Auf Wiedersehen geliebtes Fuchsauto

We had a an old 1989 VW Fox.

It failed it's smog test. Actually, it's emissions were OK. The timing and idle were set wrong and a smog device had a broken hose.

The magnanimous state of California will now pay for such cars to be junked. They said they'd give us $1000 to junk our car. It's a program to get smog emitting cars off the road.

The blue book on our Fox was about, oh say, $0. Too good a deal to pass up. We like having a second car, but can definitely use the savings of only having one car. The Fox was getting old and using up repair money.

We applied for the $1000 by mail and got the paperwork. Friday we went to the DMV and turned in our license plates, title and registration (we actually lost our title, but no problem because there is a simple form to sign). Then we drove to the junk place using our special one day permit that allowed us to drive w/o plates. There the car had to pass a rigorous mechanical inspection. It had to run. It had to have a front windshield and at least one front window. A couple of other trivial things to make sure California wasn't paying us to junk a pile of scrap metal. All was good.


I didn't really believe it would happen until I saw the check. "If it's too good to be true it probably is." Well, here is the check we got from the junk place!

The junk place weighed the car and gave us an official weight ticket.


And our car was gone.

I'll actually kind of miss it. I guess I'm getting sentimental in my old age. It was good to us. It had a history. Carolina's sister Rebecca bought it when she was going through a divorce. Her first husband was a jerk and wrecked her credit. We helped her finance it. Now she's married again to a very cool guy and they have two boys and lots of other vehicles. They decided to give us the Fox for free.

It was kind of meant as a car for one of our children to use at school but never really turned out that way. It was a good second car when we had lots of drivers in the house. This really helped.

It was German, well-engineered but somewhat cranky and expensive to maintain. In the end, too expensive. Still, it served us well for many years. Thanks to California we even made a profit on it!

We have a habit of getting older cars and driving them into the ground. This time we actually got some money out of it.

For the record, here are the cars I (we) have owned.

• 1972 Capri. I bought in 1980 for $1600 a couple years before we were married. Put a new engine in for under $1000. The car was Ok and peppy to drive. The rebuilt engine was cheap and never worked well. We sold it for a few hundred around 1984-85.


• 1965 Oldsmobile Cutlass. This was a favorite old car of the husband of a co-worker of mine. They heard we could use a car and sold it to us for $100 a little before we sold the Capri. We junked it a few years later, but got $30-40 for it.


• 1978 Grand Prix. We knew a person at church who helped with ministry. People gave the church cars which the church gave to those in needed. We needed a car as the Olds was dying. The church gave us the Grand Prix. Very shortly the engine went. We replaced it for something approaching $2000. It lasted several years and got us to Oregon in 1991 for our summer at the University of Oregon SIL (stuffed to the gills -- packed things in and around the kids' car seats). It died coming home from Eugene at the end of the summer. Conveniently it started having trouble after coming over the grapevine, but made it all the way home to L.A.
  


• 1986 Astro Van. That same summer of 1991 we knew our Grand Prix wasn't going to go much more. Wycliffe helped us find a van while we were in Eugene. Paid $9000 -- a good deal but way more than we were used to. It was a tremendous improvement. Very low mileage and lasted a long time. We did have to replace the transmission soon after we got it (while in Dallas in 1991). Loads of room for the kids. A great traveling car. It finally died in 2004 and we junked it (no money received).


• 1989 VW Fox. Received as gift around 2000. Sold to junk for $1000!


• 2004 Scion xB. First new car for us -- paid about $16,000. Best car ever. Lots of room for a compact. Good gas mileage. Good stereo. Keeps value. No problems mechanically. I'd buy another if they still made the same model. It's our current car.
  

Good-bye, Fox. Thanks for the memories.