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I pulled up to the bank yesterday and parked nose to nose with a Mercedes-Benz.
It was kind of weird at first glance but I only looked for a moment and didn’t give it a second glance until I passed it again, on foot, on the way into the bank.
The car was an “Anniversary Edition,” at least according to the crudely applied stickers near the front fender. That’s when I paid more attention and realized the car wasn’t a Mercedes at all.
It was a Kia.
“You know, we should probably check out a Buick.”
I had no idea my dad was capable of speaking such nonsense. He wasn’t even kidding.
My parents were in the process of shopping for a new car, and my dad, a lifelong proponent of foreign cars and skeptic of American cars, uttered those fateful and surprising words.
At 60 years old, my dad was just doing what many 60-year-olds do. Thankfully my mom is still 59 and hasn’t crossed over into the age of Buicks just yet. She prevented the purchase and influenced a choice that conveys a considerably younger persona.
My son just wanted to look. As a young car-obsessed kid interested in a future of car design, he is desperate to own a sports car. The kid has taste, though, and knows the value of a Porsche over a Corvette.
He wants his first car to be a Boxster so he can drive to high school in style.
He wants my new bride and me to own a 911.
Wishful thinking, right?
Every driver has a different set of expectations and needs for his or her primary vehicle. What meets my needs might not work for you at all, and your ideal car might be the last one I’d ever consider buying for myself. No wonder arguments about cars often get out of hand.
CarGurus user reviews provide a good idea of whether and how well a particular car met the needs of one driver, and based on car reviews received from our users over the course of the last year, it looks like most drivers are pleased with their cars. Our user reviews invite submitters to score a car from 1 to 5 points in a number of different categories, and with more than 10,000 reviews received from April 2013 through April 2014, three categories received average scores of 4.5—Reliability, Style and Overall—and Front Seat, Handling, Power and Price each earned averages of more than 4.
The two categories that received the lowest average scores were Cargo Space at 3.9 and Fuel Economy at 3.7. These qualities generally have had to be traded off in vehicles, since increasing size reduces fuel economy with all other things being equal. But cars get better with every passing year, and these days it’s possible to find vehicles with plenty of room as well as reasonable gas mileage. So here’s a look at our top 10 2014 vehicles for cargo capacity and mileage across a number of segments.
Yesterday, in the course of my adventures, I overheard one sentence from someone’s conversation. It was one of those moments when you walk past someone, hear a snippet of what they said, and spend the rest of the day thinking about it.
This is what I heard:
“It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile.”
That’s it. I have no idea what the context of the conversation was or what was said directly before or after. I heard only that one phrase.
It triggered memories from many moons ago of ads that attempted to sell the “modern” Oldsmobiles as less stodgy and more hip than the Olds cars of the past.
The campaign obviously wasn’t all that effective, considering the brand ceased to exist soon after. I have a theory as to why: I think the ads were right. Those newer cars weren’t my dad’s Oldsmobile.
My dad’s was way better.