ShawWife used her Honda Odyssey van and now uses her Acura MDX sort of like a truck. Paints, easels, brushes, plaster, frames, tree roots, bark, flowers, bulbs, … . Paintings to framers or galleries. She frequently uses what she can carry in a car to determine the maximum size of a painting. But, her NY gallery wants much bigger pieces.
I’m hoping my current car, purchased in 2014, is my last car and that driverless Uber/Lyft will be there to take me wherever I need to go. I think ShawWife will still need a pseudo-truck.
When H and I were first married, we shared one vehicle in TX - and I worked night shift as a nurse, which had it work out that we could get into our first home earlier. In our second home, different TX location, I took a free university bus to campus (walked a couple of blocks to a nearby apt stop) for graduate studies. Later working as a graduate assistant, I was able to get more convenient campus parking. H found a very well maintained 2nd car that he bought for under $1K “The Mav” - Maverick owned by several ME students over a period of time, back when the engine and other car parts were simple. When we needed to get a better car, we kept our better car and he sold The Mav to a new driver for $100 less than we bought it for - the young man and his parents were thrilled with it as we had been. When in our 3rd home, in N AL, H finally was able to buy his ‘dream’ vehicle, a pickup truck; back when not the pricey things they are now…eventually we took ‘cash for clunkers’ when we got the new Highlander in 2009 - saw how quickly the money was used up for ‘cash for clunkers’ and jumped on using the program as soon as they had it extended. Now we will rent a truck from Home Depot if he needs to haul something too big for the Highlander, or ask a friend with a truck to help. H helped a lot of friends haul stuff with his truck when he had it, but it was mostly used to haul him to work.
MIL/FIL gave up their 2nd car when FIL could no longer drive - it was only an around town vehicle at that. MIL gave up her car at age 86 and sold it to DD1, and should have done so a year or two sooner.
Since H and I are both 61, and both go different directions, we like having 2 vehicles at home. Right now DD2 has one of our Highlanders at school, and she has to decide if she wants to buy it when she begins her career or buy something else; she could borrow the Buick for a while but she is not a fan of using the clunker. The Buick is great to get me to and from work, and doesn’t bother me at all to use it, but I do use the Highlander if H is on work assignment elsewhere.
Some cars are made so much better/more reliable than others. We had a series of problems with the Buick at 123,000 miles (and should have ditched it if we had known it was going to be a series of problems) so end result it has ‘new guts’ - motor, transmission, exhaust system ($10K of work!) - so now it has 182,000 miles and has been reliable for around town. I didn’t want to buy that vehicle either, but as a new car purchase at end of year, we had 5 year 0% interest and H wanted a 4 door sedan. The irony is I am the one still driving it…
We live in a neighborhood bordered by major highways, and my husband doesn’t really like to share (cars), so I suspect we will always be a two car family. I am not a “car person,” but I admit to recently making an “emotional” decison and purchasing a brand new car. Usually I do more research and evaluation, but I had a string of little car issues, and while I was having one fixed, I went to the sales department, and they just happened to have the car I wanted, in the color I wanted, etc. I suffered significant buyers remorse, but now I’ve given that up and am not worrying about it.
The reality is that the real winners of this tech are baby boomers, so it will be easily made into law. Youngsters don’t really care about driving, so that leaves a few in between who will whine. I can’t wait. Road death numbers are akin to war carnage, it cannot possibly be worsened by taking out human efwittery. Even my current Subaru has tech that is amazing to me. People here drive across into your lane to kill you because of texting or coffee or a burger. Lets legislate that out of the future.
“Youngsters don’t really care about driving, so that leaves a few in between who will whine.”
Let’s not derail this thread, but that does not represent the youngsters beyond the urban hipsters. Kids in my neck of the woods (many, many of them) are passionate about their cars. Some even own a Model T (hint - it is not made by Tesla). Mr. Lutz should go do a triple lutz or something…
“In 15 to 20 years — at the latest — human-driven vehicles will be legislated off the highways.” - Hey, maybe that will extend the “driving years” for DH and me
I would believe that lots of younger folks like driving. But it’s certainly noy true in my very small family sampling of three city kids (DS-Boston, DD/SIL - Denver). In the bunch there is only 1 car. It is a 2003 Civic with 26,000 miles (up from 13.000 when my mom sold it to DD 2 years ago.). DS usually rides his bike to work but has decent mass transit options too.
Last week I had the Civic when DD borrowed my minivan for moving. The smaller car was nice for parking. But I do like having a minivan and will miss it someday.
I grew up in Southern California as did our D’s. Everyone has a car here, but the older I get the less I like to drive. I will happily ride in the autonomous vehicles. H loves driving so we will always have at least one car.
My MIL kept her Acura until she was sure my younger D would be able to drive it. Even though she drove little, and her stroke stopped all driving, she was never, ever going to be beholden to FIL for a ride to the salon. She calls herself a car person.
No way, no how will I share a car with my H, I love my S4 and can’t be bothered with his car. Leaving driving behind is one of my real fears of gettting old. We have two cars and a truck, D (at home) has MILs old one, and D, who lives downtown, has the car we bought for them when they were in HS.
(My daughter’s BF has 3 cars - a beat up hybrid for commuting and 2 sports cars for fun and hobbies.)
I’m a control freak. The thought of autonomous cars makes me twitch.
I read that piece by Lutz the other day. I think he paints a very plausible picture of the future, but no way in 20 years. Maybe in 50 or more years. 20 years… that was 1997. How different are cars today from 1997? We were all supposed to be flying around like George Jetson by now, weren’t we?
Technology developed a lot during the last 20 years. After seeing FaceID on Apple, I am beginning to think it can be sooner than I expected. They now have a viable robotic eye. Soon, they will see better than humans. If they can see, the rest is information processing. They won’t have to exclusively rely on maps to navigate.
Changes in the last 20 years have been largely incremental, but there have been many important advances - on-board diagnostics, smart keys, headlight tech, tire pressure monitoring, backup cameras, bluetooth integration, collision avoidance systems, airbag tech, GPS (it wasn’t until 2000 that the gov’t allowed GPS positioning to be accurate enough to be really useful), etc. Even little things like 100,000-mile spark plugs make our cars cheaper to maintain.
And there have been game-changers like hybrid drive trains, and practical electric cars.
And think how technology has changed over the last 20 years. The internet was barely a thing 20 years ago, now everything goes through it - communications, entertainment, commerce, finance, information, social networking. Smartphones.
It’s not the technology that’s going to hold back widespread adoption of self-driving cars, it’s the legal issues. I’m not sure why, given our current litigious society, any company would want to make a self-driving car. Every accident, every injury, every death (and they will still occur) will be a lawsuit against the maker.
In the year 1999, I believe, some manufacturer touted their smart fridge that would connect to the internet and restock itself via Homegrocer or some similar outfit. Ha. I am dating myself.
Communication technology is different from cars and houses. It was always on a roll. There is still a large chunk of the population that does not have internet access in their homes. Heck, there are some who have no home. It will take a while for all homes to become “smart” - the tech is being made as we speak, and wireless does make retrofit easier, but it is not cheap. Here is a recent example. We looked at Nest smoke alarms… At $100 a pop, it would have taken us $1300 to replace all alarms. The dumb Firex kind cost less than $200 for all 13 we needed. Guess what we ended up buying?
BTW, please check how old your smoke alarms are. They are no good after 7-10 years.
