Car(e)free in Cambridge

Just to recap...

We moved to America - land of the automobile. We were raised on a diet of Springsteen ("I've got a '69 Chevy with a 396"), Simon and Garfunkel ("Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike"), Tom Waits ("Crying 'Fill her up and check that oil,/ You know it could be the distributor and it could be the coil"); and the Eagles ("don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy"). And growing up, we watched endless road trip movies - Smokey and the Bandit, Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise, Midnight Run... It seems fairly inconceivable to live in America without a car, but we've done just that for 15 months.

We've compromised with endless local zipcars (and, by doing so, we have become 'zipsters' and part of the 'zipsterhood of Cambridge' and the puns have deteriorated with the selling of the company to someone big and corporate) and we've also made use of the wonderful Sam at our local car hire company. But dogs aren't allowed in hire cars or zip cars, the snow isn't conducive to hauling around groceries by bike, and we realized that the time had come that we needed to buy a car. We thought that, in the Land of the Automobile, this would be fairly easy.

Our first outing took us to Volvo Bob who keeps several acres filled with Volvos near a major junction of the local interstate. He used to sell racehorses, but times have changed. He doesn't really like selling cars. He had maybe forty XC90s and asked us which color we would like to test drive. I asked about the history of the vehicles: had they been in accidents? What kind of mileage had they done? Volvo Bob gave me a very long slow look, as though I was something unpleasant that he needed to feed to his horses, and said that a car is a car is a car.

Volvo Bob isn't the only local Volvo dealer. Volvo Dave knows a lot more about Volvos than Volvo Bob. He has a lot of statistics. He doesn't have any race horse stories but he tells a very good story about his colleague who was in a horrific car accident in New Hampshire. The other cars were right-offs, but his colleague's Volvo wrapped about his colleague like a mother's arms and had even applied band-aids after the event... Well, maybe I exaggerate, but it was a very good story. Volvo Dave likes selling cars and he is very good at it. He nearly persuaded us to buy a brand-new Volvo. This seemed to be a better bet than buying a used car from Volvo Bob because the car didn't have a history. It's a bit like buying a prospective partner at birth so that there aren't any dark secrets hiding in their past by the time you consummate your relationship.

Unfortunately, Volvo Dave forgot to talk about credit ratings. As English people, Nathan and I assumed that having good credit meant having few debts and a record of responsible saving, but that's not how it works in the US. To attain a credit score, one needs to have a history of borrowing money. We tried to tell Volvo Dave that we didn't have a credit history in the US, but he was talking about side airbags. We should have used louder voices.  Poor Volvo Dave had our vehicle sitting in the forecourt, all brand-new and shining and ready to (safely) go, when he realized that we had no credit history. Having no credit history is worse than being sub-prime. Being sub-prime means that you have borrowed money that you haven't been able to pay back. Sub-prime bankrupts have a credit rating of around 300. Having not borrowed money means that our credit rating was zero.  Volvo buyers normally have a credit rating of 700 or above. Volvo Dave shouted at us and we don't want to buy a Volvo anymore.

Perhaps, we thought, we ought to buy American. A Ford. What could be more American than a Ford? We booked a test-drive of a Ford Fusion on Presidents' Day weekend. By then we'd opened a few credit cards and our credit rating was looking perky. The car showroom was very busy and filled with large helium balloons. We watched an elderly woman touch-park her Chevy in the forecourt (literally bashing against the SUV which was parked behind her until she had room for her vehicle), and then push into the queue before us to ask for a red car. She had a card in her purse with the exact color red she wanted. The salesman was keen to help her. I asked a few questions about fuel economy and safety features and our salesman got a bit sweaty. He went to put some gas into the test-drive car and didn't come back. I hope that the old lady found her red car. After half an hour, we went home.

Luckily our homewards route took us past the Toyota garage. A very charming Eastern European man called I-something introduced us to the new Prius. He was an lovely polite young man and the car was equally lovely and polite. It always checked twice that you wanted to accelerate and moved very slowly and carefully around bends. It was a good car to drive if you didn't have anywhere that you wanted to go. The young salesman was absolutely delightful and explained that he, personally, preferred driving Mazdas. We chatted a while about Jeremy Clarkson and he gave us the telephone number for the Mazda garage where he had bought his car.

As responsible parents of two growing children, the Mazda CX-5 seems to be a good choice: it's not quite as safe as a Volvo, not quite as fuel efficient as a Prius, not quite as big as a typical SUV, not quite as small as - well, as a smaller car. Mazda Mike was very happy to take us for a test drive. He knew a lot about car engines and there was even a My Little Pony set in the showroom that Iola was allowed to play with. It's probably a good option for us.

... But, in the showroom next door there was a Ford Mustang Bullitt. It wouldn't make any sense: it's too small on the inside and too big on the outside, it's fuel hungry and lacks both safety features and space for the dog. But there is something utterly American about it - Springsteen's dream of the open road, Waits' freedom of the full tank of gas on a Saturday night, the Eagles' hitch-hikers' paradise of 1970s' desert roads...

I'm fairly sure that, now that we're grown-ups, we'll take the safe option. I am sure that the Volvo Bob's and Albanian Idris's and Mazda Mike's will applaud our decision. It's just that it isn't quite the same as the things we dreamed about when we were growing up.