It’s the case that I prefer biking, but it isn’t the case that I dislike my car. I’ve had the same vehicle for 12 years, and I’ve written about it before: fixing her from junkyard parts, and having a piece rust away far from home. The thing about cars is that they aren’t good storytelling devices when they are quietly getting you from Point A to Point B without drama, which is what my 2012 Ford Fusion has been doing for me since 2014.

Mostly.

Believe it or not, I really like cars, I just don’t see them as the appropriate mode of transportation for everything society says they should be. My physical health, my finances, and the environment have been the beneficiary of my inclination to bike wherever and whenever I can. When the circumstances warrant, my Fusion, which I’ve nicknamed Sweet Beast, has been fantastic.

We acquired her in 2014 to replace a 2002 Subaru Outback that in retrospect, we never should have purchased. Our strongest memories of owning that car is a dude named Brian on YouTube who did amazing step by step videos on how to replace various components. Will replaced the head gasket from these videos in my dad’s garage… and then replaced lots more things. That car was comfortable – it had the fanciest trim. But the repair costs were rivaling a car payment and putting the key in the ignition was feeling a bit like Russian roulette. Was it going to run? Or would a new thing break? We took the Outback to the mechanic on the corner of Amherst Street and Elmwood Avenue when the inspection was nearing and asked him – was this car worth keeping? Warmly and politely, he advised us no. Will and I then began the search for something that comfortably fit both of our bodies, as he is a foot and an inch taller than me. It was a quest.

After realizing that the Fusion SEL did not fit both of us, but the SE did (no sunroof = more space for Will), a salesman connected us with a lease trade in that had a whopping 9,000 miles on it. The seats were comfortable, the trunk was deep, and every time you turned the key, it started up. We paid off the car in three years and for nine years drove it for the cost of insurance, fuel, and maintenance.

I have been driving a sedan in a world that prefers SUVs and trucks, and haven’t wanted for one. With snow tires, it was an absolute beast on winter roads. It was our preferred vehicle for road trips because of its comfort. The insurance wasn’t horribly expensive and no one wanted to steal it. It’s been very good to us, overall.

A car you drive that long starts to feel like an extension of your own body. I am a bit sentimental about the car because it’s the first one that’s “mine”. The scents of age, dirt, and an exploded kombucha bottle 10 years ago giving a bouquet of familiarity. It’s a machine, and it’s part of the ambiance of home.

Now, I may have mentioned that cars are lousy storytelling devices if they aren’t giving you drama.

My family took a road trip to Gettysburg. It’s a six hour drive from Buffalo. We had a wonderful time, and I may write about that later. We noted that it was likely the Fusion’s last road trip with us: Great Lakes winters have taken its toll on it. Sure, the car has only 108,500 on it, but it also doesn’t have all the metal it once did. The evaporation canister rusted off. The heat shield rusted off. The body was rusting off. The engine has lots of life left in it, but it requires a frame to support it. Salt has undermined our efforts to keep that. We had a plan for the Fusions’s replacement somewhere in August or September: money lined up, days scheduled to test drive cars, a general sense of how we wanted a new car to fit in our life. We’re trying to plan for the next dozen years. But for now? The Fusion was doing what it had done for the previous dozen years: taking us somewhere.

We drove to Gettysburg comfortably.

We drove through Gettysburg comfortably.

We drove through 2 of six hours of the return trip comfortably.

Then the car threw a warning: SERVICE POWER STEERING NOW. SERVICE ADVANCETRAC.

Will pulled over into the gas station that was nearby in Hummel’s Wharf, Pennsylvania. I had never heard of this place, either. The power steering wasn’t functional. We were getting Chassis failure codes on the computer reader.

We have cellphones, so we started to Google and text my dad. We learned that we shared this experience with many Fusion owners. Power steering in the Fusion is an electrical process, not a fluid one. The issue is either an electrical one that’s fixed by resetting the message, replacing some sensors… or the entire power steering system needs to be replaced, which is a four figure amount of money. The car is, at best, worth a four figure amount of money.

