History Repeats & Its Name is Mustang
A New Electric Vehicle's Siren Song Includes an Familial Chorus
Buying a new car is the worst “investment” anyone can make. I’ve read that many times and I believe it, hence a lifelong history of buying only dealer models or used cars. Except during the pandemic.
That was when I “grabbed” a 2021 Toyota Highlander off a lot in Glens Falls. With car factories shut down and a scarcity of computer chips delaying production of new cars, I drove by the dealership and saw a brand-new Highlander sitting on the lot, a Holy Grail of the automotive sector in a barren wasteland of for-sale vehicles.
Hello, Covid-driven impulse buy.
The sticker price for the Highlander was north of $45,000, defrayed a bit by trading in my beloved Acura TSX wagon that everyone (Diane) said was too small and too low to the ground to safely drive on the highway.
Besides, with the world shut down, with museums and restaurants closed and public spaces off limits and our psyches wrecked, the new Highlander was going to be our ticket to long, safe rides to beaches and mountains — any place we could go without threat of Covid annihilation.
The new car wasn’t just a new car. It was like the last helicopter out during the fall of Saigon. We grabbed hold and were prepared to ride that overpriced, gas-guzzling baby to better times.
Well, here we are. Better times! (Maybe.)
The world is moving again at warp speed, in some not so good. Climate change is changing coastlines and weather patterns. Elon Musk is big-footing our collective consciousness.
Yet in other ways, there are glimmers of hope. MAGA got beaten back a bit at the 2022 midterm elections. Innovation and new technology are presenting us with ways to move forward and solve some of our big problems.
I am reminded of this every time I turn on the TV and see the ubiquitous ad for the Chevy Bolt.
“Daddy, what’s the future?” the little girl asks wide-eyed and full of wonder from the rear seat as her father navigates the road in his electric vehicle.
The future! It’s coming!
Is it going to be better than we think?
I think of that little kid’s face in the back of the Bolt EV and feel like a total loser. I am letting down the kids!
Defeated, I realize a better future won’t be because of me!
I think about the big-ass SUV that gets 28 miles to the gallon tops on the highway that I have sitting in my garage and realize: My pandemic purchase up against this spate of new electric vehicles has trapped me in a disconcerting dance between the past and future.
The Test Drive Was On
I’m not gear head by any means, but I have always had a fairly healthy fascination with the automobile. Maybe it’s part of my genetic code.
My great grandfather, who I never met, was a cruise ship steward with the White Star Line, the British shipping company that made comfort an option for transatlantic passengers. When Frederick Spencer retired from the Liverpool, England-based company, he moved his family, including my paternal grandmother May Spencer, to Coxsackie, New York where he purchased a large and handsome home and three surrounding farm properties, one in Coxsackie and two in New Baltimore.
With his apparent penchant for adventure and entrepreneurialism, my great grandfather must have also decided it was either good business or exciting or both to become part of the expanding availability of motor cars.
It was movement spurred by Ford, which began producing the Model T in 1908, so by early 1920’s, my great grandfather Frederick Spencer started bringing Ford Model Ts to upstate New York for sale or distribution.
Produced from 1908 through 1926, the Ford Model T was called in 1999 the Car of the Century, because it provided “inexpensive transportation on a massive scale, but also because the car signified innovation for the rising middle class and became a powerful symbol of the United States' age of modernization.”
To think of my Irish-born great grandfather by way of Liverpool landing in upstate New York as a “retiree” so he could buy a handsome house, farmland and start his own sort of car business: It’s what America is all about — except for or maybe including the absolutely tragic result.
Upon driving a Ford up from New York City, my great grandfather hit a tree that was notoriously poorly placed on one of those early parkways. The accident was serious, and his injuries fatal.
After several days in an Albany hospital, Fred Spencer died — leaving my grandmother without her beloved father by age 15 and resulting in the sale of the Coxsackie house and farms for a move down to a new house in Queens.
Lee Iacoccoa Gave Me a Mustang Gram
Fifty years after my great-grandfather’s Ford car accident and death, the power and influence of the Ford Motor Company was again made clear to me.
