Moon Miles

Newsletter 2025-08-25

I know a lot about a few things and almost nothing about everything else. Ask me about D-Day or the Pacers’ off-season personnel moves and I can talk to you for hours. You’ll beg me to stop until you finally have to make up an excuse and run away. The wall behind the toilet won’t paint itself. But if you bring up something that’s actually useful or relevant, expect me to lapse into awkward silence for the rest of the afternoon. All of my interests and expertise are confined to things that aggressively don’t matter. It’s easy to always be right when no one cares about what I’m saying enough to argue or even listen. Recently, and completely against my will, I was forced to venture into the realm of the practical. If you were to check my browser history, you would see nothing but web pages and reels about used cars. I’ve become obsessed with finding a vehicle for my fifteen-year-old, Betsy, for when she finally learns to drive—if she ever learns. At the current rate, she’ll finish the online portion of her driver’s ed course when she’s thirty. Finding a vehicle might take me nearly that long. I’m becoming a reluctant expert on something in the real world. I don’t even recognize myself anymore, which is for the best. I was a pretty awful person in the first place.

As we approach the monumental decision on what car to buy for Betsy, my wife Lola and I have learned some things about each other. Before we got married, we had extensive discussions about what kind of family we wanted to have and where we wanted to go in life. We never shared our philosophies on buying used vehicles for our children. Shame on the priest for not bringing that up in pre-marriage counseling. I think we should get the cheapest vehicle possible that’s just barely capable of getting Betsy to and from school a mile away for the next few years. Lola believes we should get something that’s actually nice. “Nice” is a polite way of saying “expensive,” or at least “not currently on fire.” I’m willing to tolerate some flames as long as the car will still make it all the way to school before it burns down. Clearly I’m the reasonable one here.

Lola views vehicles as a tool. She wants a good one that will last a while and get the job done. I view them as tubes of toothpaste. They’re something that gets used up and thrown away. I heard a philosophy on Facebook that I’ve since adopted as my own: You should expect to get about a year out of a car for every thousand dollars you spend on it. That idea is based more on vibes than mechanical engineering, but I choose to believe it’s true. If we spend two thousand dollars on a car, we should expect to get two years out of it. When it needs to be fixed, we’ll get rid of it and buy something else. In that price range, the vehicle would be totaled by the cost of an oil change. Lola would prefer something that will last longer than a Dixie Cup. She wants it to survive for ten years, which would cost a corresponding number of thousands. In a decade, Betsy will be twenty-five, which is about how old Lola and I were when we had her. No starter car should last that long. I can’t afford a generational vehicle. This disagreement won’t be what ends our marriage, but it might be what makes us not buy a vehicle until the last possible second, if not a while after. At this rate, I’ll never be done giving Betsy rides. I might be the one who has to drive her to the hospital when she has her first kid.

The biggest problem with my approach is that a few thousand dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to. I should know. My parents bought an entire fleet of vehicles in that price range, only about half of which turned out to be total lemons. My Mom and Dad purchased countless cheap cars over the years to accommodate their legion of children. Like me, they were eager to never drive their offspring anywhere again. The vehicles were swapped freely between us over the years depending on who needed what and what was falling apart that week. None of us actually owned the vehicles until we moved out for good, at which point the game of musical cars ended and we were given the title to whatever we happened to be driving at the time. Some of those vehicles ran for years. My favorite was the one I took from college and into marriage: My 1997 Geo Prizm. It’s the closest thing I had to a dowry. It was a rebranded Toyota Corolla built at a joint GM-Toyota factory. It was mostly a Toyota under the hood, which is why it worked. The leather on the seats cracked and all the knobs fell off, but the engine ran without a single problem. It was like me: ugly on the outside but extremely hard to kill. It ultimately gave its life to save mine, crumpling effectively in a collision with an out-of-control truck driven by a teenager. I would love for Betsy’s first car to be a Toyota Corolla. However, everyone else knows how good Toyotas are, which is reflected in their prices on the used car market. The only ones in my ideal price range have enough miles to have driven to the moon. That’s not much of an exaggeration. The moon is 238,900 miles away. I tried to convince Lola we should buy a 2004 Camry with a mere 198,000 miles. The conversation did not go well.

