I never thought I’d be the type to drive a middle-of-the-road sedan, let alone white one with a bog standard interior and enhanced safety features. I mean, come on… who needs a thing that beeps when you start drifting out of your lane, except people who shouldn’t be driving in the first place? And yet, here I am. The most confronting bit is that I actually chose this travesty of my own free will.
Why? Because I need to hop around town reliably, efficiently and unassumingly, rarely venturing out of the city and almost never onto unsealed roads. At the end of the day, that seems to frame me as precisely the sort of person you’d expect to own a car like mine, and I guess it’s time for me to accept that. But I just can’t shake the image of myself as the owner of a devastatingly cool and wholly impractical vehicle, such as a classic Cadillac with engine mods and flame decals.
On the plus side, owning a car like mine makes things easy when it comes to maintenance. If I need, say, a mechanic shop near Bentleigh to help me out with a short-notice fix, I can have that sorted out in a matter of minutes. I daresay this would not be the case if I had that vintage convertible of my imaginings. No one would have the parts in stock – that’s if they’re even available on the market, which they’re probably not – and I’d bet my bottom dollar that many technicians wouldn’t want to go near it.
It’s not even as though specialist auto work is hard to come by in Bentleigh. Auto electrical services, in particular, seem to be ahead of the game around these parts – maybe because there are so many people who, like me, own cars with new-fangled digital lane control systems, bluetooth interfaces and the like. But at the end of the day, automotive workshops are specialising in new technology, not old stuff – no matter how cool it might be.