Sorry for the Group Email

So you’re a backpacker, looking to recreate Jack Kerouac’s great American roadtrip through the United States. Renting a car is expensive, and what better way to make the trip than in an emotionally-resonant, self-bought jalopy?

You’ll need a few things first, of course. The first is some money; the second is a local classified paper, and the third is an American.

In New Zealand and Australia, the used car market, and relevant government agencies, are perfectly-formed for tourists. Buying a car is the work of a few days, and you don’t need to have an Australian address, credit card, or drivers’ licence to do it.

The United States, for all its allure for tourists, and enormous tourist industry (we contributed two out of thirty-nine million visitors to the United States so far this year), isn’t particularly well-built for those with time to kill and ambitious plans. You might be able to rent a car, for instance, and you get ninety days with American’s visa waiver program, but the two won’t co-exist happily if you’re on a budget.

Of course, to buy a car, you need to find one first.

Cars are not something that have ever been particularly on my radar. I know what I like and I understand, roughly, how they work. (It’s something to do with internal conjunctions, is it not?) I used to drive a van for a living, but the thing about driving someone else’s car is that it doesn’t really matter how it works. If it breaks down, or the wheels fall off, or the engine catches fire, it isn’t your problem. When I drove my van, I did – once – have the good sense to demand that the tyres be replaced, but that was only because the cables beneath the rubber was showing and we were gliding to a graceful halt at red lights.

So we recruited Mike.

Mike is Jordan’s dad. Jordan is Mendy’s best friend.

Mike has a crushing handshake and a terrific sense of humour, and knows a thing or two about cars to boot. So we loaded him into the back of our borrowed car and headed to a dealership in Champaign, Illinois.

We struck gold instantly. The dealership was selling a five year old Chevrolet Cavalier with a hundred and forty thousand miles on the clock, and with Mike’s help we duly negotiated a selling price of $3,100. The sole problem was that the title was a hundred miles away.

The title, for those who have never bought a car in America, is the single most important document you can have. It signifies your ownership of the car, and without it you can’t register it with the state, you can’t pay road tax, and you can’t sell it.

So, our price agreed and half of the forms filled in, we shook hands with the owner of the lot, who swore to call us the next day once the title had arrived in the post.

The next day came and went, and a call to the dealer in the afternoon revealed no title yet – but soon, tomorrow, most likely.

By the next morning, tired of waiting, we called our friendly dealer again.

There was a long pause.

“Man, that car’s gone.”

“I’m sorry?”

I become Hugh Grant when I’m annoyed.

“Yeah, ma dad must’ve sold it yesterday.”

“But we had an agreement. We’d filled out the forms!”

“Yeah, I don’t know what to tell ya. Maybe you could come in an’ we’ll give you a deal on another car.”

What to tell us, for a start, would have been a profuse, grovelling, humiliated apology and the offer of something spectacular: a three grand Ferrari or something of the like.

We were furious. We had been expecting to drive our car away from the dealership that day, and instead we were left carrying three thousand dollars in cash around with us and no keys.

(It would, after the fact, be a pointless act of spite to name the dealership involved, so Champaign Auto Repair & Sales, of 407 S Neal St, Champaign, will remain unidentified.)

It was a lesson in absolute frustration. We hadn’t signed anything, but – I like to think – a half-filled sales form and a handshake should at least have guaranteed a “by-your-leave” before the dealership let a car we’d agreed a price on drive away.

Still, all was not lost.

We headed out to a Toyota dealership, where Mendy’s mum (or mom, in local parlance), had ground a salesman down from five thousand dollars on a 1996 Toyota Corolla to just three. Mendy’s mum is legendary at this kind of thing. And, while 1996 might sound old for a used car, bear in mind that the only thing more reliable than a second-hand Japanese car is a paperweight.

We drove for nearly an hour out to the dealership, where a short-haired man showed us to our car.

“We test all our cars before we sell ‘em,” he said proudly. “This is a great car, and it’s a Toyota, so it’s reliable.”

It started with a woof and a metallic wrangling noise.

He blinked once.

“The muffler needs some work, but we’ll get than done for ya’.”

We drove a few minutes away and crunched to a halt on a gravel car park. As the engine shut off, a small amount of dark smoke seeped from under the bonnet.

“Is that oil?” asked Mendy’s mum, a hint of incredulity in her voice.

There was a small silence.

“Think so,” said the man. “Probably no big deal, though.”

I climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

It’s hard to know where to start. The steering was unconvincingly light, and the brakes, when asked to produce a serious stop, felt squashy. I drove it for less than five minutes, then parked it back in the dealership we’d started from.

The car sighed with relief and produced another belch of burning oil and smoke.

“It needs some work,” said the man. “But it’s still a good car.”

