There’s been a new addition to my fleet. This is my newest—and sole—car: A 1996 Honda Accord DX four-door. It has a non-VTEC single-overhead-cam 2.2-liter four-cylinder mated to a four-speed automatic. It is finished in Frost White over a tan cloth interior. It was $1,500, and it is the single most boring vehicle I’ve purchased in my entire life.
It might be the single most important car I’ve owned in my life, too. I’m thrilled with it.
After my Camry took its heroic trip over the Cascades to get me to my new home of Seattle, it immediately perished, and I got rid of it. In the intervening 11 months, I’ve gone without a car, mostly due to financial reasons (extended bouts of freelance writing will do that to a person). Instead, I have used my own two feet, public transit, and the occasional press car. It was the first time I’d gone without my own vehicle since I got my very first at age 20, a third-gen Supra Turbo.
Of all the places to go car-free in America, I chose a good one. Seattle is one of America’s most walkable cities, and I live right in the heart of it. By US standards, the buses in Seattle are great, and the train line is decent enough to get to the most popular places. Most of my friends live nearby and my favorite restaurants are almost entirely within walking distance. A decent number of my friends are also carless (or in some cases, can’t drive at all). It’s one of the only cities in America where going car-free is possible, let alone desirable.
But not having a car reveals just how intensely even the best American cities incentivize private car ownership. Grocery stores anywhere near the pricey real estate of downtown are expensive, thanks to sky-high rents; Drive out half an hour, and you can cut shopping bills in half. Vast swaths of the city are several long-headway bus transfers away and just a bit too far to justify walking. From midnight until about 5:30 AM, the train doesn’t run, which means a late night out or an early flight requires a very, very pricey Uber. Any outdoorsy activity (which is the main hobby of half of Pacific Northwesterners, myself included) is virtually impossible to get to with transit. If it weren’t for press cars and the generosity of my friends letting me borrow their vehicles, I’d still be living in an unfurnished apartment.
Do not get me started on how tired I am of lugging cat litter up the hill to my apartment, either.
For a while, I had an ambitious and diverse shopping list. An AMC Eagle wagon (4.0-liter straight-six a must), EG Civic hatchback (strictly a five-speed), any pillarless 1960s American sedan (Cadillac preferred), NA Miata, TJ Wrangler, E21 3-Series, and a Honda Beat all fell in the net I cast. My budget was low: around $5,000.
This used to be sufficient—that first Supra a decade ago was roughly $3,000, as were each of the next eleven cars I owned. But nowadays, five grand won’t cut it. Virtually everything I looked at was a basket case and I only have access to a parking spot and small assortment of tools. Anything non-running wouldn’t work, and even a drivable basket case would be difficult to restore with such limited resources.
If I could spend about twice or maybe even three times my budget, I could get a nice example of something on the list, but that would mean waiting another six months to a year to actually save enough. That meant another six months to a year of hiking cat litter up the hill home, and of drastically limited horizons. Unfortunately, pretty much everything that runs and drives is expensive nowadays, as a quick search on Craigslist will reveal. This meant I was taking the bus for another year regardless of what car I aspired to.
Then a friend of mine posted on Twitter that he was thinking about selling his daily driver: a white ‘96 Accord with 284,000 miles on it. I asked him how much, and he said $1,500. The car needed a few small things, but it was running and driving, with a recent timing belt job and new front suspension wear components. The air-conditioning works. My friend even put a new battery in it for me.
It was vastly cheaper than anything else I’d found. I could afford it, he would deliver it from Spokane directly to me for the cost of renting a car trailer, and it would be an easy vehicle for my fiancée to learn how to drive in. Insurance for it is dirt-cheap, and real-world MPGs can easily climb into the 30s. Parts are plentiful and inexpensive. The practical need to go grocery shopping on a budget vastly outweighed my desire for something interesting.
I bought it.
The to-do list is utilitarian. Rear struts have already been purchased, as the passenger-rear is blown, and it needs an exhaust manifold gasket thrown on to fix a small leak and a CEL. (I’ll be doing these myself in a friend’s driveway, to save money.) I plan on getting a Club as a theft deterrent since Hondas of this vintage are wildly easy to steal, and a new radio, since it currently doesn’t have one. A new set of tires looms in the future since it currently rides on three different brands. My stretch goal is a ski rack so I can get back into cross-country this winter.
That’s about it. Engine and transmission swaps are easily undertaken for this generation of Accord, turbo kits abound, there are coilovers and other handling upgrades on the market, and there’s even the incredibly rad JACCS JTCC Accord for visual inspiration… but I won’t be doing anything that exciting. It would simply be a distraction from the car’s goal.
Every time I write a car review, I start by asking a single question: what is this vehicle’s purpose? The answer for my Accord is the same as it was when it first rolled off the assembly line 28 years ago: reliable transportation. Nothing more. That means no VTEC head swaps, no lowering springs, no JACCS livery, no alloys. The task at hand is to get from point A to point B as cheaply and easily as possible, and I need to let the car achieve that without impeding it.
The more alarming follow-up question I find myself asking: What does this car mean for me? Owning an interesting vehicle has been integral to my sense of self—not to mention my career’s success—for a decade. My career began with a story about my Supra. My first hit-it-big blog for a major site came when I wrote about my JDM Accord Aerodeck. I established myself in this industry with tales told from the driver’s seat of my Toyota Hiace. I just published a book centered on the idea that cars can make a fashion statement.
Who am I without a cool car? What’s my purpose?
As much as I’d like to be the person I was ten years ago when I bought a manual Supra without even knowing how to drive stick, or the adventurous woman who set out West in a JDM van without a plan, I’m not. I am recovering after a series of poorly-planned moves from one hostile place to another, for years on end, until I landed here in Seattle. (This will be my first year without an interstate move in half a decade.) I am healing from a stint in a psychiatric hospital, with all the difficulties and instability that entails. I am trying to take better care of my body. I am engaged to be married to a woman I love. I am trying to build a life with a future.
What does this car say about the person that exists in this moment? I am being pragmatic for the first time. I am planning for a future I want to build. I need a sturdy foundation. There is no vehicle better for that than a dirt-cheap Honda sedan.
As an added bonus, this car also says something physical about me, too. For the first time since I transitioned, the title reads “Victoria," rather than the name I was given at birth. This is—legally and officially, according to the state of Washington—a new era for me.
Perhaps it will be a boring one, but I’m looking forward to it. After all, there will come a time when I, Victoria, can finally drive something a little more exciting. That day is worth waiting for.
