The way my wife sees cars and the way I see cars couldn’t possibly be more different. She sees them largely as appliances that help you get around, whereas I see cars almost like pets — character-filled machines with soul, and things that should be cherished. Neither of us is wrong, and we respect one another’s views, but I have to say: Sometimes I wish I could treat my cars like she treats hers.
My wife, Elise (Not Her Real Name), does not abuse or mistreat her car by normal-people’s metrics. She just uses it. Hers is a 2017 Lexus RX350, a vehicle that a few years ago I would have told you is a soulless beige appliance with zero soul — just a snoozefest of automotive boredom. But I’ve since changed my mind.
I’m not saying her Lexus is an exciting car, but it actually does have some soul, and in fact, you can find soul in almost any car. This Lexus’ soul comes from the fact that it’s just so good at fulfilling its intended purpose. This thing is meant to be a reliable, comfortable, practical suburban commuter, and as I said in my review titled “Driving My Girlfriend’s Lexus RX 350 Made Me Realize That The Most Boring Car On Earth Is Also Excellent,” I think it’s a truly excellent crossover SUV. Arguably one of the best ever made. And that alone means it’s more than just an appliance.
From that review:
My girlfriend sometimes gets upset when people call her car boring. It seems like an insult to a car that she thinks is so great. Are people saying she’s wrong?
No. She’s absolutely right. It’s an excellent car, and Lexus should be commended for building something that perfectly aligns with what she and so many other consumers are looking for: The ultimate no-bullshit luxury SUV. That’s what the Lexus RX350 is. You buy it, you’re comfortable, you’re confident, you’re safe, you rarely have to worry about significant mechanical issues, the dealership will give you a great service experience (my girlfriend actually enjoys going to the Lexus dealer, which says a lot about what Lexus is doing right), and the car just demonstrates its competence every time you’re behind the wheel. It fades into the background, and lets you live a life where cars are not at the forefront.
Anyway, this blog isn’t about how good the Lexus RX is, it’s about how my wife uses hers. You see, while my respect for the Lexus RX means I no longer see it as an appliance, my wife definitely uses it as one. And if I’m completely honest: I wish I could do the same with my daily-driven BMW i3S.
For example, one day she opened her car’s rear hatch in a parking garage, and the taillight hit one of the hanging pipes, leaving a chip:
“Oh, you damaged your light,” I told E(NHRN). She walked around, took a look. “Where?” she asked. I pointed out the damage. “What, just that little chip? That’s fine.” She’s right. It is fine. She went on with her day, happily and merrily and joyously. My day would have been ruined. She’s clearly doing it right, I’m doing it wrong.
Then one day she backed up into the vertical garage door track, leaving scrapes and a dent on her rear quarter panel. Look at this carnage:
“Woops!” she said as the horrifying screeches left lifelong imprints in my mind. She pulled the car from reverse into drive, repositioned the car, and backed out. We stopped to look. “Eh, it’s fine!” she said. And went on with her day.
I, meanwhile, have had nightmares about that horrible noise, and that destruction of a painted panel that cannot be unbolted from a car — the dreaded quarterpanel damage. It still haunts me; my wife doesn’t think about it. Ever.
Then there’s the door-opening situation. I’m not saying my wife is careless about opening her door, but when she has to get into and out of her car, if there’s a tight space between her door and a wall or pillar, she will rest the door on that wall or pillar. “I need the space!” she says, as that door taps the concrete, sending a solitary, involuntary tear down my face and ensuring a second therapist booking to follow up that garage door fiasco.
Speaking of garage door fiascos, one day while pulling her car out of our garage, I accidentally hit the wrong garage door button, sending the door BANGING down right onto the Lexus’ roof! As I was driving slowly, the metal bottom grabbed the paint and scraped it until the garage door could figure out what was going on and slide back up out of the way.
The bang and scratch left me alarmed. I peeked onto the roof, and though the scratches are hard to see in the light, they are there. My wife literally couldn’t care less. The scratches are on the roof, after all.
