Car Lust

I'm horny, dear readers. 

Some days, when Mrs. Done by Forty leaves for work, I take my laptop into the bedroom, put the dogs out in the hallway, and I pull up my favorite site: Craigslist.

But, no, I don't click on the personals or the dreaded casual encounters link. No, friends. I get off on something weird. What gets my engine running is a sleek, gently used, and maybe a little dirty....Subaru Outback.
You know what's funny? We don't even need a new car. Our trusted, 2006 Toyota Matrix, named Skoda (after a matching little red hatchback we drove on our honeymoon in Ireland) is still going like a champ. At only 115,000 miles, she rides just as well as when we bought her five years and fifty thousand miles ago, for only $6,700. (And in cash, too. Like, a stack of hundreds in the front pocket of my Levis, that I got to plop down on the table after we agreed on the price. And for ten brief seconds, I felt cool.)

So here are the great things about Skoda. For one, she's a manual. This used to be pretty common but these days it is near impossible to find any vehicle whatsoever that still has a stick shift. And if you're not shifting, you're not really driving.

Second, the Matrix is like a small-wagon and hatchback combo. I love that the back seats fold completely flat, and so does the front passenger seat, allowing us to put bikes, lumber, furniture from Craigslist, two golden retrievers, or whatever else we may need back there. We've yet to find something we needed to haul that couldn't fit.

Third, she's reliable, just like any Toyota, or almost any Japanese car, in my experience. Other than changing the oil, battery, belts, and other regular maintenance, Skoda hasn't given us any problems. Well, almost no problems. The one sore spot is her paint. This is what the Arizona sun has done to her pretty coat:

The clear coat has completely come off in major sections.

But I really don't want to pay someone a thousand bucks to repaint the whole vehicle. Channeling my inner stubborn male and a desire to DIY everything I can, I want to try to apply the clear coat myself, for something like fifty bucks in materials. Here is all (I think) I'll need for the job:

And of course, some help from YouTube. I'm going to try to follow this guy's process, mostly because he cracks me up:

Of course, I have absolutely zero experience with painting an automobile. There's a decent chance it's going to turn out looking, well, like a DIY job and then we'd be faced with either just living with it (it's superficial), paying about a grand to have the car painted again, or, as perhaps the worst option, I could just submit to my car lust and buy something like this sleek Outback:

My mouth actually waters a little bit when I see an Outback I want to buy. Let's not delve too deeply into that.

We've more or less settled on the Outback as our next car for a lot of the same reasons we like the Matrix. It's one of the only remaining vehicles that's available in a manual, it has great cargo space with seats that fold flat, and, like just about all Japanese cars, is really reliable. And it's a little bigger than our current car: more able to handle a couple future kids and a couple golden retrievers. 

Still, the models we want are between ten and fifteen thousand dollars. It's crazy to think about dropping that kind of coin on a vehicle, to me, especially when our current car is, functionally, just fine.

Logically, I know what the right choice is. It's crazy simple: paint the car with some clear coat (or learn to live with it, or just pay to have it done), then drive it for another eight to ten years.

But my emotions are fighting me on this one. I probably spend thirty minutes a day pining over different cars, just because we can afford it and, as my heart reminds me, I want one. 

Wants are tricky. I don't know that we're ever really free of them, and at least a lot of the time, they're completely irrational. I don't need a new car, but that's not the whole story. As consumers in a culture that determines status via purchases, and emotional beings, to boot, needs never tell the whole story.

It doesn't help that we have a pile of cash from our last home sale burning a hole in our pocket. After investing a quarter of the profits once we made the sale, we're dollar cost averaging the remaining funds into our asset allocation over the next two years. 

But the cash is sitting there. Earning 1.3%. While I look at Subarus. And mentally plan out one-way flights to various cities in the US, imagining how T.S.A. employees might feel about me having a stack of hundreds in my jean pockets.

What do you say, my kind and wise readers? I need the counsel of those who aren't so emotionally involved in the decision.

*Photo is from Garritron at Flickr Creative Commons.