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Spinning My Wheels
There's no navigation system here, no timetable. The road I take could be straight, but I may encounter a few curves. I could run all night, or I could stall out in the driveway. My pedal's firm yet flexible. So, I'll just cruise along and see where my thoughts take me.
I can't imagine an uglier little vehicle, besides the entire Scion lineup, than the 3-door Yaris. It looks like a car that left the factory without being finished yet. Its predecessor, the Echo, was a vehicle I wouldn't have taken even as a loaner car, with its too-big chassis and too-small tires. While contemplating a replacement for my aging 8th-gen Corolla, I had assumed that, unless I had need of a cargo-carrying vehicle, a Corolla would be the replacement vehicle.
But, generation X has now arrived in the Corolla line, and I'm less than impressed. Velour seating and power accessories come at a much higher price, even in the secondhand market I prefer. New Corollas are almost as much as Camrys! And Corollas have grown in size, to where they're as large as a 98 Camry.
I'm fixing up the old-timer this weekend, plugging up some leaks, treating it to new tires, belts and plugs, all to the tune of around $2K. While it's in the shop, the dealer is loaning me a 2008 Pacific Blue Yaris sedan with black interior, as basic as basic can be. What a surprise!
First, what a difference a back end makes. This is a handsome little sedan that's just about the same size of the old-timer. However, it seems twice as big on the inside because of the snub nose freeing up all the cabin space - you cannot even see the hood from the inside! Secondly, it drives great. Of course, it's not Buick quiet (no car is), but it handles railroad tracks very capably (and has a tire pressure sensor in case a nail gets in there).
I'm looking with new eyes at Yaris as a worthy successor to Corolla. Mind you, I'd prefer a car with velour seats, foam-padded steering wheel, POWER WINDOWS, and cruise, but unlike cars in the past, or as recently as ten years ago, even basic transportation doesn't mean I have to suffer. Yaris will take me to work or to the store in relative comfort. I can buy a steering wheel cover if I hate the feel of the plastic wheel, but on the other hand, it's a better quality plastic than, say, Chevrolet uses in their Cobalt, and that goes for the basic cloth seating, too. Chevrolet's seats feel like thin bedsheets, while the Toyota cloth is much better quality.
But Yaris is really going to need an overdrive gear to get the highway mileage up to the level it should be, which makes me believe Yaris to be strictly a city/suburban car. The only other choice would be to go to a manual - and who on earth wants to do that? Well, it's not as if I haven't driven one before, right?
If I were to buy a Yaris, I would like a blue one like my loaner, because it's a very attractive medium blue. It's not electric blue, it's not cobalt blue, but a nice "French" blue. It's the same color as my Alpine blue dinnerware that I got from Pier 1 Imports that I love. Then, I'd want NO CRANK WINDOWS. I'd want power windows and door locks. I love the central positioning of the gauges, but I'd really prefer an analog fuel gauge to the digital one. I'd then want an automatic overdrive transmission to help with that highway mileage. Granted, for the suburban driving I do, which seldom exceeds 50mph, it's fine as is, but again for road trips, the RPMs are going to be just too high without it. Finally, I need window tinting, air conditioning, a rear defroster, and something other than black on the interior color, especially in Oklahoma. In fact, I'd prefer a very pale gray or a beige interior to go with the Pacific Blue exterior.
From that basic layout, I'd have a very comfortable Yaris at a good price point - possibly the same price point from which I bought my old-timer ten years ago. I can't see paying what they want for a Corolla nowadays. It could be that Yaris would all I really need in a car. And if I hadn't taken my car in for service, and just judged Yaris by the hideous little 3-door model, I would have never found this out.
There's nothing like getting into your car on a cold January day, turning the key, and worrying about the crowd there's going to be at the SuperTarget, as opposed to getting into your car, turning the key, and hoping the car will start, wondering what else will go wrong today. Other than the time almost three years ago when the starter solenoid died, my 1998 Toyota Corolla has never made me worry about whether or not it will start. It has seen numerous show and ice storms and gotten me through unscathed, and I have gotten it through unscathed as well.
I have never garaged it, and so it has suffered some from our hailstorms and from my teenage and young adult neighbors at my apartment complex, who generally have no respect for property not their own. I even have a scrape on my hood that was obviously a gift from someone at SuperTarget who backed up a little too far into their parking space. These things are to be expected. After all, not everybody can afford a house with a garage, a lot of us are apartment and condo dwellers, and we don't all have the space to work on our cars even if we wanted to, and some of us even have to outsource the cleaning of our cars. So a car that presents few problems is a worthy investment. Corolla has been branded as "bland", but what's wrong with that, so long as the car functions as it was designed to? In the words of Jack Nicholson, do I want to "drive it or buy it a dress?!"
What I want to do, right now, is get in my car, turn the key, and go to 7-11 and get a coffee. And I don't want to think about my car while I'm doing so. I think ideally I wouldn't need a car at all; I do care about the carbon footprint I'm leaving, and don't feel my needs supersede those of the planet. But I don't live in a very walkable community, and buses are few or at inconvenient hours. So I'm happy to drive, and even happier to not worry about whether what I'm driving is going to let me down. If I tool all around town and come home after dark safely without ever thinking once about the car, then it's done the job I bought it to do.
No dress required.
