Is Anything More Anxiety-Provoking than Buying a Used Car?
A story about dreams, driving, and used car salesmen
It has been a tough week. I’ve been attempting to buy a cheap car with enough oomph in the engine, and enough miles left on the clock, to get me around Scotland for the next year or so.
It doesn’t have to be pretty as long as it’s reliable and easy to fix; I wished the same for the buying process.
I’m not mechanically inclined, and as an older woman shopping alone, I’d probably feel safer in a Wuhan wet market than a used car dealership. I went through days of scrolling cars for sale on Autotrader UK with my jaws clenched as I bit down hard on my underlying anxiety.
Dream Drives
I began driving in my mid-twenties, and ever since, my dreams about driving have been allegories of the state of my life at the time. The car I’m in, its condition and who it belongs to, who is driving and how—each element is a metaphor.
In the midst of my divorce, I twisted round from the front passenger seat, desperately trying to buckle my children into car seats while a faceless, shapeless gray presence hurtled us across bumpy ground in the dark. Another time, I drove a whacky red convertible, laughing uproariously as the wheels refused to take me in the direction I was steering for. I’ve never had a boring driving dream, but then I’ve seldom had a boring life.
When I’m awake, I don’t much care what car I drive. My first cars were purchased from friends of friends, amateur mechanics who resurrected junkyard heaps as a side gig. That’s how I became the owner of a Citroen DS from the 1950s. The headlights turned with the steering wheel, and when I switched on the ignition, hydraulics lifted the body of the beast up over its wheels. It was a fun car.
It started having electrical problems soon after I bought it, so I took it back to Julian, a young man with oily hands and a charming forelock that hung dangerously close to the engine as he worked.
“Ah, I know what the problem is,” he said, and gave me a no-kill mousetrap. “He likes popcorn.” After I caught the mouse, Julian replaced the chewed wiring, and I drove the car for years until a ‘real’ mechanic fixed something that didn’t need fixing, and the engine seized and died forever.
Some people give their cars names, and although I’ve never done that, I remember my DS as I would a dear, departed friend.
I don’t have any mechanically inclined friends these days; cars are so much more complicated now that I wonder if the hobbyist market still exists. Perhaps it died during my long hiatus from owning a car.
I didn’t have a car when I worked in the luxury yacht industry, but driving was sometimes part of my job. I was the chef onboard, and if we had a big trip coming up, provisioning meant shopping for seven or eight cartfuls of groceries as well as boxfuls of booze, so I did the rounds in rented minivans.
‘Girls on Tour!’
For a while, I worked on a boat that belonged to a Snowbird who summered in the North and wintered in the South. His two Rolls Royces went with him, and one spring, he had some of us from the crew drive the cars to the shipping depot a few hours away.
The First Mate and the Stewardess drove the ‘everyday’ Rolls, and I got the midnight blue Cabriolet. When we stopped in Miami for a night out, we all piled into the Cabriolet and went cruising along Ocean Drive with the top down.
On one side, the South Beach strip was bright with party lights and dance music spewed from outdoor bars and restaurants. On the ocean side, ‘locals’ wearing little more than a Walkman, sequins, and a suntan rollerbladed around tourists strolling in dark glasses and bright Hawaiian shirts. The road itself was a conga line where we were not the only Rolls Royce. Ahead and behind, the latest models of the famous European brands glided along, vintage American cars bounced and flashed, and passengers in couture sunglasses toasted each other with umbrella drinks. We puttered along, left in the shade by the bling of fancier cars and decidedly fancier people.
When we turned back onto the main road, I put the top up for protection against the seamier side of downtown Miami. We slowed for an intersection and, as the light turned red, a panhandler leaped onto the hood with his squeegee mop. His face was split by a grin and he went at the windshield like he’d found a scratch card for the million-dollar lottery—someone in Miami was still impressed by our old-school Rolls Royce.