He said that last one with a rising inflection, as if it were a question he was unsure of the answer to.

By this time we were seventy metres away, and we could still smell the burning oil.

We saw one more car: a Chevrolet Lumina that, while sufficient in the post-running burning department, pulled to the right under both acceleration and braking, and was falling apart inside. It was also huge – roughly the size of a comfortable fishing boat – and from 1996.

We kept our three grand zipped up.

By that time, it was Thanksgiving, which is when Americans get together to drink and eat a lot of turkey – think of it as a kind of pre-Christmas binge. It’s normally a time Mendy and I go to the States anyway, but while we saw friends, ate too much and dozed on the sofa, we nonetheless had the unsettling feeling of our trip time dwindling before us.

On Thanksgiving morning, we went to visit a Turkish fellow who had advertised his Honda Accord on Craigslist.

As cars went – or at least as far as the cars we’d seen already went – it was fine. Dented and scuffed on the driver’s side wheelarch, but not badly enough to hurt handling or produce noises when the wheels were at full lock.

We promised to bear him in mind, and set off home, stopping to pick up a classified ads paper.

Mendy spotted the 2003 Chevrolet Cavalier first. It was notable for its low mileage – seventy thousand miles total was the lowest of any car we’d looked at (the highest was the Honda Accord, which had been pushing a hundred and fifty thousand), and its price: at $3,500 even my lacklustre bargaining skills might be up to it.

We drove south the next day to investigate.

Illinois is flat. Exceptionally so. Once you get out of Chicago (which has in Sears Tower the world’s second-highest building) Illinois in winter is all calm, chilly cornfields which rumble past the quiet interstate highways. We drove for over an hour before we arrived at the Chevrolet.

Not only did it have low miles and an almost-acceptable price, but the Cavalier was in almost perfect shape. The body was beautifully-preserved, the oil was at the right level (the only way I know that is through Mike, of course), and it drove beautifully. It tracked nicely – which I believe means it didn’t pull either way under acceleration or braking – and its two point two litre engine pulled the car to seventy with no bother. The brakes worked, and once the engine was turned off there was no sign of smoke.

It was a keeper, and we knew it.

We bought our car for $3,100 from an exceptionally friendly lady named Sally. Sally was selling the car for her son who had moved to the Virgin Islands some time previously. The reduced price, I’m afraid to say, is testament to Sally taking pity on a rank amateur rather than my bargaining skills.

Our car found, we handed over the cash, and took the keys and the title. The last few hurdles required a little dealing with the government, and the next morning – a particularly cold Illinois morning – we arrived at the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles, for the interested).

First, we stood outside for half an hour. The Illinois DMV’s website might have announced a seven thirty opening time, but the staff hadn’t received the message.

We stomped the snow off our boots at eight in the morning.

The process of buying a used car in Illinois is astonishingly simple. You wave your title in front of a kindly person who lends you a pen to sign things with, which you later accidentally steal. You tell her what you paid for the car and she charges you the appropriate sales tax on the car - $115 for a $3,100 car. You pay for the title transfer, which is another $80 or so, with a money order from the local petrol station. Then, everything paid, you take your forms to the next desk, where a woman hands you a pair of license plates, scanning the barcode on the back as if it were a copy of the New York Times. She takes the title from you and promises that the state government will post it back soon.

A pair of plates and a registration sticker in our hands, we had parted with just over $200 on top of what we’d paid for the car.

We were car owners. We drove back to Sally’s house and picked up our new ride.

Here’s the thing about owning a car: it’s terrifying.

The first time (and every subsequent time, if you’re congenitally nervous like me), you’re not only concerned with driving – which is bad enough in itself – but also every bump, squeak and jiggle produced by the car. A car engine is complicated, you see. Hundreds of thousands of tiny little mechanical pieces, all of which working within millimetres of each other, and requiring nearly-perfect timing and precision to keep your car a useful mode of transportation, rather than a broken down hunk of scrap metal and rubber. Every single little piece of our car is now owned by us and for the first time, if it breaks, we’ll have to pay for it.

I’ve been present for the death of a car before. I was at the wheel of my dad’s car: a bright red, turbo-charged touring saloon with a top speed of about a million miles an hour and the acceleration of a rocket ship. I’d driven it precisely twice when the head gasket blew.

This presented a few problems. We were going up a narrow hill in lots of traffic with no power, for one thing. Another, what was a head gasket, and why did it mean the replacement of the entire engine?

That’s the thing with cars: it doesn’t take much to turn them into immobile wrecks, and now we owned one.

We did, however, manage to get it back to Champaign.

Next: Chicago, and the world.

Dave brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm, brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm, brrrm, brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm.

Links

For those who arrived here looking for serious information, www.dmv.org is a superb repository of state-by-state information regarding buying and registering a car in the United States.