Car Lust

A Minivan is Better Than What You're Driving

(Note from Chris: We've touched on this subject in the past, but this bears repeating. Besides, David's is better--and it's fun to watch him rant.)

I don't care what your current ride--or even pie-in-the-sky dream ride--might be. A minivan is better. "But wait!" (I can hear you say)... "A minivan will make me look, well, like a minivan-driving loser." Get over yourself. If your self-image is based on what you drive, just put a Ferrari Owners Club license plate frame on the minivan. Awestruck onlookers will assume that your Ferrari is in the shop, which it probably would be anyway.

1992 Mercury Grand Marquis

According to Click & Clack, the cheapest car to run is the car you already own. Lucky for me, the car I already own--as opposed to the one I lease for the lovely and talented Mrs. Drucker--is a 1992 Mercury Grand Marquis LS, and I flat-out love it. I'll begin expounding on its wonderfulness a paragraph or two further on; first, though, I'd like to explain how a dashingly youthful 59-year-old came to be driving a geezermobile in the first place.

Actually, the whole story begins in 1967, the year I convinced my parents that my college experience would be greatly enhanced if I didn't have to walk to campus from my in-town lodging. Rather than recount the entire tale, I'll skip forward a few decades, to 1999, when those very same parents came into possession, almost by chance, of the subject Grand Marquis. At the time, it had 30K on the clock, and because it was their second car, the mileage had jumped by only 7K when they passed it on to me in mid-2001. I drove it for three years, bumping the mileage to 75K, and then sold it to a buddy who used it to commute between his home on Long Island and his offices in Brooklyn and Queens. Two years later he was offered a real deal on a 2002 Grand Marquis, and in early 2006 I jumped at the chance to buy the ‘92 – now with 99K showing – back from him for small money. Since then, I've bumped the mileage to 126K.

1998-2002 Lincoln Navigator

In today's brave new world of five-buck gas and energy-related panic, it borders on dangerous to admit to lusting after a three-ton station wagon. In fact, the desirability of such a vehicle would never have occurred to me but for the 10,000 miles I spent behind the wheel of, first a 1998, and then a 2002 Lincoln Navigator.

Most of those--95 percent--were long-haul miles, with the goal of getting a large enclosed trailer filled with 3,000 pounds of motorcycle from one edge of the country to the other. The rest were in around-town stop-and-go traffic in various cities, towns, and villages.

Those Navigators belonged to one of my riding buddies, and when he allowed as how he'd rather fly, and have someone else haul the trailer to Daytona Bike Week in February of 1998, I volunteered without a moment's hesitation. (Yeah, we trailered our bikes. Sometimes in a blizzard. Get over it.) That first trip, behind the wheel of what could be viewed as nothing more than a tarted-up Ford Expedition (which, itself, was a roofed-in Ford F-150 pickup) was a revelation.