Fifty Ways To Leave Your Motor Vehicle

it's time to admit that my love affair with the automobile is just not working out.

I should’ve known something was askew when I ended up in Humble, Texas. Humble is one of those Texas towns that was once an oil boomtown but now waits until the next recession puts it out of its misery. It’s one of those places where high schoolers go to Wal-Mart to hang out. One of the many American cities that got hollowed out by capital flight and left just enough people behind to staff the local Dollar Tree. It was genuinely sort of a bummer to visit. And I was there to buy a car.

I don’t have an amazing track record with cars. I’ve owned 4 cars since I got my driver’s license and parted with each one in equally stupid and stressful ways. My 2007 Toyota Matrix, my first car, still stings the most. I was run off the highway by someone who merged on top of me. When I swerved to avoid them, I went off the road and hit an exit sign at 50 miles per hour, totaling the car. Weirdest of all was that for the months preceding the accident, I had dreams that I would be in a car accident where I was run off the road on my way to work. The accident occured exactly like my preminotory dreams. My second car, a 2012 Honda Civic, had a transmission failure. I paid $5,500 for it with the insurance settlement from the Matrix Incident. When I traded it in 2 years later, I got $750 for it. To the Toyota Dealership, my 2012 Honda Civic was worth about as much as a nice espresso machine.

I traded up for a 2021 Toyota Corolla. Brand new off the factory lot, it had about 400 miles on it. It was the nicest car I had ever owned, and it was intended to be a graduation gift. 6 months later, on the first of this year, I rearended a 2022 Chevy Tahoe at a stoplight in Dallas because I thought he was going on a yellow light. The guy threatened to kick my ass until his wife and kid got out of the car — once his wife was in earshot and he could see I was in tears he asked me if I was okay. The front end of my Corolla was so fucked up. I had driven the front of my car directly under the bumper of the Tahoe, so my hood was scrunched up. I did absolutely no damage to the Tahoe, which the guy reminded me about 5 times was brand new. (Sorry for making this guy sound like an asshole — in all fairness I did rear end him.)

The Corolla was totally repairable, and I walked away with incredibly damaged pride and a stiff leg. While the damage to the car was bad, it wasn’t enough to total it and I figured I would learn my lesson in the form of being carless for a month while the bodyshop waited for backordered parts. I figured that this time was the time I got my shit together and became a better driver.

In February, around my birthday, I got a call from the bodyshop. My car had been left outside by a technician, and due to a heavy hailstorm that came through, my car had been deemed a total loss by my insurance company. I was absolutely stunned. What had been totally fixable a week before was now a worthless hunk of metal and glass. I wept for days at my misfortune. I couldn’t believe how much things could change in less than a year. What followed was unbelievably messy - insurance paid out enough for me to pay off the loan on the car plus a little left over. The bodyshop took the money that the insurance company gave them and ran off with it. It was incredibly stressful and involved many tearful phone calls with the insurance company. All the while, I was stranded with no way to get around in a town that was impossible to navigate without wheels. The entire experience left me stewing in resentment - at Geico, at mechanics, at God and The Devil and Robert Moses.

But mostly, I hated myself.

I hated that I had been so careless and let my attention lapse for a second. I hated myself for having been irresponsible, for not taking better care of my previous cars. It became twelve rounds with myself, each time bludgeoning myself with what-ifs and how-could-I-be-so-stupids. It’s not like I was drunk driving or intentionally being reckless. I, like everyone else, had a momentary lapse of reason. But because that lapse royally screwed me in a country where one emergency can put you on the brink, I took it to mean I was a horrible fuckup. I had nightmares for months about car accidents. I swore to myself that I’d never put myself through the anxiety of car ownership again. So when the insurance check came in the mail, what did I do?

I went out and bought a fucking car again.

Now, I can’t be too hard on myself. I live in Texas. Not having a car in Texas effectively makes you a non-person. Everything really is bigger in Texas, including our freeways. I was planning on moving to Houston, one of the most car centric cities in the nation. Even though many told me that buying a car probably wasn’t a good idea, I didn’t think about it. I wanted to get around, god dammit! So I took my insurance settlement and went back to the casino and gambled. If I just played my cards right, I could strike gold. It’s a hot car market and anything goes, baby!

