Self-doubt, Sartre, Saab 900 S, and the Economics of Ditching Your Ride

1993 Saab 900s

Hej Hej Gamling

At the end of March I knew that it was time to say goodbye to my 1991 Saab 900S. I had spent way more than the Saab’s retail value in the weeks preceding the acknowledgement of the end. This led to confusion and pain. Every car lover must submit to the entropy of life and realize that the existence of their beloved ride relies on maintenance and repair. These expenses are often embraced and we allow ourselves to project a kind of affection upon our vehicles. We have pseudo-emotional relationships with the rolling hunks of rubber and steel and repairs seem a kind of care and feeding. But given the right rate of repair and increasingly deeper forays into reserve funds we sour an in turn feel as though we have been scorned by not just our beater/classic but by fate—Why all this money? Why right now? I began to contrast my plans for the 900 (every car lover has plans for their ride—no matter how humble) with the opportunity costs of supporting the ailing Swedish drama queen. I amortized schedules of repairs and compared them with hypothetical car payments. I found the numbers to be close. Plus, wasn’t the 900 pretty shabby to begin with? What is the sense of polishing a turd—even a turd that had served well for 20,000 tough miles in the last year and projected a vision of not just Scandinavian thriftiness, but adventure and design too. Had the Saab not earned its keep for a little while? Christ! It wasn’t even a turbo—just an S! The marginal paint. The cracked dash. Not all that characterful really. Was I the kind of car lover that could roll in a beater forever, never admitting that it was not a classic but still feeling pretty special? Like a deranged Fiero owner? Like anyone with a trailer queen? I am not that car owner. I have no affinity for a particular car. I’m not cosmically offended if you don’t keep up the shine on you Lambo. I don’t believe that the relationship between man and a car is a truly emotional one—there is no essence to it and no morality. The only relationship is one that we create of our own accord w/ourselves. What we allow the car to say about ourselves and what pleasure we derive from it. This is the existential crux of car ownership.

That old Swede can’t hold me back.

So, the decision was made. And after the fact it seemed like an even worse idea than it had before I’d sorted out the lingering emotional ghosts and busted them off into Sartre-land. How could I spend all the fix-up money and then dump it? Should I not have just planned and saved? Really stupid. Right? Well it took a while, but then I thought of F.A. Hayek. Hayek believed that the real heart of the economy (and thus the massive web of decisions made everyday and everywhere) was information and knowledge. Prices are signals. And these signals allow diverse individuals to coordinate their plans. And the simple truth is: before getting the signal that the old 900 was getting quite long in the tooth by way of repair bills, I simply couldn’t know that it was time. The prices were the signal. But they didn’t exist a priori. They needed to happen in order for the realization to happen. In The Use of Knowledge in Society Hayek was speaking about groups of individuals but surely we all have to coordinate our lives in this piecemeal way: the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. A little heavy for GGGP but it’s a deep insight. I came to understand that it is OK to make mistakes. We do not always have the facilities to make perfect decisions on the first attempt. Sometimes the perfect car is not the one we have right now. Maybe the next car will reveal itself as such. But will we know that while the car is with us? Ask Christopher about the Alfa.