Speaking of Richard, he needs a car in Columbia, so our black Acura sedan has now been relocated to Missouri. I hope that it serves him as faithfully and reliably as it has served us since we bought it almost 10 years ago.
Your car is like mayonnaise — you either love it, or you hate it, and there is no middle ground. I hate mayonnaise, but I loved the Black Ack. I loved its graceful lines and comfortable interior, its simple dashboard and its easy to reach knobs and buttons. I loved its easy handling, its quick burst of acceleration, and its good gas mileage. And most of all I loved its reliability. It had a few dings and dents, but when we turned it over to Richard it had 175,000 miles on it and was still going strong.
I drove that car pretty much every day for years, wrote about it in good times and bad, and got to know it like you get to know an old friend. I’ll miss not seeing it in the driveway, but I’m glad that Richard is inheriting it — because I know he loves that car, too. When you pass along an heirloom, you want to make sure that the recipient cares about it as much as you do.
The Beijing auto show just ended — that’s right, Detroit, the Beijing auto show — and it featured the standard weird cars and high-heeling wearing models. One of the concepts, Toyota’s i-Real electric vehicle, offered a chilling vision of what the decades to come might be like.
It produced models like the Datsun 280ZX, a cool-looking, reasonably priced sports car that was popular with many of the guys in my age group. Then, one day, “Datsun” was gone — forever (we were told) replaced by “Nissan.” For years, Nissan did whatever it could to try to erase the name Datsun from the collective consciousness of the American consumer.
Why have teenagers become less interested in driving? Some speculate it is attributable to a poor economy and a lack of jobs. Others suggest that teenagers are simply satisfied to interact within virtual communities via social media like Facebook.
The most recent news is that 
Beverly, a community on the north shore of the Massachusetts Bay near Boston, apparently has been experiencing a raft of thefts from parked cars. Many of the victimized cars have either been left unlocked or with a window rolled down. So, police decided it would be a good idea to leave warning messages on the unlocked cars and then enter the cars to lock the doors. In some instances, police have locked out drivers who left their car keys in their unlocked cars. (Speaking as someone who is pathetically anal about making sure the car is locked whenever I leave it, I can’t imagine leaving my car unlocked, much less leaving my keys in the unlocked car!)
I don’t sense that gas prices are really on the radar screen in Washington, D.C., and I find myself wondering whether that seeming lack of interest has a geographic basis. Most East Coast cities have established, easily accessible, and often subsidized mass transit systems; they also have other qualities that discourage car use — like limited, hyper-expensive parking and constant gridlock. As a result, Eastern city-dwellers don’t drive much. When Kish and I lived in D.C. in the ’80s, we never drove anywhere. It was too easy to take the Metro, or walk. We could go weeks without filling up our one car. As a result, gas prices didn’t make much of an impression on us.
In the meantime, the government has committed to buy the first 100 Chevy Volts that roll off the assembly line. Who else is buying the Volt? GE, for one. It can’t resist the chance to 
