Goodbye to an Old Friend
I bought my Toyota Camry XLE brand new off the lot at San Francisco Toyota in August 2014. Cami, as I soon named her, was top of the Camry line for the time. She had advanced features that were to become standard in many cars but were then considered quite high end, including blind-spot monitoring and a door lock-unlock system that operated just by grasping the door handle (unlock) or running a finger along the edge of the door handle (lock). She had all the bells & whistles of the day, including a smallish but clear LED screen, backup camera and rear monitoring, nice sound system, all that. Cami was a hot chick, automotively speaking.
She drove like a dream, silky smooth and unruffled. I bought the model with a big V6 engine since I lived in San Francisco at the time and figured that even with her relatively low mileage it wouldn't be an issue. And it wasn't, until I moved out to the inland East Bay and started spending time on the freeways. Then the problems with her 25 mpg maximum (often less than that) got me thinking. Not to mention the $5.00+ gas of today's California living.
Over the years she continued to run smoothly but, as is the nature of things, needed fixes. New tires twice. A new windshield, courtesy of a rock careening through the air on Highway 4. New tire-inflation sensors, since they poop out after about seven years. Two car battery replacements over a 12-year period, about average. The usual round of oil changes, a change of transmission fluid. On the whole, awfully good for a dozen-decade-old vehicle.
But her tech was borderline obsolete. She lacked adaptive cruise control or any modern features like lane centering, lane assist, or collision avoidance. She couldn't use Apple CarPlay, and her functionality on Bluetooth didn't go much beyond phone calls; for music she required a plug-in USB connection. Her navigation system still worked but it was out of date. She could no longer respond to voice commands. When the GPS gave driving directions she started cutting off the ends of sentences. And the screen was very small by modern standards. And so forth and so on: she had been a glamour girl in her day, but her day was gone.
I might have kept soldiering on with her, since she still drove beautifully and provided me with comfortable transportation and a surprising amount of elemental power for what is fundamentally a little old lady's car. But something more sinister started popping up: the 'check engine light' would go on, but corresponding error codes didn't point to anything a service tech could identify as actually defective. 'Twas a mystery.
Perhaps Cami had begun hallucinating a bit in her dotage. That wasn't any big deal, except that the error codes tended to effect her operation—such as the in-car computer putting her in 'limp mode' in which she was restricted to only a few gears. In brief, it was time to say goodbye. She remained a worthy car in practically every way and still commanded a good, solid trade-in value of about 1/3 of her original price, awfully good for a 12-year-old car.
I traded her in on a Lexus RX350h, and I couldn't be happier. I've named him Ricky, and he promises to be every much as faithful a companion/servant as Cami, probably for even longer. He's got the latest suite of great bells and whistles, and in levels of comfort he's miles beyond Cami. Which is as it should be: I went seriously upscale with Ricky. He's a Lexus. 'Nuff said.
I think that Cami probably has a good future ahead of her. Her encroaching senile dementia needs to be identified and cured, but beyond that, she remains a damn good car.
Having delivered Cami off to her destiny, I'm shacking up with the oh-so-suave Ricky, with his stellar Lexus engineering and design, his industry-busting reliability ratings, and his utterly competent serenity. Not to mention his hybrid powertrain and superb fuel economy; almost 600 miles on a tank of gas. I'm in awe of Ricky's beauty, quality, and competence. And I have no doubt that over time I'll develop as close a relationship to him as I had to Cami, who served me so well for so long. But I hope that, as she embarks on her next chapter, Cami appreciates just what a high-class automotive act I deemed appropriate for her successor.
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