The Family Car

We’ve taken the plunge and bought ourselves a family car. We’d battled driving an “it’ll do” Holden station wagon and an “it won’t do anything” Citroen. Cars are the bane of my existence. I don’t like them, they cause me grief, stress and at age 33.3, I don’t need that. There’s enough stress in my day to day life that I shouldn’t need to worry about whether or not I’ll make it to work alive.

The Citroen I drove was a character. Unfortunately, cars that haven’t yet done 100,000km shouldn’t be characters. They shouldn’t have idiosyncrasies, they shouldn’t make strange noises and they should definitely stop running after you’ve turned off the engine, not in the middle of an intersection. On a daily basis, it was a roll of the dice as to whether my Shitroen was going to make across two lanes of busy traffic with the engine still running. After driving for ten minutes, it would emit a ridiculous whining siren noise and this humungous red STOP light on the dash board would flash repeatedly. I kid you not. This car was embarrassing to drive and what made it worse was that no local mechanics knew how to fix it. They had no idea what to do with a French car. So that is possibly the last European vehicle we’ll be buying.

Of course putting all of the above into the mix with the fact that a baby is now on it’s way… the perfect storm of car buying and selling was building. We traded in the old Citroen for a new Mitsubishi Outlander.

I never thought I’d be the driver of one of these SUVs. I never enough thought I’d utter the phrase SUV. I’ve always hated them on the roads and I’ve always despised those that drive them. They seem to be a haphazard bunch, drivers that don’t seem to care about anything outside of the vehicle. But we’re starting a family and these are the family cars of today. So now, The Wife and I drive around in higher than everyone else and strangely enough our driving skills have deteriorated somewhat. Personally, I feel a bit stupid driving a family car when I don’t yet have a family, but it’s all about the future. Even still, we don’t really need a car of this size right now or even a few years down the road, but goddam it’s fun to drive and it sure beats the hell out of rolling the dice every morning before I go to work.

Did I mention the smell? The brand new car smell? It’s worth the price of purchase alone.