Photo by Mike Petrucci on Unsplash

Lola doesn’t believe in spending money on a vehicle that’s older than our children. I can sympathize with her reluctance, even if I don’t share it. Just because a car type has a reputation for lasting decades doesn’t mean your particular unit will. The Honda Odyssey is supposed to be extremely reliable on average. Yet my 2011 van basically imploded. The electrical system mysteriously failed, the oil disappeared despite no detectable leak or sign of burning, and the cords connecting the motors in both doors snapped, making them impossible to open. I wrote multiple newsletters about how I thought my van was haunted, yet most owners of that same make and model had a far better experience. You can’t tell a vehicle it comes from a good brand and expect it to behave itself. If shame worked, I would pay much less for car maintenance.

My father-in-law, Bob, recently gave us a lead on a vehicle. He has a friend with a Mazda6 he may be looking to get rid of. Like Bob, Bob’s friend keeps his cars immaculate. Unlike Bob, he almost never drives anywhere. Bob’s friend takes his seldom used car to the car wash twice a week, which is the same number of times I go in the entire lifetime of a vehicle. It’s only worth it for me if I’m going there in place of an actual vacation. For my kids, those automatic scrubbers are more exciting than Disney World. Bob’s friend’s car is a higher trim package with all the bells and whistles. I’d prefer none of the bells and at most one of the whistles. I’m willing to pay for windshield wipers, but only if there’s a lot of rain in the forecast. I’ll only buy a car with all the extras if I don’t have to pay for any of them. Selling to me would be the worst decision this guy could make, but it might happen because friendship makes people do dumb things. He already sold his wife’s car to Bob’s son for a great price. I’m banking on the fact that Bob’s friend doesn’t want to make thousands of extra dollars by talking to a second person or driving to literally any dealerships. If he charges a fair price, I’m officially out. If he gives us the friends and family discount for his mint condition used car, we might be in business. Unfortunately, that would still be more than I want to pay. If this goes forward, Lola will win for the millionth time in a row. That won’t stop me from arguing with her again next time.

The niceness of the Mazda is actually a problem. It’s far too good for a kid. It’s newer and better than Lola’s van. That’s not just an opinion. According to the estimate website, it’s worth about twice as much as hers. If we buy it, we’d actually be buying it for Lola. That would mean Betsy would inherit every child’s dream: an eight-year-old minivan. Actually, nine since she wouldn’t get it until next year. It would look super cool in the high school parking lot. All of her friends would be jealous. Giving her a minivan would have several advantages. It’s big enough for her to transport all of her sisters with ease. It’s lame enough that none of her friends would want to ride with her, thereby increasing the safety factor. It’s also big enough to hold its own in a crash with an SUV. In an impact with a compact car, it would roll over it like a monster truck. We already know everything that’s wrong with it. It comes pre-dinged. Each bump and scratch was lovingly earned. New ones would blend right in without causing additional trauma. With a new vehicle (even a new used one) we’d feel bad the first time we damaged it. With our existing van, new scratches would merely add to the aesthetic we’ve already established. I’m not implying that Lola has been hard on the vehicle. She’s a better driver than me, as our respective crash histories reflect. But we’ve had to take her van in once to repair thousands of dollars in hail damage. A new scratch from hitting a curb won’t be a big deal. It’s mom-tested and kid-approved.

Another downside of the potential Mazda deal is the timing. Betsy won’t be able to get her license until the end of next summer, when she’ll be sixteen and three months. At first, Bob said his friend wouldn’t be ready to sell until next spring, which would have been perfect. Buying early doesn’t help us. That’s just longer we have to pay insurance on an unused vehicle sitting on our property. Today, Bob texted me that he was driving around dealerships looking for a new vehicle with his friend. So we’ll need to be ready to buy sometime between immediately and the middle of next year. In the meantime, I’ll hold off on looking online for other cars in case this one pans out. If we wait on it for months and then it falls through, we can do a panic search at the last minute. That’s my most likely path to get an old vehicle with a year or two left before it explodes. If the Mazda deal does go through, however, Betsy can look forward to many adventurous years of minivaning. I’m hoping my van was the only cursed Odyssey. Perhaps Lola’s van will achieve moon mileage while in Betsy’s possession. Some day, she could load her own kids in it, or better yet, actually drive it to the moon. We can’t be that many years away from a space highway.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James