Ever since we bought our last car in 1998, my wife and I have been thinking that our next car should be an SUV of some kind.
Our 1997 Camry feels roomy inside, but that’s because of good ergonomics. If you try to fit in something not shaped like a human, like a bunch of Banker’s Boxes or a set of shelves from the Container Store, you quickly realize that the back seat has an awkward shape. The trunk isn’t much better. It’s got room for a lot of small things, like grocery bags, but when you try to put in anything big, you realize that there are a lot of protrusions into the trunk space.
The Camry also has some problems in the snow. It’s got traction-controlled front-wheel drive, so it’s not a pig like the Thunderbird, but it’s slung so low that it gets stuck on unplowed streets and parking lots because snow gets packed up underneath it, which takes weight off the wheels, killing the traction.
On the other hand, the Camry had been refusing to wear out. There had been some problems with the water pump and the timing chain around 120,000 miles, and it was burning oil for a while too, but my mechanic fixed that, and the car seemed fine, even after almost 11 years and 190,000 miles.
In fact, it was running so well that right before Christmas I decided to invest a little money to fix it up. I decided to spring for a new wiper motor because intermittant mode had gone away a few years ago and I wanted it back. I also bought four new tires and a new battery. The car had been so reliable that I was hoping to try for a cool quarter-million miles.
A week later, I was driving it one night when the oil light came on and stayed on. I had it towed back to my mechanic, and he called me the next day with the bad news: It had a spun bearing, which is a fatal engine problem. He said he could install a rebuilt engine for a few thousand dollars, but given that every other critical system was just as old, he thought it would be a bad idea.
We hadn’t been planning to buy a new car, so our first thought was to just buy another Toyota Camry. But after thinking about it, we decided it was time to get that SUV we’d been wanting.
I’ve got work to do and this is long enough, so I’ll write more about it later.
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