That, dear reader, is how me and my roommate ended up in Humble, Texas looking at a 2006 Subaru Forester with 100,000 miles on it. Cold AC. One owner, never been smoked it. Ran great, new tires and new battery. This was a great car, one that will last another 100,000 if I take good care of it. A serious downground from my last car, but in many ways a serious upgrade to my street credibility. I mean, this thing had undeniable charm. Between the old cloth seats, the slight smell of gas and the gold metallic color that they don’t put on cars anymore, I was sold. I drove it around the block and decided it was good enough for a point A to point B vehicle. With just a little bit of my womanly charm, I could turn this oldie into a real conversation piece. Nevermind that I was spending nearly all my pandemic savings on the car, or that I neglected to get a serious inspection before buying from a woman I met on Craiglist. This was the piece of the puzzle I needed to finally get my life back on track. Once I had personal transportation again, I thought, I could pay back the debt I had racked up in the form of bumming rides everywhere I went. I’d be back in the good graces of the society I felt ostracized from. So I paid too much for a car almost as old as I am because I thought it would make me feel better about my series of unfortuante events. At the time, it felt like a nice end cap.

That was until it broke down and I had to put it in the shop for $3,000 worth of work. And then, it broke down again, putting me another $1,800 in the hole. In the span of just a month, I had put more than the value of the vehicle into repairs, registration and insurance costs. I had wiped out my savings and actually taken on debt in service of this car. The car dreams again returned. I was financially drained, all the while in the middle of making the big change of moving after college.

As with any time I’m stressed, I felt like the floor was about to fall out from under me. I started to panic thinking about how much more money I would have to put into the car. I started to learn to do my own repairs. I joined a forum for Subaru Forester owners in the hopes that someone there could help me do my own repairs and figure out what was causing the constant breakdown. Each time the car broke down, I broke down. The car went to the shop more than I drove it, and I started having to budget for if the car broke down again. If I didn’t have the luxury of working mostly remote, I would’ve probably lost my job. I started to feel like I was in an abusive relationship with my car, always crawling back to try to make things after I got hurt.

After the last time the car went to the shop, things seemed fine for a while. I began to feel like I was in control again. The car didn’t give me any problems, and I started planning what needed to be done next - brakes, detailing, maybe I’d be bold and try to do something big like change the oil myself when it came time. I started to fantasize about my second life as one of those people who knows shit about cars. I followed car mechanic subreddits and laughed at stuff that didn’t really make any sense to me to cosplay the blue collar bliss that seemed to radiate off of guys who talk about cars all the time. I felt like I had gleaned some sort of knowledge from my experience buying a shitty used car and now I knew better.

When the car wouldn’t start again, same as every other time, while I was trying to head home from a weekend at my parents, I lost it. I actually kicked the car and cursed it, like they do in movies. I didn’t recognize myself after how upset I became. I had become so angry, so self-hating over a car that I chose to buy. Like an addict, I started the cycle all over again. I put the car in the shop and waited for what my mechanic had to say. He was a nice guy after all, and maybe this time we could figure it out.

When he called me and told me he had no earthly idea what the problem with my car was, it was like my eureka moment. I decided to take it to the dealership, where insanely expensive car repairs go to become absurdly expensive car repairs. It’s there right now, and I have no clue what they’re going to find. But I had an epiphany. If the guy who I pay to fix my car has no clue, what hope do I ever have of making sense of it? I realized that I have sunk time, money and emotional energy on a car I bought in July. Reflecting on my months where I had no car at all, I realized that I had been much less stressed without it. I had no driving anxiety, and I had a little extra money in my pocket from no insurance costs. I decided that I was going to break the cycle and quit my love affair with the car for good.

A big part of my car anxiety has to do with the afformentioned marginalization that comes from a society organized around cars. Unless you live in a major coastal city, owning a car is essentially required to participate meaningfully in modern life. If I wanted to be someone, it felt like I had to own a car to get around. How else could I experience true freedom if I was dependent on a bus schedule or Uber or god forbid, walking? Even though I considered myself progressive, I carried the shame that many associate with public transportation, even though I absolutely loved taking the bus in college.

