Today we bade farewell to an old friend, our 20 year old Volvo 240DL. It was an excellent, reliable car right to the end. It looked great due to the factory rust-proofing and still averaged 20 miles to the gallon. I’d thought (and hoped) that it would last forever or as nearly forever as my purposes would require.
I try to deal with these things as rationally as I can and, consequently, starting a dozen or so years ago, I’d put a budget on how much in repairs it made good sense to continue putting into the car before the cost of maintaining the old car actually exceeded the cost of buying a new one and it finally happened.
Volvos aren’t inexpensive to maintain, we’d just replaced the brakes this spring, and we received the word last week that the entire exhaust system would need to be replaced. That and a handful of other age and incidental damage-related repairs that really should be done put the cost of repairing the Volvo over the budget we’d established so we decided it was time to buy a new car and sell the Volvo.
I’ve got a lot of memories tied up in that car. It was in that car that we brought Qila home as a tiny puppy from his breeders, sitting in my lap in the back seat. The back seat still has lots of his fur clinging to it and the rear windows still have has nose prints on them. I haven’t had the heart to wipe them away.
The car took me faithfully to and from work for many years and, when I closed my office and began working out of the house, it’s taken me to clients and on the various errands I’ve run for the ten years since then.
I’ll admit that I had a little dampness in my eyes when we said our goodbyes to it for the last time. It’s just a thing and it’s a bit silly but there you are.
I completely understand your sentiment. I had my first car for 16 years and 210,000 miles and with it many memories. How many miles did yours have and what did you (or are you) planning to buy?
180,000 miles. Our previous vehicles have done 210,000 and 250,000 miles respectively. Tomorrow we’ll be buying a Toyota RAV4. We’ve had good experience with Toyotas in the past, it gets mileage just a little better than the Volvo’s, it’s cheaper to maintain, and, most importantly, it can carry one dog crate.
: )
If you weren’t buying it tomorrow I’d have advised you to also check out the Nissan Rogue which is comparable but gets better gas mileage and to also ask Michael Reynolds what he thought of his new RAV4.
Sounds like a good choice. I’ve heard nothing but good things about the Rav4 from friends and acquaintances who’ve owned them.
We looked at the Rogue as well as the Honda and Subaru offerings. We liked the RAV4 better. Last weekend when I went to St. Louis I rented a RAV4 for the weekend and was pleased with it.
I had a Volvo 144 for several years, and I loved that car. It was stolen in Denver. Sigh.
When I finally sent my Suburban and Jeep to the recyclers because of terminal rust and such almost two years ago, they had just under 600K miles between them. (Yes, I believe a good vehicle SHOULD be driven until it fall apart.)
We have our RAV4 here in Italy where it is fairly gigantic compared to most other cars. The mileage isn’t great, not after renting local diesel vehicles, but I love the car. It’s just so well-designed it’s hard not to.