* The truth about cars? Ok, but you won’t like it. They cost about $25 per day to own, and most people use their car for about an hour per day. Vast resources are expended to conceal these facts from us.
It costs about $9,000 per year in after-tax income for a reliable four seat vehicle. Sure, argue with me, but car execs (and the leaders of related industries like insurance, road construction, oil) know it’s true. They (and their dads and granddads and great-grandads) have been playing this game for 100 years, my friend.
* What purpose does a high performance vehicle serve in a driving environment packed to the gills with traffic congestion, poor and getting poorer driving habits and an over-reaching State that seeks to control, punish and extract sustenance – with the utmost technology-enabled efficiency – from those who possess the temerity to drive Their vehicles on Its roadways?
* One of my favorite things to point out to people is the drabness of our age. In 1970, a walk through a parking lot offered a rainbow of colors and all sorts of shapes and sizes. In the early seventies, the most popular color for Corvettes was orange. I think that was ’73 or ’72. My father’s Valiant was powder blue and my mother’s Plymouth was green.
Today, the top three colors are black, gray and silver. Walk through a parking lot and it looks like film noir made in the GDR. The general ugliness of our cars is due to the unrelenting claim that form follows function in all things at all times. The neo-Puritan scolds in charge of our lives lie awake a night worried that somewhere, someone is enjoying themselves.
One of the ironies of the age of plenty is we have a lot less fun.
* Here in my part of coastal SoCal, the most popular vehicles are (in no particular order)
Big pickups, usually tricked-out enough that you can be certain that they aren’t used for work;
Small pickups of indeterminate age, used almost exclusively by Hispanic men in the 30-to-50 age range, clearly doing either gardening/lawn care or construction work;
Large SUVs driven by soccer moms;
Hybrids (Toyota Prius in particular) driven by either incipient cat ladies, or white collar men and women who want the carpool lane stickers (supposedly carpool lane stickers can increase the resale value of a car by up to $5k in LA);
Everything else out in the long tail of the distribution – sedans of all ages; Mercedes and Cadillacs in regions where the average age is pushing 60+; quite a few Audis among the 30+ reasonably affluent professionals; BMWs for the dickhead drivers; etc. I see few new Camrys or Accords, but I don’t see many Rogues except among college-age women. And Tesla is pretty popular among a certain demographic.
* About six months ago I shopped for a car for the first time in over 30 years. (I’m moving from NYC, where you don’t need a car, to CA, where you definitely do.) Research junkie that I am, I did a lot of test driving and I read a lot of reviews and comments online. The car journalists are definitely well-informed and they write well, but Steve’s right — car journos live in their own universe, where cars and car-ness are infinitely more important than they are to the rest of us. I finally wound up relying on the car forums on Reddit; the buyer reviews on Edmunds were much more helpful to me than the pro reviews were. Everyday people’s reports are often great.
* Toyota directs their work directly at the mass market, which is why critics don’t like it. They’re the Norman Rockwell of cars–technically proficient with values (dependability and ease of use in the case of Toyota) the elite doesn’t appreciate but the commoners do.
As I recall from your blog, you liked Rockwell for that reason. I think it makes sense you would like the Toyota too.
* One of the interesting things about the Camry – if you talk with a Toyota mechanic – is that the 1985-90 vintage is considered one of the best car models EVER for reliability & longevity. It was common for them to exceed 300,000 miles on the original transmission if cared for reasonably. Some argue that it was such a good car that it was hurting Toyota’s sales, and it was intentionally degraded in the 90s so it would’t last so darn long.
* Before Toyota brought out the Lexus luxury marque at the end of the 1980s they put everything they had into their Camrys. After that, they tried not to make Camrys too good to give you a reason to upgrade to a Lexus.
* I remember back in the ’70′s reading a book with the title, if I remember right, “The Screwing of the Average Man” or something similar. The chapter on cars explained that if you took all the time the “average man” spends driving, maintaining his car, working to pay insurance, taxes and registration, gas, oil, repairs, and the monthly payment and divided by miles traveled the average speed was about 5 miles per hour. I suspect today’s figure would be similar.
