My Life in Cars: Part 2
A Pickup Truck, a Buick, a Mustang, and EVs
As we left Part 1, speeding tickets had taken the bloom off the rose for my fun, speedy Rx7. I needed to slow down.
I was into country music at the time, so I traded in the Rx7 and bought an old Chevy S10 pickup truck. I guess I was trying to be Joe Normal.
The truck was cool for a while, although it never ran very well. But before long, it got too rough on my bad back (herniated S5-L1 disc). I needed to find something more comfortable. I bought a Buick.
I sold the old truck to a fellow at work and within a week, he had it purring like a kitten. Did I mention that I’m not a motorhead?
The Buick LeSabre is a classic old person’s car, but that was okay because I was getting older. My back started feeling better right away. I enjoyed driving that car for about a decade.
Unfortunately, my drinking was getting out of hand and one night, on the way home from a bar, I totalled that Buick. I remember I got off at the wrong freeway exit and didn’t quite know where I was. I came to a Y intersection and I guess I couldn’t decide left or right so I took the middle. There was a traffic sign in the middle.
I knocked the sign out of the ground and it flew over my car and smashed the back window. There was other damage as well, but the car was driveable, barely. I managed to nurse it home safely.
At the time, I didn’t realize hit-and-run applied to traffic signs. I thought it was only in cases where people were injured or there was damage to private property. Anyway, I seem to have gotten away with it. (I’m pretty sure it is beyond the status of limitations for the offense now. Besides, maybe I’m just making up this story to sound cool.)
The incident had an upside: It got me into Alcoholics Anonymous and sobriety.
Our cars project and reinforce our personal identities. Looking back on my cars so far, all so different in style, I see that I was casting about for an identity that felt right for me as a man. I never did find that ideal vehicle. Right about this time in my narrative, my identity crisis came to a head, and I had a sex change. Now I would be trying to find my identity as a woman.
The very next day after my crash, putting my hangover aside, I drove the damaged vehicle down to auto row in Los Gatos and to find a new ride. It raised some eyebrows.
After several fruitless hours, I noticed a shiny black 1987 Ford Mustang on the display pedestal outside a dealership. Sweet!!
I never thought of myself as a Mustang person before, but she was beaut. I went into the dealership and purchased her. They told me the only previous owner had been the service manager of their shop but I was skeptical. They probably said that about all the used cars, right? But I think it must have been true because the car was cherry and turned out to be very reliable.
They took the smashed up Buick in trade. I don’t know if they even gave me any money for it. I was just glad to get it off my hands. (And to get rid of the evidence!)
I guess I’d gotten my inner speed demon under control by then because I never got a speeding ticket in the Mustang. I’m sure the switch from testosterone to estrogen had something to do with it.
There came a time when I started getting interested in electric vehicles. I followed some people who had converted ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) cars into EVs. I was considering undertaking such a project myself, but I really didn’t have the mechanical aptitude for it. So I was very excited when Nissan introduced the first commercially available EV in the USA. (Not counting the aborted GM EV1, which was an extremely cool vehicle!)
I was in line for the first shipment of Nissan LEAFs that came to California in June 2011.
I loved that little car!
The original LEAF had only about a 100 mile range on an overnight charge. I was commuting from Felton over the hill to northern Santa Clara for work, about forty miles each way. So I was set — except that lithium ion batteries lose capacity as they age. (Tesla batteries are reported to have little of this degradation.)
After a few years, it started getting dicey, but I found that as long as I could make it to the summit at the top of the hill between Silicon Valley and Scott’s Valley, even with zero miles left in the tank at that point, I could always make it home safely. That’s because, after the summit, it was downhill most of the way, and when you are going downhill, regenerative braking puts charge back into the battery. Whee!
I never ran out of charge in my LEAF. I never even hit “turtle mode,” where it slows down to like 5 miles per hour for the last little bit of charge. But I did have some nerve-wracking commutes home. Fortunately, EVs just love rush hour traffic. You drive slow, which is more efficient that fast for EVs, and they don’t burn any energy when they are stopped in stop-and-go traffic.
Eventually it got to where I needed to recharge a bit before I could make the commute home. There weren’t a lot of chargers around in those days, and a lot of companies that had chargers in their parking lots locked them to employee use only. But I found a few I could hit and managed to get by without much trouble.
The best spot I found was just off First Street in northern San Jose. The county jail building has a big parking lot that included more than a dozen chargers fed by solar panels shading the parking spaces. The lot was marked for county employees only, but just a few of the chargers were ever in use and I thought they would cut a break for a needy EV driver. I charged there quite a few times and never got hassled for it.
The LEAF was my first car with a backup camera. Soon after I got the car, I happened to be driving in the underground parking structure at Santana Row shopping center. I somehow got going down a lane in the wrong direction and another car was approaching from ahead. Slightly panicked, I looked over my shoulder and started backing up to turn around.
Wouldn’t you know it, I backed right into a pillar! If I’d just used the backup camera, it wouldn’t have happened. But it was new to me and not yet in the instincts that kicked in when I slightly panicked.
Anyway, it was not bad and just left a little ding in the bumper immediately above the backup camera (ironically?). I never bothered to get the ding fixed and the camera still worked just fine.
In 2017, I lost that job in Santa Clara and I was off work for a while. Since I was going to be commuting into the Valley, at least for job interviews and probably at a new job, I decided I needed a more reliable drive. I contacted the Nissan dealer to get the battery replaced. It was going to cost $6,000, which is a lot, but it was much cheaper than buying a new car.
The dealer really, really didn’t want to replace the battery. When I brought the car in, they said, “Hey, instead of a new battery, how about if we give you a really good deal on a new car? We can get you out the door for no more cash that you would pay for the battery.” (But of course there would be payments after that.)
The thing was, they had inventory of the then current model that was about to be replaced with a new model with significantly better battery range. So nobody wanted the old ones. They made me a pretty good deal and I drove away with a brand new LEAF with a nominal 120 mile range on a two year lease.
As it turned out, it wasn’t as good of a deal as it looked. As a lease, I was not eligible for the mutli-thousand dollar rebate the government was giving for EVs. But it was alright, I was still happy.
I soon discovered more disappointments. What I hadn’t realized was that I’d gotten my original LEAF with all the trimmings, while the new one was a more basic model. I missed the automatic headlights and cabin preheat timer, little features like that.
But it’s still okay. It’s just a car.
In the end, I could have just kept my original LEAF because I wound up with a job that I work from home. I drive very little, mostly to the grocery store and back. (I am really old now.) So the battery range would not have been an issue after all.
Afterword
And that’s my life in cars, not counting the hearse in which I will take my last ride. In all that time, I never had sex in a car. Not even with those fully reclining Rambler front seats.
Note: The Chevy and Buick photos are just examples scraped from the Internet, in the colors of my actual verhicles. The photos of the Mustang and the two LEAF EVs are my actual cars.
— Lannie Rose, September 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
GPT-4 (bing.com/new) used heavily for research, but not at all for writing (except as a thesaurus)
