My first (and only) car

I have owned only one car in my life, and unlike Tessie, mine was not a charming junk heap made primarily out of rust like most people imagine when they think of first cars. No, mine was a new car, and not just any new car: it was a Volkswagen New Beetle, obtained a few weeks before my 16th birthday, on March 4, 2000.

Now, lest you think I was a spoiled princess who received a brand new car for her Sweet Sixteen, let me set your mind at ease. The car was not a birthday present. The reason I got it so close to my birthday is because I got my license on my birthday, and with the license came the accompanying car. I paid for precisely one half of the car. In fact, I was in debt until my sophomore year of college because of that car.

But basically, the reason I had a shiny new car was because my mother had an irrational fear of used cars. She always liked to say that used cars aren't reliable because you never know how the last owner treated them, which I suppose is true to an extent. Thus, she did not want her young, freshly-licensed daughter driving on the back roads of North Carolina in a car that could break at any moment.

When you're living in North Carolina, you more or less need a car. Everything is very far from everything else, and there is no public transportation to speak of. My parents fully supported the idea of me having a car, because they were really sick of having to drive me everywhere. This was made worse for them by the fact that my older sister had driven me everywhere for a year when she got her license, then gone away to college, forcing my parents to once again get up early to take me to school (no school bus), drive me to see friends, etc.

God, writing this is reminding me of how much it really sucks not to be able to get places on your own. This is why Torsten and I want to have kids in a city that has a real public transportation system.

Anyway, back on track. My mother did want me to have a car but did not want it to be a used car, which would have been the only option I could afford, so she offered to pay for half of a new car for me and to lend me the rest of the money that I needed to make up my half. And when she said half, she really meant it. Half of the cost of the car, half of the tax, half of the gas, half of the insurance. My mother was all about teaching her children financial responsibility, and she kept very good records.

By the time I turned 16, I had about $5,000 in savings (from babysitting and working as a salesclerk), and it took me four more years to pay off the rest of the car because every time I got close, it would be time to pay car tax or another insurance bill would come or something, and so it was with the biggest feeling of relief ever that I finally paid my mother my last installment and took the car to college with me. (I was not allowed to take the car away until I had paid it off. This was part of the lesson on financial responsibility. On the other hand, I was not charged any interest on the loaned money. This was a reasonable trade-off.)

The decision to get a New Beetle as opposed to any other car was not based on the fact that it's a cute car, but rather on the fact that it was one of the cheapest cars that Consumer Reports gave good reliability ratings to. Still, my mother was worried that I could get stranded somewhere, get out of the car to call her on a pay phone, and get attacked by a man who was loitering near the phone, just waiting for a young girl to stumble innocently upon it. So, she insisted that I get a car phone. This was before cell phones had really caught on. The cost of making a phone call on the car phone was about 60 cents per minute. Of this, I was expected to pay 25 cents, as that was what I would have paid for a call made on a pay phone (I presume you see what I mean about her insistence on lessons of financial responsibility).

Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of that stylish car phone, but suffice it to say that it took up more or less the entire glove compartment of the car and that the only thing the screen showed was the phone number you typed in, in giant orange numbers. It also had a classic blocky look to it. I never used it, even once.

It did have a good engine, but it had tons of electrical problems. The oxygen sensor kept breaking, which caused the car to smell like rotten eggs. The check engine light kept coming on for no reason at all (and no, it was not because I didn't know how to screw the gas cap back on). Sometimes the electric window buttons stopped working (this happened at a toll booth once, forcing me to get out of the car to pay the toll. That sucked). Sometimes the CD player stopped working. I'm pretty sure Consumer Reports doesn't give it top ratings anymore, at least not for wiring.

I did love the car, though. I drove that thing as far south as Orlando and as far north and east as Maine, although I don't think it ever went further west than Toronto. When I got back from my year in France, I was afraid to drive it, but it turned out that driving is pretty much like riding a bike. That car has been up and down I-95 more times than most people I know. That car was my first step toward liberation from my parents.

I sold it when I graduated college and moved to DC, after having had it for just over six years. I made a pretty decent amount of money from selling it, and that money helped me pay my deposits, move-in fees, and rent and support myself for a month until I got my first real paycheck. Now I use the Metro, the bus, and Zipcar. So I don't miss my car. And I definitely don't miss having to take it to get the check engine light turned off at least once a month.

But still. Wasn't it a pretty shade of blue? It looked purple in the sun.