Then there’s the time an almost-90-year-old guy crashed into our rear bumper and our insurance company somehow blamed us. My wife was obviously not thrilled about State Farm not placing the blame on a man so out-of-it he didn’t even realize he’d gotten into a crash, but as for the damage? I wiped it off with a moist cloth, and though there are still some scratches visible, my wife thinks the car looks great.
I meanwhile, freak out over every single thing that happens to my BMW i3S, to the point where I spent thousands of dollars installing XPEL PPF just so that I can avoid paint chips and door edge scratches.
Seriously, I even wrote a whole article about a tiny scratch I got on my mirror from a lane-splitting motorcyclist:
Look at how ridiculous this is:
That scratch wiped off to look like this:
Why am I even mentioning a tiny bit of roughness left on that mirror?:
Every time my wife gets into my i3, she throws her keys onto my eucalyptus dashboard, and I cringe. “Careful with that!” I say. “Oh, sorry!” she replies, literally not knowing what the hell I’m on about. There’s a cubby on my dashboard; why can’t she just use it? Sometimes she brings a backpack with her in the passenger’s seat footwell; “careful not to push that bag against the lower dash, since the white leatherette will get marked,” I tell her. When she opens the door in parking garages and the edge touches a wall, I always get annoyed.
The result is that I don’t think she enjoys riding in my car (a car which, to be clear, isn’t exactly a rare sports car, it’s a small daily-driven city car). It’s not that she’s careless, it’s that she just doesn’t see things the way I see them. It’s a car. You use it to get you around. If a space is tight and the door has to touch a wall, so be it? If you get a scratch here and there, so be it. That’s part of owning a car.
I wish I could treat all my cars like she treats hers. Her Lexus looks good; it’s not a steaming pile at all. It has a few scuffs and scrapes here and there, but she’s not constantly worrying, and she can get the absolute most out of her machine without being in a bad mood all the time.
Why is it that for me to enjoy a car without stress it has to be an absolute steaming beater? Why can’t I just enjoy my cars, stress-free, well before they become rustbuckets that lower my neighborhood’s property values?
I’m doing it wrong, she’s doing it right.
For me it really depends on how the damage was done. Honest damage, like the small dent in the back of my truck cab from getting bumped by a kayak as I unloaded it I don’t sweat. However, the scratches I inadvertently left because I let my RV door bump against the front fender when they were parked side-by-side in the garage piss me off. That was stupid negligence on my part, not honest use.
The newest (and most expensive) car I’ve ever purchased, my 2017 Volt, was damn near factory fresh when I bought it a year ago. I was terrified of dings, dents and scratches. Then, during a major wind storm, the shitty asphalt shingles on my garage decided to single out my Volt. Skipped the 2001 Tracker, and the 95 K2500, and went straight for the Volt. Over $11,000 in paint damage (really just scratches, but it’s a fancy 3 stage paint and every single panel had at least some damage.) After my insurance payout, I just don’t care about the finish anymore, and I have to say it’s pretty liberating.
See, my only problem is that people these days are perfectly satisfied with paying big money for a luxury car then treating it like it’s a beater.
If you’re going to treat it like basic transportation, I say buy basic transportation.
It’s sad to see $60K luxury cars that have never been washed/waxed with split leather and scratches/dents everywhere.
When did we stop caring about nice, expensive things?
Hmmm, I didn’t know my wife had a twin sister living in California…..
There’s a big difference between using a car and carelessly fucking it up
I don’t think she is carelessly fucking it up. Life just happens and she chooses no to stress about it.
In my grad-school and first job times of the late 90’s, I drove a 1988 VW Fox. It was fine, except the paint was thin and there was a lot of superficial rust on the body panels, which got treated with Permatex/POR-15 and rattle-can grey primer. With all the primer on the white body, it kind of looked like a Dalmatian with mange. In those days, I’d double the car’s value whenever I put my mountain bike or a few pairs of skis on the rack.
It was liberating, not caring about how it looked. Sketchy parking spot in the warehouse district? No problem! You can park by feel. Soccer mom parks too close at Costco? No problem! Enjoy your new door ding. Worried about theft? No problem! Who would steal that POS?