In an incredibly selfish way, taking the bus made me come to terms with my own ordinariness. I was not special, at least not in a way that entitled me to my own metal death trap. I was an other, and that made me feel genuinely very strange. I started to worry that I would be left out of things because I didn’t have a car. If I couldn’t get a ride to a social event, I might no longer be part of the group. I might be looked down on because my own bad decisions had led me to be one of those people that get Twitter memes made about them. In a world dependent on the car, it can feel like there’s a stigma attached to not driving for various reasons. Are you too lazy to get a license? Are you too poor? These and more are things that can be conjured up by telling someone you don’t drive. And I was afraid that I’d be marginalized. I also worried that having just moved to Houston, I would be cut off from a lot of great culture because I couldn’t drive there.

So this past weekend, I decided to try the bus in my neighborhood to get a sense of how reliable it really is. The first thing that struck me was how cheap it was - $3.00 for unlimited rides all day felt like a great choice if I had a lot of errands to run. I decided to take a trip to Target down the road. What I noticed after boarding the bus was immediately how many different kinds of people were there. I saw people in suits on their way to work. Homeless people, kids, teens on their way to the mall, people I had seen around my apartment but never talked to. I suddenly felt surrounded by the very thing I moved to the city for in the first place - the abundance of people from all walks of life.

I’ve taken public transit many times in various cities. The Phoenix lightrail is one of my favorites - it’s fast and reliable, and goes all the way to Tempe in about an hour. I fell in love with the subway and the walkability when I visited NYC this spring. I’m no stranger to seeing people on the bus, and I wasn’t gawking. But since moving to the city, I felt alienated between working from home and commuting. Suddenly, I felt less like I was commuting and more like I was part of a community. I felt like I was enjoying my outing and getting more out of the time I spent commuting, instead of sitting in the car staring at the back of some dipshit’s Ram 2500. As I saw some people who seemed to be sitting on the margins of society, I realized that what I took for granted was something that others lived every day. My incovenient trip on the bus was the only lifeline for many in the city. For every minute I spent feeling sorry for myself for not owning a car, it wasn’t an option for millions of people who take public transit rain or shine. These were all things I knew of course in the abstract, but never thought about concretely until I decided to make the concious choice to utilize public transportation in my daily routine.

Most of all, I realized that as much as I lamented the fact that public transportation in the US is so piss poor, I was a contributing factor to making our cities less pedestrian friendly. Everybody says that it’s impossible to get around in Houston without a car, but maybe that’s partially just a lie we tell ourselves in order to avoid making a change. Every time that someone starts taking a bus or utilizing the downtown MetroRail, it becomes one more person putting their faith in alternative modes of organizing the way that we live and work. Will ditching all of our cars overnight make public transportation better? No! These things take years, sometimes decades of hard lobbying and organizing to make happen. There’s also a massive, entrenched corporate lobby in this country dedicated to making sure that everybody remains a slave to car ownership.

I also acknowledge that cars do have a place in the modern world - plenty of countries in Europe that emphasize public transportation have cars and car ownership. Plenty of people in rural areas can’t or don’t want to move to giant cities and ditch their cars, and giant cities don’t always need the extra people. I also recognize that I’m extremely lucky that I don’t need to drive five days a week for work. Not everybody, especially people working more than one job, have that luxury. But my hope is that more and more people, like myself, start to rethink the role of cars in their lives. If even just one person who can afford to, like myself, takes the step to reduce their dependence on cars, it creates one less driver on the road.

I’m not totally over cars. I’d love to drive a newer, reliable car in the future once I’m in a good spot financially to afford one. There are pros to car ownership, just like there’s pros to walking and taking public transportation. But for the time being, I’m at peace with my decision to sell the Subaru and pocket the money while the car market is as insane as it is. I’m doing myself, and really all of you, a favor by not getting behind the wheel of a car anytime soon. So if anyone wants to buy a 2006 Subaru Forester, please email me at gwenhowerton@gmail.com. No lowballs; I know what I have.