cars Archives - Fran Moreland Johns

September 11, 2022September 11, 2022

Should You Still Be Driving?

A CLOSE LOOK AT THE UNIVERSAL QUESTION

I am slowly talking myself into giving up my car.

Though still, I honestly believe, a very good driver, I cannot escape a tiny, nagging question: Could I live with myself if I were involved in an accident in which someone is injured or killed? Even if it were clearly not my fault, could I avoid suspecting some failure of eyesight or reflexive response or yet unknown factor had played a part in an accident that might not have happened if I weren’t driving?

So I have begun this conversation with myself.

It starts with the memory of former conversations, one in particular. For years my three sisters and I discussed who would get our widowed father from behind the wheel of his car (none of us wanted to volunteer.) “Never had an accident in fifty years!” our father would declare. None of us wanted to point out the chaos in his wake. We were saved by a family friend who undertook to explain to our father how much money he could save on gas, insurance, repairs, etc.; he threw in a list of small town neighbors happy to be on-call chauffeurs. My father died 12 years later, at 90, never having injured a fellow creature.

This background conversation relates to the personal relationship I have with my 2001 Volvo S40 The Bud. Less intimate than my relationship with its predecessor LilyPad, a forest green 2000 Volvo S40 that was demolished by a 14-wheeler in 2020. The LilyPad and I were turning right from the right-turn lane; the 14-wheeler was turning right from the center lane blithely unaware of the legal maneuvers of that little car below. I consider it a testament to good reflexes that I was able to get out of his way after he demolished the front of the LilyPad and before he demolished the rear; the driver’s side and I survived unscathed.

But two more years have ensued. The conversation continues:

How certain are you that your reflexes are really as good as safety requires? Suppose someone’s beloved dog darts into the street and you don’t hit the brakes quickly enough. Could you live with that loss — knowing that a better driver might have avoided it?

And how about eyesight? I have, like much of the over-70 population, macular degeneration. Cataract surgery several years ago greatly helped my vision, but still. I have AMD and my eyesight is only going to get worse. At what point do I decide it’s worsened enough?

I think there is no magic moment when one can say, Today I should quit driving. Occasionally a driver receives a signal. My sister Helen, for example, was in her early 70s when she went to get the family car from its parking space in a Boston street lot. Instead of backing up a few feet as she had done countless times before she went forward, rolling to a stop against a sidewalk sign.

Everyone said, “Oh, that’s a common error. Your foot slipped.” “Nope,” said Helen, as she handed the keys to an attendant. “Someone could’ve been on that sidewalk. I put my foot on the wrong pedal. I am never driving again.” She never did.

There are, of course, good drivers in their 80s — I continue to consider myself among them — or perhaps older. There are plenty of bad drivers in their 20s or 30s. But those of us in the older category should be peculiarly attuned to the questions about when we turn from good to bad. It’s unlikely to be one lightbulb moment.

So we might all do well to have the conversation. What are the pluses? All that money I’ll save on no more insurance, gas, repairs (you might figure from the age of my vehicles that car payments are not an issue.) Parking meters. Garage fees. Fastrak fees and miscellaneous tolls. And even as little as I drive it, The Bud is not helping the environment; its namesake worked hard for the planet.

The minus? It comes in handy. There’s the convenience of being able to zip off to the park or the grocery — almost the only places to which I frequently drive. Freedom? A lot of drivers cite their car as a symbol of freedom; actually, I feel most free when walking a few miles, carrying stuff in my backpack.

I live in a city where public transportation is quite good for the most part; taxis and ride shares are everywhere. For what I’d save on the costs outlined above I could take an awful lot of cabs. My father’s small town had no public transportation — but neighbors beat light rail any day.

You can see the direction this conversation is going. Before my next birthday — still nine months off — when it’ll be time for driver’s license renewal and close to time for new smog check, registration etc, I think I will have taken the leap, gotten the airport-effective Real ID, sold The Bud and adjusted to a new life of being chauffeured when necessary.

I believe the car-free life will be just fine.

Optimism Collection/Travel

May 16, 2022May 16, 2022

Adventures in Mountainside Driving

by Fran Johns

*Photo of the mechanic taken by his mom*

A travelogue:

The handsome grandson, a Naval officer stationed in Sicily, is functioning as a tour guide par excellence for his mother and grandmother, happy tourists. We are enjoying the incredibly beautiful Sicilian hills and mountainsides en route from Catania to Cefalu, on an incredibly beautiful Sicilian afternoon.

The roads, it is worth noting, are narrow and winding and tend toward steep inclines. Sicilian drivers, it’s further worth noting, can best be described as Oh, what the hell. Intersections are for the stout-hearted, survival goes to the victor. Solid white lines are simply gauntlets thrown down as a dare. I have no idea how a Sicilian driver lives to be middle-aged.

