I’ve been driving a 2009 Honda CRV since 2011. It was my dad’s car, I inherited it and got rid of my Subaru Forester because the CRV was better. I planned to drive it until the wheels fell off which is a practical thing to do maybe if you live in a place without a punishing winter. The CRV has needed a lot of little, normal fixes but some of it was body work and belts that still sounded funny and at the end of the day I am a person who could afford a new car more than I could afford to be stuck on the side of the road in 15 degree weather. Or, rather could afford a new-to-me car because I had a pretty specific set of requirements and one was that the car had to have as little privacy-violating tech as possible and that’s easier in an older car.

So, after a lot of poking around in places like Carmax (usually a great idea but also the nearest one is in Manchester NH) and a lot of texting with dealers and their AI agents about this and that car, I finally settled on a 2019 CRV. I had only bought a car from a dealer once before and it was 20+ years ago and even though it was a no-haggle dealer my experience was not great: a lot of high pressure nonsense and some of that “Oh I’m disappointed you are making that decision” static. Just the usual “I’m pretty uninterested in your consent” stuff that many people get from salespeople. I have a natural pleaser-type personality so that sort of thing is fairly rough for me.

This new dealer was fine. I got to do a test drive on my own. I got a reasonable amount of money (less than I wanted, but not by a lot) for my trade-in. I went home, thought it over, negotiated a slightly lower price and made sure floor mats were included. I did not get an extended warranty, fancy undercoating, or whatever else they were offering to sell me. The kid who signed the paperwork with me was 23 and had graduated from the college in my town and grew up around the corner from my old barn so we had a nice time talking. It was amusing to watch him wrestle with the dot matrix printer which was, for inexplicable reasons, part of this process.

This car is as much like my old car as a newer car could be. It does have an onboard computer which I don’t love but, like all computers, I am going to make bend to my will eventually. It’s okay to not require consent from computers. The reverse is not okay. I’ve been watching YouTube videos about how to get at the internal mechanics of the thing and I give myself about a 90% chance of not bricking it. I decided to buy it on Saturday and brought it home on Monday and each day I’ve tried to learn a thing about it. Today’s thing: CarPlay. I hear it’s pretty good.

I’m a person who hates spending money for some “my dumb childhood” kind of reason so I’d been putting this decision off for a long time. Now that it’s been made, instead of my usual “I’ve made a big mistake” regrets, all I feel is that I should have done this sooner.