Shifts in Transmission
It was surprising that the Owner had trusted me to drive his prize car along the busy South Florida highway with its notoriously accident-prone residents. The only other time he had handed me a set of car keys, they belonged to the police chief of our home port on Long Island, New York. The Chief had accepted an impromptu invitation to have lunch on the boat, and the Owner asked me to move his car out of a 5-minute parking spot.
The Chief was over six feet tall (200 cm) and it took me a while to maneuver the seat so my little legs could reach the pedals. Not having driven an automatic before, I spent yet more time trying to find the shift lever and guess how it worked. I had just about discovered how to get the mammoth old Chrysler into reverse when the deckhand appeared at the window beside me. The Owner and the Chief had been watching from the boat and, having laughed themselves silly for ten minutes, the had sent the deckie to save my embarrassment.
When I became a parent, I drove a Honda Odyssey—the ultimate ‘soccer mom’ van. Then came the divorce and I needed something that was cheaper to run, with no monthly car payment. I called about a Scion xB I found online and spoke with a man who sounded like he lived on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall. He turned out to be younger than I expected but just as Cold War in his demeanor. When we had agreed on a purchase price, I put my hand out to shake his, and he grabbed it like he was executing a judo move.
Apart from a near disaster when the battery exploded, my ‘toaster’ proved to be a good deal. By the time its clutch finally gave out, I had driven it 80K miles (160K km), including a twelve-hour round trip to Montreal so the kids and I could spend Christmas in a foreign country.
Back in the online marketplace, older but not much wiser, I decided that since I am no judge of cars, I would do better to go by the character of the sellers. As long as the cars met my basic criteria, I would make my choice based on reviews of the dealers.
And so, on Tuesday, I bought an unremarkable hatchback built in 2011 and drove it back to where I was house-sitting. Except that halfway into the 30-minute journey, I got stuck at a roundabout, unable to get the car into first gear.
The Breakdown
I used to be an apologetic driver—sorry, I’m going too slow, sorry, I don’t know where I’m going, sorry I won’t chance a maneuver that might help you shave two minutes off your commute. I’m older now, and a breakdown at a busy intersection is no longer a cause for embarrassment.
Still, my car buying anxiety revved into overdrive, and by the time I arrived at the house, I was in full-blown alarm mode. Had I just wasted a substantial chunk of my cash on a useless heap that would now need even more money to make it roadworthy? Had I fallen for a con I should have spotted?
Anxiety is like ice, so cold that it burns. I couldn’t get a grip on my thinking—my powers of logic slid out from under me; a furnace of ‘you-deserve-what-you-get’ shame roared inside my chest.
I’ve been working on how I respond to anxiety since I began to notice the physicality of it a few months ago. I’ve been trying to see and separate troubling situations from my troubled response to them.
I took some deep breaths and talked myself back through my car buying process: “You can’t put your trust in the car, so put your trust in the people”.
I called the salesman and explained what had happened. He was well within his rights to say, ‘The transaction is complete, you got free breakdown cover and a free 6-month contract with an independent warranty service—call them to sort it out for you.’ But he didn’t.
Mohammed came right over to pick up the car. The guy he brought to drive it back was eager to diagnose the problem, so we all got in the car and drove around until the gears got stuck again.
“Ah, I know what the problem is,” he said, “It’s the linkage, that’s a cheap part to replace. You’ll have the car back in a day or two”.
Old cars being what they are, the repair has turned out to be more complicated and is taking longer than expected. My next house sit is a remote one, so I need to borrow a car and make a plan to have that car, and my car end up in the right places. It’s like a game of Chinese checkers except the board spans 170 miles (350 km).
Not my dream scenario, but I’m managing my anxiety, so it’s not a nightmare either.
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Beth. I almost never read people's whole articles. I scan the first paragraph, sort of flip to the end, and move on. I read every word of this. Thank you for this momentary escape into the used car world. My very favorite moment was reading "until a ‘real’ mechanic fixed something that didn’t need fixing, and the engine seized and died forever." I laughed out loud, all by myself here in the house. Hope you are well and happy, and that whatever vehicle you're in, for the rest of time, it's a good one, running smoothely and getting you there on time.