Now the question is, is this my next car? Currently, I have a generation 8 Corolla, now ten years old and showing its age. It has a cassette player, for God's sake, and I want an iPod player so that I'm not carrying around CD to melt in the hot Oklahoma sun. (Of course all CDs meant for use in the car should always be copies of the originals.) It has developed a leak, and the red puddles are annoying and messy. I could invest in fixing it, but I could also invest in new safety equipment in a car for the next ten years of my life. I would like a new car, because I anticipate moving soon. The Corolla is a sedan. A hatchback or a wagon would be just the ticket, as I am single, live by myself in an apartment, and don't have the facilities for more than one car.
Never being one for making snap decisions, I've been looking since last summer, when the transmission leak made itself manifest. My car's generation was the last good looking generation. I always found generation 9, while undeniably reliable, was just kind of an odd shape. Generation X, especially the one I saw on Thursday, has got me drooling for a car again. This is the car that should have replaced the 8th generation, I believe, and Motor Trend's interior shots of the Corolla show a beautiful, understated interior. I don't need steering wheel controls, in fact they're more trouble than they're worth. If you change your stereo, they are rendered useless! I would have another CE, but make sure it has power windows. That's all I insist on, really. Compared to my old-timer, the new one is very well equipped standard. It's a car, a tool, something to get me from Point A to Point B in safety and relative comfort. I won't be living in it as if it were an RV. I never, ever buy new, but a program car will be available before the spring, perhaps! Maybe I will find one for under $15K like my current car was.
But what about in the meantime? Before I saw the new Corolla, I was just about set on the Nissan Versa. Pontiac Vibe and Matrix lost because neither comes in a light-colored interior, and I still find the Matrix ugly after all these years. Hyundai's Elantra is stylish, but limited by the lack of a hatch. Plus, forum trips revealed speedometer problems, and above all there was this nagging feeling that I was somehow betraying Toyota by risking money and time on another brand of car. I've had nothing buy Toyota product, one disguised as a Chevrolet, since 1987 - the last 20 years. I feel safe with Toyota - as a woman, this is important to me. I've been scouring Carmax's lot since summer waiting for just the right one to show up (I'm not fooling with transfer fees, thank you). I even contemplated driving to Kenosha, Wisconsin for new Toyota or flying to Maryland for the new Nissans and driving my new car back home. It's just not fair that I can't get good deals close to home. And I hate car dealers with a purple passion. At any rate, for three months Carmax had a 2007 Kia Optima that was gorgeous and surprisingly well equipped - but a sedan. I made a couple of e-mail inquiries about it, and it was gone within the week after I had done so. That's the way to move cars, I suppose!
I suppose I can keep topping up the transmission until the next thing goes wrong while I wait for an affordable 09 to show up at CarMax or, heaven forbid, a traditional dealer or private owner. I could go ahead and get a "meantime car", like the Versa. As a single woman in a city with no bus service, I can't stress the importance of a car I don't have to worry about. If they won't sell the Corolla Fielder wagon here and insist on the Matrix being our only option...I suppose another sedan won't kill me.
Thursday, January 17, 2008, I saw the new 2009 Toyota Corolla. Instead of affirmation, I got hate from the Edmunds forums, especially from a poster with a host tag who wasn't even host of that particular forum. Well, I learned a long time to pay attention whom to take your orders from; at work just because someone's head of a department doesn't make him YOUR boss. kirstie_h is not the boss of me, nor can she take away what I saw. She can't prove I didn't see the car, and neither can everyone else.
I think it's great that here in Oklahoma City, a place nobody cares about because it's far away from New York City or even Detroit, a charcoal gray metallic 09 Corolla is roaming our streets, albeit with a Texas tag. I'm going to call around to the four Toyota dealers in the area, Bob Howard Toyota, Dub Richardson Toyota, Fowler Toyota, and Hudiburg Toyota, and see which one of them the car was visiting.
The car could have been given to a reporter in order that they can write about it in a New Car Review. I put those together for The Oklahoman, the state's largest newspaper, which means I could be seeing it again soon!
Ah, but it was like a ghost. I was on Santa Fe avenue between 2:30 and 2:45 in the afternoon, on my way back to the Broadway Extension when I saw the back end of a midsize sedan that was decidedly NOT the distinctive rounded back end of the Camry. Maybe in my sights all of ten seconds before I realized what it was, then off on the Kilpatrick entrance ramp and gone.
Can I be sure it was Corolla? The only sure things in life, it seems, is the hateful, self-centeredness of human beings, and the wonderful fact that they, like all the rest of us, will die. But looking at Motor Trend's photos of the 09, especially the rear views, I'm confident I was less than two car lengths from the generation X Corolla.
Sometimes you take a photograph without realizing what you've captured. Doesn't the stereo to my 98 Corolla look happy? I can't really explain the glowing "mouth". SOMETHING caught the light just right, that's for sure! This was taken with my Olympus FE-100 digital camera, at the parking lot of SuperTarget in Edmond, Oklahoma at about 8:30 or 9 at night. I often drive over there and just sit in the car for some much-needed peace - as well as to watch the cars as they pull in and out! Night photos are so interesting with a low-end digital camera in that you never get what you set out to! This time out, though, the illumination of the stereo was downright eerie! My car has one of the last of the cassette players, but it's the part below that, where the digital radio dial is, that is casting such an eerie glow. I can't remember, now, whether I used a flash, but I kind of think not. I hate the way flash washes out a photo, and I oftentimes do without if I think the natural lighting is enough, even at night. My Olympus does have a night setting that at times seems rather useless, but at other times makes me want to jump for joy!
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