Car Culture Shock

A week before my Defensive Driving course, I finally closed a deal. After plenty of due diligence I made my move. I used eBay’s “Buy It Now” function to purchase a green 1996 Subaru Outback Sport. I’d bought a car! But the transaction was far from done. In addition to transferring the title, driving the car home, registering it and inspecting it, there were two other obstacles. The first was the insurance. I had to buy insurance for my new car before I could complete the purchase and drive it home. The nightmare had come true. A whopping insurance rate.

Why, you ask, did I not wait to purchase a car until I had taken the course and reduced my points. Actually, I had discovered that the Defensive Driving course would cut down my points so far as the Department of Motor Vehicles was concerned, but they would still appear on my record and would result in hefty insurance rates whether I took the course or not. Either I had been misinformed or I had misunderstood. My car purchase could have happened long ago!

The second obstacle was arranging to pick up the car in a small town in the Pennsylvania Poconos. From Manhattan, where I have been spending about half of my time since returning to the US in June, I was driven about an hour and a half west to Broadheadsville where I met with the seller at a title transfer agency. In less than an hour I drove away with my new-to-me Subaru Sport.

I had bought a car online. Most of the anxiety I had felt during the past week diminished as I drove through rural Pennsylvania. Most, but not all. It still remained to see what the Subaru mechanics at home would say. But with each passing mile the worries subsided.

I began tracking my miles per gallon, and by the end of the week, returning from my second day of the Defensive Driving class with a newly inked certificate in hand, I was able to confirm definitively that my new car consistently got at least thirty miles to the gallon. Several days later, I arrived at the Subaru dealership for a “twenty seven point inspection” or some such thing. They went over my green machine with a fine-toothed comb, changed the wiper blades, changed the fluids, checked the wear on the tires, and returned an unusual verdict. She was in amazing condition! And the invoice for everything came in under what they had estimated due to a standard prognosis for a Subaru of similar year and model. I drove away from the dealership feeling pretty damned pleased.

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