We tried to reset the message by disconnecting the battery. This required walking to the Walmart that was two stores over (how lucky I get in unlucky circumstances!) to purchase a wrench to do so. A wrench that slipped out of Will’s sweaty hands in the absurd heat into the engine, which I knocked to the bottom of the engine with a squeegee handle and extracted from it with small hands. Retrieved, and having spent downtime eating lunch, we climbed in and fired the car back up.

The engine started. The power steering message popped immediately and the steering wheel was stiff.

Strictly speaking, power steering is optional, in that the car will continue to operate without it. With your muscles, you can compensate for its absence. Which is what Will did, for the entire four hour drive home.

My dad told me that cars didn’t have power steering until the 1950s – I consulted a calendar and saw that was about 70 years ago. It is also the case that power steering was invented for a reason and driving without it is really, really unpleasant. When the car was at speed, steering was easier, but slower? Much harder. Will had me drive the car when we got home so I would viscerally understand what we are working with. Every turn in the city is coming off a stop sign, or a traffic light. I am a strong woman. I felt like I was absolutely wrestling with the vehicle. I could get it where it needed to go, but it was rough. Power steering failure also disables the anti-lock braking system, which adds another layer to its handling.

I took it to my current mechanic, who is located on the corner of Stevenson and Abbott Road, and who I wholeheartedly recommend. He told me the issue was either something simple like a bad ground, or catastrophic like the rack and pinion. He told me he would refuse to price the latter repairs, because he said the cost is astronomical with having to work with the sub-frame and trying to fix it tends to break more things with how rusty the bolts and components are. I started getting deja vu – a conversation I’ve had with a mechanic before.

Clearing the code with his tool got power steering back. However… the rack and pinion are shot. He charged me $0 and gave me 0 guarantee that the power steering was going to continue to work for any meaningful duration of time. It’s the end of the line for my Sweet Beast. I drove it home, parked it in the back of the driveway, and probably won’t drive it again until it’s time to trade it in.

The irony of this is that the first day we had planned to test drive vehicles, a plan we had for quite a while, was the day after the Gettysburg trip. It felt ahead of the game and responsible at the time. We have a sense of what we want: hybrid vehicle, big enough for the kids, small enough for our city driveway. We started to drive.

I like cars. I experienced no thrill in driving the newer ones.

The newer cars are comfortable, soundproofed, and very, very smooth. Relative to my bike or our 12 year-old and 14 year-old vehicle, you can’t feel nor hear the road. All I could smell was the interior of the vehicle itself. Your eyes get you all of the information you’re going to get. It’s a bit dissociative. Engineers have spent a lot of time and cleverness to create this disconnection. I am not sure I like it.

Being a bicyclist makes you a witness to a lot of bad driving. I’ve been baffled at some of the choices I’ve seen, where people act like they aren’t in the environment they are in, like they don’t notice the other people around them, or the roads, and so forth. And now I am wondering if the cars are contributing to this isolation. Like you’re in a living room and the outside world is a movie. I have noticed better driving in the city of Buffalo – a place where more people have economic reasons to have older cars, if they have a car at all. I’d attributed this to the street grid and the traffic calming measures… and the bike lanes, which create an understanding of where everyone is supposed to be. Now I wonder if it’s partially the vehicles themselves, doing a more work to keep people anchored in the moment through doing a poorer job of insulating them from the outside.

I get in the Fusion and I hear the engine rumbling and I feel the road. I get into these newer cars, and I watch the world go by. Will also reminded me that we are making decisions based on boring, responsible things. We’ll get a boring, responsible car as a result. One that ideally will last us more than 109,000 miles, or maybe not. A new era of automobile ownership will thus start.

And if I want to feel the road, maybe I should just get a motorcycle.