As a transportation appliance, it was fine, just ugly.
Now, I do wonder if the scratches can become part of the soul? The trails (okay, fire roads) I ride have rhododendron so close that a KTM 250 would get scratches. In fact, the scratches on the side of my SUV are almost its defining trait; its proof that it is not a pavement princess.
What say you, David?
Peninsula pinstripes is what we call em out on the Olympic Pen.
“Wilderness Pinstriping” here. 🙂
Yeah she definitely has the right of it. If you buy a car and use it as a car it will have to interact with the real world where shit happens, even just getting in and out of the car every day for a couple years will leave its marks. If you can’t accept that the only alternative is to put your cars in a climate controlled museum they never leave but that defeats the point doesn’t it?
So just buy a three figure beater and store your BMW in the climate controlled, inert gas filled rodent proof car bubble it deserves!
I also drive a 20-teens crossover as a daily. It’s been great and has taken me into – and out of – some challenging places in the Rockies. Now it’s mostly driven around the NY suburbs and the into the Bronx and Manhattan to see my girlfriend. I couldn’t imagine parking a car on the street in NY if I cared about the possibility of dings and scratches and whatnot. I love cars – I’m commenting on a car site, after all. But unless it’s something that belongs in a museum, use it. Maintain it. Treat it well and don’t abuse it, but let it serve its purpose.
The longer I live, the more scars I accumulate. It just shows that I’ve been out doing stuff. Some scars are embarrassing, and some aren’t even my fault. Little scratches and dings on my car show the same. At the end of the day, my Subaru is going to wind up crushed into a small cube and melted down, just like I’m going to end up in a box and lit on fire. Same as nearly all the other cars on the road and the people driving them. I’ve got enough to worry about. A scuffed front bumper on a daily driver just will never be something that bothers me, thankfully.
It’s actually liberating to drive in a car that already has some battle scars. Driving around Berkeley and San Francisco in a banged-up Peugeot 504 was awesome. Nobody cuts you off because they have more to lose.
I’ve had three new cars in my life, and the first scratch or ding is always painful.
And David, a little marital advice… lighten up. Nobody’s perfect and you even admitted to doing a number on the Lexus’ roof. She shrugged it off. Nobody likes being nit-picked to death.
I really hope you’ve given her a 1 of 1 autopian tshirt that features a console shifter with something like (E) N H R N next to it on the left.
Backpacks are banned in the front seat after the lower dash of my i3 was damaged. I put a Carhartt seat cover in the back seat for such things and it kind of went with the tan interior. It doesn’t match my current GR Corolla, which suffers from a wheel scrape caused by trying to park as far as possible away from another car. It never ends.
Cars are just cars.
If you plan to drive them, they will get wear and tear.
A perfect car is a boring car.
When we bought our Mini recently, we chose the slightly less mint version of the two we were interested in because it’s a car we drive and going ot et a few dings anyway.
My cousin treats her C Class the same way Elise does her Lexus – must be an LA thing where women slowly trash valuable pieces of equipment, then decide they need replacing after 5-6 years because it’s “all worn out”.
Just wait till they realize their replacement imported luxury chariot of choice is now 25% more costly – That’s gonna put a dent in the Pilates, Dog Trainer and Wardrobe-in-a-box budget…
Since E(NHRN)’s Lexus is already eight years old and there’s no indication she’s in any hurry to get rid of it, I think your theory is perhaps flawed.
DT has wrote out his plan on how he’s going to trade in that Lexus in several articles.
Hmmm. I must’ve missed those somehow.
IMHO, 2017 was when Lexus’ grill was already tipping into absurdity. The 2015s were the last ones that I actually found attractive.
It has nothing to do with how someone treats their car. Mistakes happen, the general public happens. Your comment is shitty.
This is exactly why I can’t have a new car either. I have tried two times,although not «new»,but nice two-three year old ones. Every time I get a ding or a scratch it really gets to me and detracts from the pleasure I get from the car.
This was… awkward. Can a grown-up explain to David where shit-boxes come from? I think he’s ready for The Talk.
