Before I started shopping for a car, I saw them in a utilitarian light. They were clean or dirty, fast or slow, arriving in four minutes via the Uber app or not. The difference between a Hyundai, a Mazda, a Kia and Toyota seemed minimal – pointless even – and the fact that anyone would have loyalty towards or strong feelings about a brand of car struck me as strange and infantile.
That is, of course, until I got my own car, five days ago. I was inspired after being a passenger in my colleague Chris’s car. “This is nice,” I said unconsciously mimicking a terrible car commercial. “It’s smooth, brakes easily, handles corners, posh interior, good display … What sort of car is this?”
“It’s a Mazda,” said Chris with pride. “It’s the best car I’ve ever owned.”
Although it wasn’t easy, I managed to buy almost the same car and now I am a Mazda stan too. I love my car. I can talk about it all day. If anyone hurts my Mazda I WILL CUT THEM!
But getting one was difficult.
Economists and anthropologists will look back at Australia’s 2022 car market as evidence that “shit got weird in the early 2020s”.
Dealers told me new cars had around a 10-month waiting period, and used cars cost as much, if not more, than new cars. There was a spate of almost new cars on the market (that were selling for the price of a new one) that had been hastily turned around after the owner ran into financial trouble. The car I ended up buying was four months old but “the owner got squeezed with interest rate rises and rising cost of living and needed to sell quickly to free up some cash”, the Mazda dealer said.
I bought a similar car to Chris’s but paid an extra $8,000 for it because the market was completely different from when he bought his car in early 2020.
In this overheated market, I purchased the car quickly – without having driven it. But how to get it home to the country? The dealership was in outer suburban Melbourne, and as a new driver, I had never driven in Melbourne. I wasn’t about to have my first ever city drive in a new car, on a highway, in Melbourne. No way! I could see how it would end (5m outside the dealership, in a collision on the Monash Freeway after mistaking the brake for the accelerator).
The dealer agreed to drive the car to Gisborne, a small town on the outskirts of Melbourne.
I was to get a train to Gisborne – but the trains were not running. This is why I need a car, I thought, as I desperately tried to find someone to drive me an hour away at 10am on a Friday morning. In the end, I had to get a cab. As the meter clicked over the $100 mark, I was fuming. “I’m going to pick up my car! And I’ll never need another taxi. Take a good look at my face buster, because you won’t see it again!,” I said (to myself).
After a test drive, in the train station car park, Jamal from the dealership handed me the keys and returned to the car that had been trailing him, to go back to Melbourne.
I was left there with a car, just sitting there, gleaming like an evil ruby.
What? I’m expected to drive this home? By myself? It hadn’t sunk in yet that this is my car. I could drive it wherever I liked.
After getting some insurance online before I left the car park (Jamal strongly insisted I don’t drive while uninsured) I got in the driver’s seat and drove the wrong way – towards Melbourne, in a sort of stunned wonder that I was like, you know … driving.
After I reorientated myself, I followed the directions before being spat out on the Calder Freeway. WTF??! The speed limit was 110km/h. That was a lot. I tensed up, suddenly scared. I had been doing driving lessons in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, where the traffic was so bad it was difficult to get above 30km/h. And in the driving test itself they keep you well away from the freeway. So there I sat in the driver’s seat, foot on the accelerator, rigid as a rock, palms and wheel slick with sweat. The heating was on, blasting me with hot air, but such was my terror – my body and mind could not deal with any stimulation (no music, no talking on the phone, no heat) that I needed to turn it off – but how?
In this surreal real-life Daytona, I blindly stabbed at a couple of buttons on the dash, refusing to let my eyes leave the road. The hot air was still being propelled out of the vents. It felt unpleasant. I sensed my breathing restrict. Was this a panic attack? On the freeway? No!! Please no!! I mashed at some buttons on the door and managed to open a back window to let in some air. The window went all the way down and suddenly the car was filled with a terrible sort of howling. It was 9C outside and I was going 110km/h down the freeway – a continuous, vocal wall of cold air entering the car like an angry ghost.
There was a turn-off to a small town and I took my chance and got off the freeway.
On a side street, drenched in sweat now, I found the button to turn off the heater and wind up the window and continued on my way home via a smaller road now that looked and felt like being in a car commercial sequence. No other cars, just small abandoned stone cottages, sylvan sunlit uplands and the occasional farmer on a tractor in the distance. I puttered along at 80km/h, felt my fists unclench slightly on the wheel and my breath even out.
*
I arrived home and relaxed. For a brief time – driving around my town, picking up my friend Brad on Friday afternoon (windows down, driving to nowhere in particular, just driving) I was overcome with an expansive, beautiful, oceanic feeling that I recognised at once from deep youth.
It was the summer I turned 18 and all my friends were getting their licences. It was Friday afternoons, summer holidays, waiting for my friends to pull up in the KFC car park. In their $1,000 cars, they’d roar in and throw open the passenger door: “Carn get in Delaney!” And we’d be off, doing laps of the Warrnambool main street, enclosed in a feeling of perfect happiness – the road and everything else ahead of us.
