Hate Cars, Love Driving

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Today’s advertiser, Huel, would really like you to add their proteineriffic drink to your breakfast routine. Should you? IDK! But you should definitely at least click on their ad, because for each of you who does, I get $1.60. If 20 of you do, for example, I can fill up my car with cheap gas!

Around this time a year ago, I had just about had it with my car. It was an old one, a 2005 Subaru Outback station wagon that my mom had given to me in 2021—technically, she sold it to me for $1—when she decided to upgrade to what she termed her “final car.” For the couple of years I’d driven it, the Subaru gave me nothing but trouble, from its poky acceleration to its habit of, like, giving up and stopping on highway exit ramps, on the BQE, on the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, or when I plugged a phone charger into the cigarette lighter socket. Really, the thing just stopped wherever and whenever it felt like it, like an elderly Saint Bernard in need of a bath—which is, if you ask my kids, about how it smelled. The heated seats were nice, though.

Still, we kept it around because it had been free and because, as someone who’d proudly survived 25 years in New York City without a car, I felt like a terrible car was the only kind worth owning. We had the subway, bikes, buses, and our own dumb feet to get us around; an automobile was a luxury for the weak, so mine had to be stripped of all luxury.

Then, 12 months ago, I couldn’t take it any more. We had a family skip trip to Vermont coming up, and I simply didn’t trust the Subaru to make it 350 miles each way. (The previous year, we’d fishtailed during a nighttime blizzard and nearly died.) I had recently edited a story on how to use AI to search for a car, and in testing out my writer’s suggestions, I started inputting my own preferences and found a good deal, in Manhattan, on exactly what I wanted. Two days before the ski trip, I dumped the Subaru—I got $500 for it—and picked up a 2021 Toyota RAV4 LE Hybrid, with about 22,000 miles on it.

The car has changed my life.

More after the highly clickable ad…

Look, I’m not a car guy. I don’t know shit about torque, I don’t care about cylinders. I have friends who adore their vintage vehicles, and one of them has for the past several years test-driven the fanciest of cars all over the United States: the Aston Martin DBS Superleggera, a Bentley Speed Six, a McLaren Longtail Spider. If those names mean anything to you, then you know a lot more about cars than me.

All I ever wanted from a car was basic comfort, reliability, and performance, because that’s what I never had. In high school, I drove our family’s manual 1984 Toyota Tercel hatchback, an unkillable trapezoidal prism that could, if you accelerated on a long downhill, eventually hit 75 miles per hour. The first car I ever owned as an adult was a silver 1989 Volvo station wagon, nicknamed Vivian, which I drove 12,000 miles zigzagging from New York to Seattle over the course of the summer of 2007. Vivian was wonderful but damaged: Only one of her speakers worked, and she had a tendency to overheat and shut down in the sun. One evening, right along New Mexico’s border with Mexico, Vivian’s rear bumper fell clean off. She did not like hills. Up in the Rockies, her transmission died. I sold her in Seattle for $200 more than I’d bought her for… Let’s just forget about the $4,500 in repairs that got us there.

The new Toyota, unnicknamed as of yet, is the opposite of all of those. It is spacious and comfortable. The heating, air-conditioning, and electrical systems all function properly. It accelerates well—I never have to worry about launching myself onto the highway. I can plug in my phone and punch in directions and listen to Spotify. The car is fuel-efficient: I can go almost 500 miles on one tank of gas. Toyota has been moving over 400,000 of these things every year (but one) since 2017; it’s America’s best-selling vehicle that’s not a pickup truck. Which also means it’s about the most normal, unexceptional car on our streets. It looks like everything else, except for the little dimple in the corner of its bumper, acquired on the streets of Brooklyn within weeks of my bringing it home.

What Should I Do Next With Trying!?

And I love to drive it. It moves easily, swiftly, without complaint—and I am so, so happy at its wheel, whether I’m lazily driving to the farmers’ market (a 10-minute trip versus a 20-minute walk) or on an expedition to Virginia, New England, or Montreal. I love driving this car, but also, in general, I love driving. I always have—on broad empty highways or washboarded logging roads, on sunny but frosty mornings or slowly through a pissing rain, in a vehicle packed with friends or all by myself. I love stick, I love automatic. I love the effortless motion and the centripetal force of a well-handled curve. I have loved whipping through switchbacks in the mountains of Jamaica, and I’ve loved sketchy three-point turns on muddy Irish lanes, and I’ve loved cruising through the Driftless Hills of Wisconsin as the sun was going golden and the deer were leaping fences in search of food. I love music and podcasts and local radio and silence. I love the freedom: With a full tank of gas and a vehicle in good repair, I could go anywhere, do anything! I’m in America, right? Sure, you get some of that on foot, on a bike or on a motorcycle, but as much as I love those, too, they’re not the same. Their limits are immediately apparent.

I think I might even be good at driving.

At the same time, I would love never to need—or want—a car again. Local public transit and high-speed regional and national transit systems are the future, they have to be the future. We can’t all drive all the time: Cars consume us. They eat up our time, our space, our energy—they’re black holes on wheels. Even as they become more fuel-efficient, they will remain the dominant feature of our civilization, the metal bricks around which cities and whole nations are designed, the first great status symbol of any emerging economy, the carrier of kids, cargo, and culture, and the cause of death for countless humans from Liberia to Fort Lauderdale. We—that is, the powers that be—can do much to mitigate all of this, but we won’t, especially given the new so-called leadership of this country. The appeal of the car is too strong. I feel it, and I hate it, and I can’t resist it. I barely even want to resist it.

I dream of a universe with full, affordable, easy-to-access mass transit, where my family and I could get ourselves, our bags, and our snowboards from Brooklyn to Vermont without the journey instantaneously descending into misery. I know that’s a bougie-ass example, but those are the dreams we all in one way or another dream—of leisure, of ease, of mobility that’s as literal as it is social—and they’re the dreams that a car transforms into reality. Now that I’ve got one, a real one, a grown-up one, I don’t want to give it up. After 25 years of schlepping this city on foot, I crave the luxury of a basic, low-end, used hybrid.

Is there a way to reconcile this? What do you do when you love something you know is bad? To give up the car would feel different from, say, going vegan or quitting alcohol: It would improve the planet but not my own life. Still, I should do it. Still, I won’t. I could deploy the Sisyphean metaphor here. We are ruled by gravity and inertia, and though we fight them, shoving that rock up the mountain every day, they win out in the end, returning us to where we started, only a little more anxious, a little more exhausted. We are trapped in pattens from which we dread freeing ourselves, our only escape that moment at the mountaintop when we can see, or imagine we see, another world in the distance.

Sounds nice, right? Well, that’s hypocrisy for you: so sweet, so synthetic. They’re just words, and while I can’t quite bring myself to believe them, I can deploy them at will to philosophize away my laziness and entitlement. I may have principles, I may think I stand for something, but we all have limits to our energy and willpower. No, I have limits to my energy and willpower. Like so many of the cars I’ve owned, there’s only so far I can go. 🪨🪨🪨

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