Today I say goodbye to a friend. Yes, it was a car, but as any car enthusiast will tell you, your car can very much be your friend. And when you feel that way, selling it can feel like an act of betrayal.
Even though it happened 14 years ago, I still genuinely feel like I betrayed a friend when I so callously sold my first car after seven good years and 75,000 memorable miles. That silver Jetta VR6 had utterly transformed my high school years like a renaissance into distinct before and after periods. It then joined me across the country for more formative years in college, before traveling back and forth across the country again with me to nab my first job in this business. So many wonderful memories happened when I had that car; it’s a fundamental part of my life. When I have a car in a dream, it’s still the Jetta, as if I never sold it. Friends stay with you like that.
No James of 2007, don’t do it! You’ll regret it forever!
And yet I prepare myself for another act of betrayal. I doubt I’ll feel it quite as acutely – as they say about love, there’s nothing like your first – but I still have that knot inside like I’m about to do something I’ll regret. We’ll be selling our 2013 Audi Allroad today after nearly six years. Though it only traveled 25,000 miles with us, they were extremely memorable miles. It will forever be the car that I drove from Los Angeles to Toronto and back. The car that moved us from Los Angeles to Portland (then drove back and forth several times). And that, most recently, brought our son home from the hospital. And isn’t it just automatic that we car enthusiasts know that last bit of trivia, almost certainly more than vital statistics like birth weight or height? I sure as hell don’t know those about my newborn self, but I can tell you “black 1981 Buick LeSabre.”
Officially, the Allroad was my wife’s car since I’ve driven press cars for 15 years and my literal car is a 23-year-old roadster/garage-bound trinket. However, there’s an extremely good chance that if we were keeping score, that I drove the majority of those miles considering all the extra-long trips. It may have officially been my wife’s car, but she’s not all misty eyed today. I was the one who bonded with it.
That tends to happen after three straight 11-hour days behind the wheel, through a blizzard in Arizona, across the mind-numbing flatness of Texas and Oklahoma, and realizing I really had to start eating something other than Cliff bars while somewhere in Illinois. There was an even more harrowing blizzard in Southern Ontario on the way back a month later. All the while, my two little dogs were riding along, stinking up that beautiful brown interior with the open pore wood trim. Someday Maggie and Nellie will be gone too, but I’ll always remember the journey we all had together and that it was in our Allroad.
Inevitably, the necessities of a changing life led to us saying goodbye to the beautiful Moonlight Blue Allroad that so caught our eye back at a Pasadena Audi dealer in 2015. While a roof carrier could expand its cargo capacity sufficiently for the added pile of baby-related baggage, there was no getting around the cabin space. A 6-foot-3 driver and two 20-pound dogs is one thing. Add a 5-foot-tall wife, an elephantine convertible car seat and assorted supplies, and things get squishy for everyone but the kid. We initially figured we’d keep the Allroad and just supplant it for extra-long journeys with a bigger, similarly old vehicle for a modest price. But to be honest, that idea was 98% sentimentality. I just didn’t want to say goodbye to a friend.
Alas, it will happen today anyway. I seriously doubt its successor will stay with us for as long, nor join us on the same type of grand adventures, both literal and figurative. Then again, one never knows what the future will bring. It’s time to start a new friendship with a 2012 BMW X5 xDrive35d. You have big shoes to fill, bud.
