No Country For Old Cars

Americans’ lust for the shiny and new is threatening to be our undoing

Four years and 10 months ago, I reluctantly donated my 25-year-old Honda Accord to a worthy cause.

I did it for safety reasons. None of my relationships with friends and family were safe as long as I drove what everybody else considered a deathtrap. Sorry, old buddy, I hope you’re in a better place now — or, more likely, better places.

A month later, I bought my first-ever new car, a Honda Fit. The experience was relatively painless: I had only one major anxiety attack, and I don’t really blame the salesman. I can think of better uses of that 40–50 hours of my life, though.

I was lucky to be in the market when car sales were down. I got a five-year loan at a whopping 0.9 percent interest, with no money down.

I’m happy to say that today, the car is running fine. With a little luck and better attention to maintenance, I expect to have it until it turns 25, too, unless driverless cars render it superfluous.

As my Fit nears its fifth anniversary, I’m about to pay my loan off. So, I have started to get The Letters from my Honda dealer. If you’ve ever owned or leased a new car, you know what I’m talking about.

They’re congratulating me for my astute purchase. They’re lauding the qualities of their handiwork.

And they’re encouraging me to ditch the Fit ASAP for a new car and, of course, roll over the loan for another five years.

Uh, no.

I have a good relationship going here. And there’s no reason to believe the grass is greener on the other side. (Now, if I could turn my little gasoline-powered Fit into a Prius, Volt, or Tesla, I might be lured away, but that’s not an option right now.)

I’m happy knowing one less car will be manufactured this year, saving all of the steel, plastic, rare metals, and energy that goes into that process.

Plus, I look forward to not watching my bank account dwindle by a couple hundred dollars each month.

I can’t blame Honda for trying.

After all, the pitch must work quite often. Check out today’s used car market, which is being flooded by nearly-new, previously-leased vehicles

When I was a kid, my parents got new Fords every few years. They weren’t brand new cars, but the hand-me-downs from the people who traded in their perfectly fine cars for a shiny new one.

I never understood the thinking.

In that era, there really wasn’t much difference from one car to the next, except maybe the size of the tail fins. And even as a teenager, I knew that a new car’s value dropped ten percent or so the minute it was driven off the lot.

Back then, there was talk of “planned obsolescence,” of building a product that’s designed to fall apart quickly, leading the customer to buy a new one. That was so Sixties.

Ford, Chevrolet and GM learned the hard way about that strategy’s short-sightedness, when Honda, Toyota, Mercedes and others swooped in with reliable cars.

No, The Letters aren’t about planned obsolescence. They’re about taking advantage of Americans’ lust for the shiny and new, damn the ecological and social consequences.

It’s not just about cars. It’s the knee-jerk reaction to trade in a ten-year-old washing machine because a knob fell off. It’s the impulse to fill in a wetland to build a new housing development, instead of rehabbing existing homes.

For the sake of our descendants and the flora and fauna with which we share our planet, we have to reckon with that part of our national psyche.

So what do we do?

First and foremost, we need a change in mindset. A company like Honda, whose fate is tied to consumer satisfaction, wouldn’t send me The Letters if its customers were saying, “No, thanks, I’m set”.

But that’s not an easy task.

Nothing distinguishes Americans from the rest of the world more than our distaste for old things. The thought of living in a 75, 100, 200-year old house — so common in Europe — is seen here as something that only history obsessives, addled matriarchs, or rich showoffs do. A car needs only to last 25 years to be officially called a “classic,” a term that used to be reserved for items from ancient Greece, Rome and China.

If we’re going to have an old civilization in this country — or even one that lasts in a recognizable form beyond the 21st century — we have to make the leap.

At the very least, it’s time to celebrate some old-fashioned American traits: Yankee thriftiness, MacGyver-ish ingenuity, pioneer resourcefulness, Lakota use of every scrap of the bison they killed.

Only when America is a country safe for old cars will we be a secure and sustainable one.