Automotivation
When I turned sixteen I lived in Rome, Italy and all I cared about mechanically were motorcycles. I was on my third off of four high school motorcycles (a Gilera 125) and cars were an afterthought. What motivated me at that age was two-wheeled vehicles with names like Gilera, Triumph, Laverda, Moto Guzzi and Ducati. When I was applying to colleges, one of the biggest reasons I liked Stanford was that as a freshman I would have been allowed to maintain a vehicle and I had visions of riding my motorcycle (a Triumph Tiger 650) through the hills around Palo Alto. You see, Cornell, where I ended up going, did not allow freshmen to have motor vehicles, presumably because it was too much of a distraction for the undisciplined mind of youth. By the time Spring Semester rolled around, it became obvious to most of us that the University wasn’t monitoring vehicles for freshmen and I was able to import my Triumph to the United States by virtue of some family friends that were traveling over on the Italian Line and disembarking in New York City. I traveled to New York with my high school buddy, Bobbie, and we both picked up our British 650s (his was a BSA) and rode them north, me to Ithaca and he went on to Ottawa, Canada.
Having a motorcycle on campus at the end of freshman year was a distinguishing feature to my persona and I suspect it made me cooler and more mysterious. By the spring of my sophomore year and after an Ithaca winter during which my bike lived in a basement storage room at my fraternity, my mind started turning towards four-wheel transport for practical reasons. I took driving lessons from one of my fraternity friends, never having really driven a car before, but generally understanding the rules of the road from my motorcycling. I passed my drivers license test without any difficulty and then, in the spring of 1973, fifty years ago, I rode my Triumph to a local Harley dealership and sold it for about $100 more than what I paid for it three years prior. I took that money and bought my first car, which was a 1968 tan Ford Torino with about 50,000 miles on the odometer. That got me through the rest of my undergraduate years on campus until I chose to upgrade it during business school with the help of some Georgia Pacific stock I owned and sold through a local Ithaca brokerage. I bought a blue 1972 Pontiac Firebird that had a low-slung profile and threatening growl to it.
That Firebird is the car I moved to NYC with and from there, my automotive activities consisted of parking on the street in Queens, where I first lived, until some local hoodlum decided to take the Firebird for a joyride one night. By that time I was married and did what married guys do, which was to opt for a more sedate suburban ride, which happened to be a Buick Century fresh off the dealer’s new car lot. A strange thing happened with that purchase in that the car was stolen off the lot the night before I was due to pick it up. It was retrieved and only slightly damaged, but it felt a bit like a portend of my involvement with cars. By the mid-1980s I was deeply ensconced in my career and my suburban commuter lifestyle. In America, that most often meant that you owned a Volvo station wagon, which I did. But I was also ready to re-enter the world of motorcycles and so I went out and bought my first of many BMWs, which is my mount of choice to this day.
Over the years, I have owned many different cars ranging from Jeeps to Cadillacs and most everything in between, and I have generally considered them mostly just transportation. I got my fun on two wheels. Then, in my pre-retirement days, my brother-in-law convinced me that I needed to buy an early-adopter Tesla electric vehicle. Why go electric halfway? I bought the newly-released 2016 Tesla X with the gull-wing doors made famous by the DeLorean and Back to the Future. For three years I kept the car out here at the hilltop and put only about 4,000 miles on the odometer. It was fun to drive, thanks mostly to the head-snapping acceleration and immediate torque of the EV motor, but the range anxiety kept me from using it for long-distance travel. Its range is 230 miles and I got unlimited free supercharging as an early adopter to Tesla’s system, but I was only comfortable using it locally. When we moved out here full time in early 2020, I started using the Tesla more regularly, but still kept it local since we had Kim’s Mercedes gas-guzzler for longer travel. Over the past four years I have averaged about 6,000 miles a year so that now the car has 29,500 miles on the clock. That is still an incredibly light odometer reading for a seven-year-old car, though the car looks to be in the same mint condition that I picked it up in in late 2016. I wash and clean the car weekly and it shows very little wear and tear. It has never been in the shop and only had two house calls for minor maintenance. It is not due into the shop for scheduled service until it hits 125,000 miles, which by my estimate, occurs in about 2040 or when I turn 86, assuming I am still driving then. There is literally nothing wrong with the car and it is as much fun to drive now as it was the day I drove it out of the dealership.
But good enough is never enough with me, so I am constantly on the prowl for an upgrade. I like having an EV that keeps me away from gas stations and that I can power up overnight in my garage, using my stored solar energy to charge it or at least the low off-peak grid power. I have also noted that the ride of choice out here is the pickup truck. So, when Tesla announced its Cybertruck to much fanfare with its seriously futuristic lines, I put down a deposit. None of those have rolled off the assembly line yet and the 1.25 million order backlog does not bode well for anything resembling a delivery any time soon. I also put down $100 for a deposit on a Ford F150 Lightning thinking Ford might beat Tesla to the street. That is, indeed, what has happened and the Lightning can be seen around town and has gotten rave reviews. Naturally, I got impatient and took back my deposit about a year ago, having convinced myself that I didn’t really need a truck and that my Tesla X handled my needs just fine. Then I got a call from the local Ford dealer yesterday asking if I was still interested in a Lightning.
My dance card was open, so I went down to the dealership at their urging to see what kind of a deal was on offer for a trade-in. My Tesla had been a $110,000 car and was still worth about $40,000 from all indications. The Lightning could be had for as low as $56,000 (new Tesla X’s were now running about $80,000). What I was told at the dealership was that despite the showing of Lightnings in inventory on the dealership website, there were no Lightnings available, which begged the question of why they had summoned me down. They then proceeded to pitch me on just selling them my Tesla X with that infamous used car dealer line, “How much do you want for it?” I told them I might consider an upgrade to a Lightning, but that otherwise I was happy to keep my Tesla X. As I drove home, unfulfilled, I even spoke to a sales manager asking why they would jack a potential customer around like that. What I got was a lot of car salesman double-talk about how none of it was their fault and that the UAW was to blame for the production snafus. What I came away feeling was that more than ever, my automotivation should be to keep that sweet Tesla X and drive that sucker until I’m in the grave.