But the handsome grandson, who learned to drive in Manhattan, hardly notices. He does, his grandmother is happy to see, forgo high speeds and motorized challenges. Sicilian drivers in the hundreds owe their lives to his brake pedal. Ours is a pleasant, casual drive.

We three slowly become aware of an extraneous noise — think snare drum — from somewhere underneath the flooorboards. It is the sort of noise that would be unwelcome on any sort of motorized journey; but it is particularly so in a VW Golf that is, ahem, not exactly new. A clicking sound, slightly metallic.

As if by magic, a turnout appears while we are remarking on the interesting new sound. The Golf swings out of the way of daredevil Sicilian drivers, and stops. The daughter and grandson hop out; the grandmother figures there’s enough trouble without her getting out to supervise.

The handsome grandson’s skills — at least those known to the grandmother — run to linguistics, or journalism, or all things nautical; his undergraduate degree was in Chinese, forheavenssakes. Mechanical engineering has thus far not been his career path. However. The daughter and grandson slowly circle the now-silent Golf, spending a lot of time on their hands and knees peering underneath. The grandmother tries not to eavesdrop; she has great confidence in her progeny — but blood pressure issues. Bits of conversation are, however, overheard.

“Don’t you have any duct tape?” the daughter asks. “Duct tape can fix almost anything.”

“Yeah, I should’ve brought some along,” says her son. “But I think I have something else that could fix it.” Whereupon he rummages around somewhere and emerges with a tool that looks very much like a toenail clipper. He disappears from view. Muffled conversation between mother and son continues, accompanied by small mechanical maneuvers.

All seems to be going well. The grandmother is heartened. The mechanic and his assistant eventually get back in the car, but he is heard to utter the words any passenger fears most:

“I don’t know if it’s going to hold . . .”

It held.

General interest

April 3, 2021October 20, 2021

When your insurance company ruins a good day

by Fran Johns

“We’re calling about your claim,” the pleasant voice said; “about the hit-and-run collision you were involved in on March 17.” This is a really bad way to start your day. While I was still catching my breath the pleasant voice mentioned my car rear-ending the other car but then leaving the scene of the crime.

I knew, of course, that I’d not been in any collisions recently – the last being over a year ago when a 16-wheeler turned right from the center lane as I was turning right from the turn lane. The 16-wheeler won that one. But as my reaction had been swift; only the front of my car and the rear portion were demolished while I managed not to get demolished in the driver’s seat.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image.png

This is critical back story to the current episode: I lost my beloved, snazzy green 2000 Volvo S40. It was immediately replaced by a slightly less snazzy silver 2001 Volvo S40 with about 100,000 fewer miles and with my bank account about $4,000 lighter.

But my new old car was thoroughly repainted and sort-of like new, and my learning curve (I’ve declared myself too old to deal with gadget-filled computerized new cars) remained flat.

Hearing one’s insurance representative declare you were involved in a hit-and-run collision is, nevertheless, unsettling. I assured him they had the wrong car, that I didn’t think I’d even driven anywhere that day. That my trusty Volvo S40 lives in a locked garage in a building with 24-hour security and really doesn’t go out rear-ending other cars without my permission.

Would this not have been a good time to say, “Oh, sorry; we’ll fix that”? I felt so. Instead, I was referred the “the adjuster of my claim.” Then I was asked to make a recorded statement, after which I was asked to email photos of my car from all sides. Which I did. Thanks to its having been all painted and spiffed up when I bought it, the little silver auto was quite emphatic about being without a scratch. I, though, was not undamaged. Beginning with the spike in my blood pressure from the original call, continuing through a trip to the garage to make sure I wasn’t crazy, recording my statement which felt like pleading innocent in a court of law and doing a photo-shoot in the garage – there went my day.

Eventually I received a copy of the “pending” file with assurance that it would soon be “settled” and nothing would appear on my record. It noted that the Vehicle Identification Number of the car involved didn’t match my car’s VIN, and – by the way – the car involved was green, so clearly not my car. This is “actually quite common,” the adjuster assured me, which was not reassuring in the least. Since no one seemed inclined to answer my emailed questions, I finally called the adjuster to ask.

The accident happened in Oakland, across the Bay from San Francisco and you couldn’t pay me to drive across the Bay Bridge. None of the streets in Berkeley or Oakland make sense to me any more, and BART does. How did the other insurance company (the one covering the car that was rear-ended) get my insurance information? “Oh, the driver of the other vehicle probably wrote down a license number one digit off, or something; that happens all the time. We were just doing our job.” Would it not have been simple to check the VINs and immediately know the car involved was not my car? “A lot of times we do not have the VIN on file . . . We were just doing our job.” I wanted to check out my now secret suspicion that my old car had somehow been put back together and sold to a careless driver in Oakland, but by this time I did not want to hear once more that my insurance company – which will remain nameless here to avoid further damages – was just doing its job. Does its job not involve trying not to drive its clients nuts?

Apparently not.