some meds to help, but at that time such things were scarcely discussed, let alone diagnosed, and there were no effective treatments, anyway.
I left the tape running while I went to fetch a glass of water. From the kitchen I could hear grandma’s voice, but not her words—and it sounded like a higher-intensity version of my mother’s rants. Oh! The pieces fell into place. Comedians joke about men marrying their mothers, haw-haw-haw, and that’s true to some degree: we tend to seek the familiar, and if we’re not paying thoughtful, attuned attention, it’s just as easy to embrace the bad-familiar as the good-familiar. My mother presented the behaviour dad was familiar with, and the somewhat lower intensity of her meltdowns made her seem sane relative to his mother. Oops!
He did his best with what he had, and all in all I’m grateful for the damn fine job he did, but he had some giant blind spots and deeply faulty programming. The resultant stoicism served him well in his careers, but I am convinced it contributed largely to his untimely death.
Another great story – one that I (fortunately) have not experienced myself. The mother part, not the Subaru part.
It is fortunate that the first Subie did not give her a lot of trouble. There is nothing worse than suggesting a car to someone, having them come around to your way of thinking, and then having to hear about it when it starts giving trouble. My sister got a Subaru Outback like that after many years of Jeeps and VWs, and boy am I glad I wasn’t the one who suggested she go look at one. That was her son (heh heh).
Gad. Until you just mentioned it here, I’d never thought what might’ve happened if she’d wound up hating the car for some reason. I’m certain it would’ve quickly become my fault.
As to mothers: you’re fortunate! As a kid, I was fascinated in a sad, awful way when I got glimpses of other kids and their parents interacting—notably my cousins and my aunt (mother’s sister, who is a lovely person).
It was so different and so completely alien to any of my experience; somehow other kids didn’t have to be constantly vigilant, on guard. They seemed to live a life without being in a deployed-soldier kind of mode all the time, they got to actually relax and not just pretend, they got to have fun without wondering what (and when) it was going to cost, they didn’t seem to have to plan an escape route and contingency plan for every last little move and word in case it might bring a firestorm. I couldn’t fathom how any of that was even possible; might as well flap my arms and try to fly.
And when my mother would go awry and blow her stack with others around, even when I saw and registered their looks of knowing and helplessness not averted quickly enough, I still couldn’t quite really grasp that something was the matter and it wasn’t supposed to be like that. When one of the core directives of one’s entire society and culture is “Of course you love her, she’s your mother!“, one does not question it or talk about it—especially when one is little and has no agency. One simply lives with a bone-grating, unexplained, off-limits-for-discussion, shameful disconnect between what one feels and what one is supposed to feel.
I once read somewhere that everyone’s family is dysfunctional, in its own way. My mother did have her issues – my father could not deal and sought a divorce at around the 8 year mark. She was absolutely and forever convinced that there was one, single way things should be done, and all was well if you lived within those fences. When she blew, it was fast and hard, but was also over when it was over, there were no long, slow grudges. But she had a great sense of humor and could be a lot of fun too.
As a parent I have come to see the flaws in my parents in comparison with the flaws that Mrs. JPC and I have exhibited in our own parenting (which, with the youngest at 25 is pretty much a finished book). As in everything, it’s all fun and games until stress is applied, and nothing can stress like kids. We found all kinds of ways to fail, sometimes (No. 1) in just the ways our own parents (unintentionally) taught us, and sometimes (No. 2) in the opposite ways, which we mistakenly found in our efforts to not fail in Way No 1. Most of us manage to fail in ways that are more or less within one standard deviation of the norm, but there are some folks who are cursed with a unique combination of attributes and experiences that create parenting failures that would be truly awe inspiring, if they were not so tragic. I have gathered from your descriptions that your mother is one of these.
(Y)es to all.
Great yet melancholy discussion. Both my parents had golden hearts yet deep flaws, as do we all, yet I choose to be thankful for them doing their best and do my best to keep those inherited traits at bay.
About Year 5 into my marriage some unsavory personality traits started uncovering themselves in my wife’s behavior, and just slowly got worse from there. My new focus became the emotional guardian for the kids. By Year 19 she left, and while it was a bumpy new journey at first (divorces are expensive), these past 4 years have been some of the most incredible of my life. The kids elected to live with me, and it’s been wonderfully calm as they finish their school careers and begin to spread their wings.
If people only realized the ripple effect of their actions on a child’s psyche….
It would have saved the service manager a lot of stress if your mother hadn’t disabled the airbags and the insurance company could have totaled the car and had done with it.
My cars for the last several years have had poor sightlines, and it’s occurred to me that in a station wagon, I’d at least know where my rear bumper was. But there’s no station wagon right now that checks all the boxes for me.
It might’ve saved me a lot of stress, given the reason (short/close/vulnerable) why she had the airbags disabled…!
Poor sightlines are an obnoxious trend. It’s a combination of thick pillars for roof crush resistance (pedestrian-hits are very common while rollovers are not, so this seems a bad trade to me; it’s been a long time since NHTSA demonstrated much competence); high head restraints, giant rearview mirror modules, fatuous styling trends, and focus group participants claiming to feel safe (swaddled) in such cars.
