Goodbye beloved Prius of twelve years, Prius of the beautiful continuous silver sweep, front to back, Prius designed the way a car should look, should behave. Sipping gas delicately, as through a straw, doors unlocking at my approach, ignition turning on with a touch of a button. Goodbye Prius that never complained, never failed me, that in all those years only required new front brakes and a battery (not the hybrid one—the small one).
I’ve had two cars I’ve loved—my long-ago VW and this one. By love I mean we were Sympatico. When I was behind the wheel, our bodies were part of each other. There has never been another 2008 Prius. My grandson Zach says there’s a whole cult of 2008 lovers, who camp in them, travel in them, chat about them online.
I mention Zach because I’m giving him the car. I couldn’t give it up any other way. He’s already crazy about it. He’s been learning everything he can about it. This is his first car, and he’s headed from Brooklyn, NY, to L.A. to work as a music producer, which apparently is the necessary place to be if you want to be successful. He and his girlfriend are going to take ten days for the trip and sleep in the back of the car. Sounds great to me.
Believe it or not, my Prius has only about 90,000 miles on it. Small town living. Last winter, Jerry and I kept a tally for a month of every time we actually needed two cars at once. Zero. We didn’t need two cars, for Pete’s sake. I would easily vote to keep the Prius and get rid of the Subaru Forester, but this is northern Michigan. We NEED the all-wheel drive, the higher clearance. I remember when my daughter and her husband, who by then had at least two children, bought a van. She hated the idea, so un-cool, so domestic. But practical. You get used to it.
You can trace America’s history by its cars. I remember tailfins. Space-age America. At the moment, it’s SUVs. Big boxy cars, shiny personal tanks, to ward off danger.
I looked at the new Prius. They’ve ruined it totally. They thought they’d go for the young market. It’s over-designed, with impractical ridges and curves, menacing front grill. If you damaged the bumpers, it would cost a fortune to repair. What’s wrong with people? Why do we have to mess up a good thing?
I could ask that about a million things, of course. What’s wrong with people? Why do they congregate on beaches and bars during a pandemic? Why do they think they’re invincible, or why do they forget about the parents and grandparents they may infect? This of course is the elegant hindsight of the old, no longer driven to mix and mate. No longer unsure of who we are, needing to incessantly check with our friends to find out.
Long ago, in the age of radical tailfins, my family was on a picnic at the city park in Fayetteville. My father sat by the creek and drew in the sand with a stick. This is how a car should look, aerodynamically, he said. It was the 2008 Prius he was designing. One graceful sweep, low in the front, a bit like an airplane wing. “Oh Daddy,” I said. “Nobody wants a car like that! It’s ugly.” That was before I became a person all my own, and not a parrot of the culture.
I wrote to the Prius people. Who do you think buys this car? I asked. Sensible people who want great mileage, who care about the environment. What sort of design do you think they want?
Simple. What is wrong with you people? I asked. They wrote back. They said they were so sorry I didn’t like it—a whole team of designers had worked on it.
That’s the trouble. Put a team of designers in the same room and that’s what happens. They go crazy. Think about fashion. Would you want to actually wear the couture clothes you see on the runway in Paris? Nah. They’re what designers do for fun. Real people wear plain clothes. Real people drive 2008 Priuses.