We had a remarkably un--relaxing day, starting with a trip to Urgent Care--I swear one of us is in there every 3 weeks lately--for a doctor to get a painful speck of something out of Anna's eye. (She's fine.) Then we had an appointment to buy a car, because one day the station wagon didn't start, thus calling attention to the frayed seat belts and other signs of wear and tear. So we bought a car.
I buy cars so rarely that I forget how many hours it takes, even without financing. I'm pretty sure even buying the house didn't involve 4 hours of sitting around.
The newest member of the family is a 2016 Dodge Grand Caravan SXT, named "Appa." He looks like this:
We did the test drive yesterday, and today we were just going to check out the fancier version (the R/T) to see if it was worthwhile. It's
possible we could have tolerated the red-stitching-on-black-leather upholstery, but the deal-killer was that the leather meant the middle seats have a sizeable hard bump going right into the base of your neck. On the SXT's cloth seats, the bump is soft, so you don't notice it. The R/T also has a bunch of storage compartments running down the center, which lower the roof by an inch or two: clearly a downside with a child who's likely to top 6'2" before he graduates high school.
On reflection, the only thing we
really liked about the R/T was the upgraded center console with the Bluetooth integration and digital temperature display, and that's usually the sort of thing added for less money than the R/T would have cost. Even if we can't get the OEM console installed, the Bay Area has a healthy culture of car modification, so there are a few dozen places to call about upgrades.
Hilariously, I learned to drive on a Dodge Grand Caravan. The family had gotten an original (not-Grand) Caravan, but my parents insisted on a manual transmission, back when that was both possible and not
quite unreasonable: automatic transmissions were sold as a feature, but were often real shit-piles to drive. Of course, the manual only came on a V-4, which could have been okay if you weren't hauling stuff, but then why are you buying a minivan? And we were hauling stuff. Three boys, our friends, skis, bicycles, you name it, until our annual trip to Cape Cod saw this gasping little engine towing a 17-foot sailboat (probably pushing 1,200 pounds with the trailer) and
everyone's bicycles at once, plus clothes and kitchen equipment, everything you needed to bring three children to the beach for three weeks, back in the days when books were paper and computers were large and expensive.
It sort of worked. Usually with the A/C turned off.
I don't remember if the Caravan died or just became intolerable, but the family's next car was...a
Grand Caravan! with the coveted V-6, and the begrudged automatic transmission. That was what I drove, when I drove, and I was pretty good at it (as much as an 18-year old can be). I knew where its sides and corners were, what it would or wouldn't do.
The 2016 model drives
exactly the same as I remember. Stronger engine, modern automatic transmission that doesn't suck, better tires and suspension etc., but fundamentally the same size with the same brick-on-wheels shape. You can lay flat a stack of 4'x8' sheets of plywood. You can carry 5 large teenagers and their swimming gear. You can tow 3,600 pounds (handy, since a trailer is how you'd take 5 large teenagers camping). Other features, besides the remarkably ugly front grille:
- The seats have this Super Stow 'N Go™ system, where there's 12 cubic feet of storage under the floor, which is also where the seats fold into, creating the 160 cubic feet for plywood-stacking.
- I grew up helping to reconfigure minivan interiors by unlocking the seats and maneuvering them out the single sliding door, which is exactly as much fun as it sounds. (If you think about where you would store 2 bench seats when not in use, you'll probably find fewer than you were thinking.)
- En route to folding into the floor, the rear bench seat flips over to provide seats facing out the (presumably open at that point) tailgate.
- Not only is there a sliding door on both sides, they and the tailgate are motorized, openable from the keyfob, and you are specifically enjoined from opening or closing them by hand.
- By extension, I assume this doesn't have the "shit, we parked facing uphill and now it's hard to close the sliding door" problem.
- With less confidence, I assume there's some kind of safety mechanism to prevent the robotic doors from closing on people.
- It has a kind of "Eco" button which claims to extract higher gas mileage in exchange for reduced performance.
- The roof rack, which sucks up a few mpg on the current car, has tool-free (dis)assembly into slots in the roof.
Since Appa is replacing a 25-year old Corolla wagon ("Molly"), we had several years to research replacements. I was surprised to find that most SUVs won't hold as much total cargo+people as a minivan, and many SUV towing capacities are pretty weak. We were less surprised to find that our desires to travel SUV-required roads are transient enough that we can just rent one as needed.
Here's to never again cracking my head against the Toyota's anemic tailgate that doesn't raise up the final few inches unless you push it. Thanks for the years and years of service, Molly.
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