Isn’t JT always going on about how cars are supposed to be forgiving? This is a perfect example of a car designed to do its job in the real world. Good for E(NHRN).
This surprises me. I wouldn’t have expected someone who cherishes and drives the worst shitboxes known to man to care about little dings and scrapes.
I think the important context here is that E(NHRN)’s vehicle is basically new or very recently new, and the i3 is also not particularly old.
It’s one thing when you have a shitbox, but the problem is that transitory phase between “mint” and “shitbox” that’s a problem. Hard to draw a line.
You are right about the transitory period! Almost every car I’ve owned has been hit badly enough to need body work and a repainted quarter panel or trunk. That’s the point at which you worry less about random door dings or road rash on the rims. Otherwise, I am more on Team David than Team Elise.
Exactly. It’s like hair – short hair can be cool, long hair can be cool, but the journey from short hair to long hair is hell.
That’s what going Hollywood does to you.
Shes definitely doing it right. I have had my fair share of true piles of decaying rust and I have had my fair share of really nice new cars. My 24 Mazda3 hatch is my work car and I put almost 30k on it in the past year but have prided myself with keeping it looking showroom fresh. However on this past work trip last week, I was changing lanes and couldn’t avoid a truck tire while changing lanes. Hit it fairly straight on and it made some rather unpleasant noises to the point I apologized to my car. Damage that resulted? Front splitter was scuffed and cracked but on the underside where you can’t see it. I was mad at first but then kind of just got over it. No mechanical damage was done and it’s not like the bumper is hanging off, flopping around. Maybe one day I’ll replace it but right now the time, effort and $400 for a new one really hasn’t bothered me.
Is this what growing up is like?
I was recently driving behind a horse trailer in my ’14 Mazda3 hatch when a flexible window panel flew out and clattered onto and over my car. I just screamed and giggled as it joined the assemblage of other pits and dings in the paint (I really didn’t find any new damage, but how would I know?). I do at least need to paint the ones in the roof, at least one is starting to form a bit of rust.
It’s not like I purposefully abuse cars, but paint is shit and they’re simply not worth spending thousands of dollars on or agonizing over. None of them are fancy.
The worst I’ve encountered was running over a Big Fucking Rock in my ’06 Altima. It somehow missed every important area of the car, damaging only a crossmember (small bend) and the right rear floor pan. The impact was enough to poke a hole through the sheet metal and cause a massive dent, but I just sprayed some undercoating to fill the tear and moved on with life.
I want to keep mine nice as long as I can being a new car, but its inevitable that eventually something will happen along the way. The part of mine that has really taken a beating driving as much as I do is the damn windshield. So many little pot marks from rocks and stuff on the road that just look like bugs, but nope! Is rather annoying
Hey, at least it hasn’t cracked!
My dad used to get furious at every little scratch or dent so I was terrified of touching the cars…it was a good way to learn how not to behave about such things. Laugh it off, life goes on.
My dad was the same way. I washed my cars once a week no matter what. Would take them to a carwash in the winter to get salt off of them (not a terrible idea but still c’mon now) and I spent a long time really going over my cars with a fine tooth comb because of that. Talking toothbrush to clean all the grooves in the dashboard type of cleaning. It did give me a sense of pride in my rides but as I’ve gotten older and have a kid now, it’s definitely not nearly as high on the priority list anymore.
She is doing it right. Your car, no matter how much you baby it, is going to get scratches and dings. You must not lose sleep over it. Now, does that mean your passenger gets to trash the interior? No. But something will inevitably spill, something will leave a scuff. Meh!
To use a cliche: pick your battles!
I’m looking at the photo of both cars side by side in the garage…and there is no way she’s getting out of that Lexus without resting the door on the side of the BMW, even if it hasn’t somehow happened yet it will soon. David’s gonna move the cars around as soon as he reads this and realizes the same…
Wait until there are kids. And a diaper gets changed on the front seat of the BMW before heading into BabyGAP…No David, the kids don’t always just lay there completely still like the baby mannequin in parenting class.