Another good read with my morning coffee. Your mother sounds like the high-maintenance type; it sounds like her Subarus have been, fortunately, the opposite. My late mother drove a series of Mopars. One of my brothers-in-law (now retired from Chrysler Canada) was always able to hook her up with off-lease executive-driven cars that were nearly new and dealer-maintained. She also had a good relationship with the service manager at her local Chrysler-Dodge dealer, so she never had much trouble keeping them in good order. As for Subarus, I’ve always found them interesting, and I had my first experience with one as a rental two years ago. I booked a mid-size for a week, and they gave me an Impreza 4-door sedan. My wife and I spent the week up in the Bruce Peninsula, and it was a great drive. It had one feature that I found a little different. It had a little green “cold” light on the dash, and the transmission wouldn’t shift into top gear until the engine was sufficiently warmed up. At first I wondered if there was something wrong with the transmission, but once I noticed the cold light, I got it.
Thanks again for another fine read.
There is an entire subreddit for children of people like my mother.
Wow, a green “Cold” light? Suddenly it’s nineteen sixtysomething and we’re driving a Ford, and that dillweed Jan Norbye is clucking his damn-fool tongue approvingly about it in Popular Science, saying many of today’s drivers prefer warning lights rather than gauges.
My ’07 Accord has a deliberately elevated idle speed, delayed upshifts, and top-gear lockout until the engine reaches a certain temperature. No “Cold” light, which I guess is Subaru’s way of doing exactly what it did for you: informing the driver that nothing’s the matter and everything will behave normally once the light goes off.
Our 2014 Civic has a cold light
That was the first time I’d ever encountered said feature on any make I’ve owned, rented, or otherwise driven.
Both my 2018 Mazda 6 and my wife’s 2012 Outback have cold lights. They look identical to each other and to the standard temperature light, only they’re blue.
My ’64 Impala still has a working cold light as well. I think several GM divisions used them up until around 1967 or 68.
My 67 Parklane has a green cold light not that it affects how the car runs once started. None of the other nine cars has a cold light.
I’ll take a pass on that subreddit. It would probably open the wounds.
Can’t blame you a bit.
Of all the test cars mother drove, the Subaru was the best pick. I got to own an ’03 Outback and a ’99 Saab 9-3, and I liked the latter’s turbo, but it was an expensive car to upkeep, and Saab was all but GM by that point anyway.
Cars of the aughts suffered from those extreme pinched rooflines that definitely hurt rear visibility. The Subaru wagons, though, had great visibility, so I can see why they’d be a good fit if that was a concern.
My ’03 Outback was a great car, and I should have hung onto it longer than I did. I made the mistake of “upgrading” to an ’05 with 30k fewer miles, but that turned out to be a much poorer maintained car, so I ditched it after only about a year.
Subaru migrated away from the classic wagon shape and into a gawky, awkward SUV shape around 2009 or 10. I think that they probably felt that wagons were out of style, and that’s a shame; they lost a lot of their uniqueness when they chased the SUV trend.
Yeah, I’m a form-flows-from-function kind of guy, so the homogeneity that results from benchmark-worship really grates my carrots. Another example: Volvo decided to nip at the heels of Audi and Mercedes, to the complete detriment of everything they’d built their reputation on.
That said, I don’t think recent Foresters are too bad-looking; they still register more as wagon than as SUV to me. Could sure as hell do without that stupid upswept-to-the-rear beltline that pinches the windows and constricts outward visibility, though!
The mother of yours sounds so much like ones from V.C. Andrews novels (they were huge things in the early 1980s).
Didn’t you try to disable the daytime running lamps in your mum’s Subaru, which left a nasty gash on your hand? You talked about it in the newsgroup many years ago.
See above here in the comments thread for more about my folks.
Now you mention it, I did send myself to the emergency room for stitches when I misunderstood the factory service manual’s poorly-written and -illustrated instructions for accessing the DRL module. I thought a part of the knee bolster had to be removed, and it fought me tooth and claw (and sharp-edged, pointy corner), but all the while the module had been staring me in the face, a few inches forward of the part I was struggling to remove. I stil have the scar on my right middle fingertip.
Don’t feel too bad about your injury; I’m staring at a scar I got closing my fingertip in the chamber of a Beretta 9mm. Long, embarrassing story. Through all your posts, I’ve been consistently impressed at the scope of repairs/modifications you’ve done. Best wishes & a quick recovery to your spouse.
Shop where I was employed took on Mazda & Subaru. I noticed that these cars had many more sharp unfinished edges, exposed & hidden, than other cars, including Toyota & Nissan/Datsun. Subaru worst about this.
That Subaru of my mother’s surely did have more sharp edges and corners all over the place than I encountered in the ’60s-’90s Chrysler products or the ’80s Volvos I messed with!
I had a 93 Legacy and it was a well put together car throughout, locally assembled but it was a good one it was gutless for the amount of fuel it got through but other than that quite a nice car
I hope Bill feels better soon.
Thanks for always providing an enjoyable Saturday morning over-coffee read.
