New car

One thing I like to fantasize about is getting a newer car. When I push my kid around the neighbourhood in the baby carrier, I usually look at parked cars and think about what make and model I would like. There is little else to do when daily walking up and down the same streets.

I'm not going to get a newer car anytime soon, because I'm sensible. I already have the perfectly suitable car for my humble needs. It's a 1989 Toyota Carina II, which is, in a way, the culmination of car technology. I'll explain this bold statement soon. It's just that it's not glamorous in any way, it does not raise my status, it's just a 18 year old boring automobile that gets me from point A to point B whenever I need to, relatively rarely that is. Besides this, and therefore, I have a senseless desire to own a flashy car. Something that might cause envy in other people.

But when I think about it sensibly, I don't want to get a new car. Mostly my car just sits in the curb, rusting. I don't even drive it every week. I'm an urban person, and I could very well survive without owning a car at all. I just bought it for 1k € when me and my wife got pregnant, in order to be able to get around with the baby and visit our parents conveniently. And when I said that 1989 Toyota Carina II is the culmination of car technology, I meant that it's the cheapest car to maintain in existence today. It's very common, so spare parts are cheap. It's very durable. It's manufactured before catalyzers became obligatory in Finland in 1992 (in effect causing fuel injection replace carburettors), and before they began to stuff cars full of electronics, so its technology is relatively simple. Therefore it is feasible to repair by yourself, without software updates.

There's just one problem. Very few people seem to understand this point. I've very rarely been congratulated on my sensible choice of automobile. Hey, come to think of it, I don't actually remember ever being congratulated on owning a 1989 Toyota Carina II. Instead, most people seem to be in awe of people who own unpractical, expensive new cars.

I realize that new cars may be more safe and ecological. The technology has advanced since 1989 considerably. However, I don't see this as a good thing. Cars are full of computers now, making them much more complex than before, and therefore more unreliable. And I'm a software engineer myself. Shows how much I trust other programmers. Sure, had I programmed the car by myself, I'd have no problem in trusting it. But I've seen myself that there are people in the profession posing as programmers without actually being capable of one. So when I hear of advancements in car technology like brakes that are controlled electronically, I find it scary. Mechanical brake systems just seem more trustworthy, even though I know that they can fail too. But at least afterwards it's possible to tell why it failed, provided that there are big enough pieces of the car left.

So far, I have found two reasons for getting a new car. Besides the status value, obviously. Safety and less pollution. If you consider the fact that manufacturing a new car is much more heavy on natural resources than using the old car longer, then the ecology point fails too. Safety is important, but should I be cost-effective when evaluating the weight of safety? Is a new car really 20 times as safe as a 1989 Toyota Carina II? I doubt it.

And I don't even want a NEW car. It would just seem very boring to have a car without a history. The rich and clueless get new cars, I don't. And the value of a new car diminishes very quickly, I hear. But a few year old car, sure. That I'd like. Even though it costs money. And I don't need one. And so on. If this doesn't count as boring, then I don't know what does. I'm even getting sleepy myselzzzzzzz....