A New Car!

Friends and long-time readers may remember that Anne and I went carless a while back. As you might guess, moving to a rural area has made that lifestyle choice untenable, and one of the first things we did on landing in VT was to go car shopping. As it turns out, there are very few cars that meet the criteria we were looking for: small, decent gas mileage, all-wheel drive, manual transmission relatively inexpensive. In fact, now that Toyota no longer makes the Matrix with AWD (and never, it turns out, made it with a manual transmission), we were left with only one choice. I'm pleased to announce we're now the proud owners of a Subaru Impreza.

We wound up buying it new because 1) it was the end of the model year, so we got a good deal, and 2) we didn't have the luxury of doing a lot of shopping for a used car that we liked. I realize that new cars lose most of their value the minute you drive them off the lot, but if past experience is any guide, we're going to own this car for a long time so it doesn't seem like too big of a loss.

As much as I rail against car ownership, I have to confess that our new car is really fun to drive! A few revelations after upgrading from a 1983 Toyota Tercel: it has a fifth(!) gear, it doesn't rattle at speeds over 60 mph, it has cruise control AND air conditioning. And unlike my Jeep, it doesn't overheat under certain operating conditions like driving forward or backward. I feel like an oil tycoon driving my fancy new car.

We're still going to apply some of the approaches we developed while we were carless, like walking more and taking public transit. Well ... we're going to walk more. Transit is a little hard to come by around here. It's not like the Yorkshire Dales where you can ride in the back of the mail truck if you need to get somewhere. We live close enough that I can walk or bike to work (as long as it's not snowing), and we're trying to get as much food as we can locally so we don't have to drive to far away grocery stores. Luckily Vermonters are really into the buy local ethic, so we should be able to do it once we get a routine. I feel like I'm certainly compromising my values a bit by getting a new car that doesn't get very good gas mileage (24/29 mpg according to the sticker). But I think we'll be happy to have all-wheel drive in the winter, and if we treat it well, we should be able to get around in it for a long time to come.