Thanks/me too and you’re welcome, respectively!
I did not know it was possible to disable airbags. Surely that is illegal.
One can get an authorization letter through NHTSA for either an on/off switch or a reduction in power for the air bag. There are a few reasons why someone would request this, years ago I installed several on/off switches as a tech for elderly or disabled individuals who felt the deployment of an air bag would cause more harm than good. I am not sure how the letter request works, I was just the tech at the end of the line.
It’s easy to disable airbags. Whether or not it’s legal for a vehicle owner to disable their own car’s airbags depends on where the car is registered; vehicles in service are regulated by the state (…province, commonwealth, etc…). Some states have laws requiring that safety equipment not be altered or disabled; some have laws requiring cars to comply with the applicable federal standards, and some have no apposite laws at all.
It’s federally illegal for a party regulated by the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards—vehicle makers/importers and their agents including dealers; all other auto repair businesses; any individual working on somebody else’s car for any kind of consideration) to disable an airbag. But when it finally became apparent even to NHTSA that their airbag specification—must “save” an unbelted 50th-percentile male test dummy—was killing and maiming smaller, shorter, belted people, they applied a series of band-aid fixes. This is discussed in detail in the ’92 LeBaron post and comments; search the page repeatedly for letters and you’ll find it.
Thank you, I briefly searched NHTSA air bag letter (as I saw the NHTSA permission letter phrase in the article) and tried to remember foggy details from my time as a service tech 30+ years ago. As a lowly service tech I just remembered doing, not questioning…. Typical scenario:
Service Writer: “Bertolini, disable this air bag. There is a “letter” so do it.”
Me: “OK, cool, but why do we do this again?, State/Federal rules and what not?”……
Service Writer: “GD IT KID! JUST DO AS WE SAY AND SIGN OFF ON IT! YOUR NAME ON THE RECORDS! YOU’RE RESPONSIBLE!!!!! AAAARRRRRRGGHHHHH! YOU WANT A JOB HERE OR SHOULD I FIND SOMEONE ELSE!!!! STUPID KID!
Me: “Yessir!! (or ma’am, they were all the same and the rent was always due….)
Ugh, NHTSA letters…….yeah don’t miss that at all.
Sight lines! I love the visibility out of my 03 Outback (and that’s about it), and I just upgraded my DD from a pair of smaller late aughts sedans to a 99 box Cherokee. No more blind spots! I am getting old! s/.
Subarus. Where to begin…. All issues aside, regardless of the generation, I do like them some what. That being said I will likely never own another of any year again. I am done with HG swaps on the older EJ25s and am avoiding the F series engines for “reasons”. Like to drive them, don’t like to wrench on them. The old Subaru fanatic joke is real…”What?!?, They’re great cars!!!1111!!!! Just replace the head gaskets, water pump, timing belt, entire cooling system, front C/Vs, rear wheel bearings, and cat. converters and they are great cars!!!!!1111!!!! You’re just dumb…..best car EVAHHHH!!!!!!! Needy little things if you ask my professional mechanic opinion. (But they are great in snow! Shhhh…)
My mom bought a 2016 Forester within the last few years and I don’t believe it has had any issues beyond a few dealer recalls, I hope it is a good car for her and her spouse.
They love it the winter in their part of north eastern PA and I am happy they now own an AWD vehicle. Also they love the visibility, I see a trend here…..
Thanks again for another great COAL
You’re welcome, but…awcrap. A Subaru of some kind was (is? Was? Is?) on my list of candidates to replace my present car, a 14-year-old Accord which both of us detest—its dependability is its only positive attribute. But you’re not nearly the only person to mention head gaskets and timing belts and all the rest of that. No car is repair-free, of course, but.
I have no idea what car to get. I guess that’s just as well; this is a great time to sell a car, but not such a good time to buy one. Nevertheless, I found myself running mind-movies about this the other day.
Another great read Daniel, although my sole Subaru experience was the 1983-ish two door my father briefly had for his commuter car. Always wondered about modern Subies.
Your mother stories kind of remind me of my own mom, and I do miss her. Although she possessed a volcanic temper and a sharp tongue she was at least rational. Whenever she unloaded on someone she was at minimum mostly right.
That would’ve made so much difference—some measure of consistency and predictability. I never knew whether she was climbing the stairs to holler and hit or to announce a batch of fresh cookies.
Ah yes sightlines have devolve some, I have a 5 door hatchback 03 huge C pillars you cant see thru and a mid 60s station wagon with glass all round its much better to see out of and really shows how bad things had got by early this century and its got worse since then.
+1 for the shot of the Pink Panther getting an idea. I watched the original cartoons when I was a kid in the late’60’s/early ‘70’s, and the cigarette in a kid’s show definitely wouldn’t fly today.
I’m up in Montana visiting family, so am simultaneously marinating in the same heat and smoke, and being short on time for decent quality comments. I’ll just leave a two-thumbs-up for top notch content, and wishes for Bill to get feelin’ better!
-TC
Thanks, TC! We had a much better day today—cooler and clearer on account of a wind-shift. Hope you get the same soon.