This time, it was the “roaring” 1960’s, when the post-war boom was exploding in Long Island’s middle-class housing development Levittown. That’s where my grandparents lived, since my mother’s father worked at Grumman Aerospace. As an engineer, Dick Mase had a personal and professional appreciation for anything that was well built and went fast.
This is how my grandmother came to own not one but two Ford Mustangs. The first one was red. The second one was yellow.
For more than a decade, from the early 1960s through the 1970s, the successive presence of these two handsome muscle cars painted the suburban landscape for me in a deep way. We all have memories that run through our minds like a favorite movie or TV show. That’s how it is with my childhood stays with my grandmother and her Mustangs.
Trim, energetic, a former model and a world-class seamstress and cook, my grandmother was running a hectic house with three of her five kids still at home by the time I came around. While my grandfather parked his big Monte Carlo in the driveway for easy access to the house — he has polio as a kid and one leg was significantly damaged by the illness — my grandmother’s Mustangs were always parked right out in front.
For years, the red then the yellow Mustangs were the first things you saw when you looked out the kitchen window. The Mustangs were like sculptures — big, bold works of American ingenuity, suitable for constant admiration, if not worship.
As morning turned to afternoon and evening, the Mustangs were in the middle of everything! Stick ball games were played around the Mustang, with the driver’s-side door serving as third base. During games of tag and hide and seek, touching the hood of the Mustang was home base. You were safe!
That made it very noticeable whenever my grandmother did one of her errands. These were her escape runs from the kid-riddled home, the Mustang transporting her to the sanctuary of the grocery market or JC Penney or Sears or the fabric store. When she was gone, there was a big, empty spot on the street where the Mustang usually sat.
The scene remains vivid: My grandmother would hurry to the street, reach in her pocketbook for the keys, drop her trim frame into the car’s low leather bucket seat and turn the ignition.
The car let out a huge, gurgling cough. Smoke would sputter out from the tailpipe. The entire body of the car shook and shimmied with the power of the Mustang’s massive V-8 engine.
In a fast-changing world of a rising American middle class, and for my grandmother, Lee Iacocca in the 1960s delivered.
“The design teams had been given five goals for the design of the Mustang: It would seat four seats, weigh no more than 2,500 pounds, sell for less than $2,500 and it would have multiple power, comfort, and luxury options.”
It worked! The luxury the Mustang afforded my grandmother was how it helped her escape her kids and grandkids in a heady, fuel-soaked plume of exhaust. It was her super power. Her muscle car, indeed!
Elon Musk’s Tesla is Not An Option, But a Ford EV?
Last week, during an errand that took me on a drive from Saratoga to Albany, I passed a Ford dealership. There, in the lot, sat a bright blue Ford Mach-E like an Easter egg glowing in a field.
Wait, what? Over the past year or two, the hype of and the demand for electric vehicles has become so intense, sales outpace inventory by months. There’s never an EV sitting on a dealership lot, unclaimed. What was going on?
I pulled off the highway and circled back. The sales manager said the Mach-E had been a special order last spring, but by the time the car was built and delivered, the guy who put down a deposit for it had changed his mind.
“Do you want to drive it?” he asked.
Hell yes. I did. I was more than ready.
After mounting pressure by carmakers to infiltrate my consumer and environmentally-conscious psyche, I had become increasingly aware that it time for us to get on board with an EV. In fact, it was becoming an obsession.
Within seconds, I had the Mach-E off the lot and on the highway and to my great pleasure and sense of dread, the ride was thrilling. This electric Mustang was bold and fast and fun and clean and quiet and …
Quiet!
I can’t oversell what a strange but compelling sensation it was to be driving a Mustang that can execute 60 miles-per-hour acceleration without that ear-thrumming torque and twang that my grandmother’s gas-powered Mustang produced.
And gone was that pungent smell of gasoline, so thick you could taste it. Horsepower & Petrol, the cologne of American carmakers … until now.
Nope. This is not my grandmother’s Mustang. Yet, isn’t it? A new era of design and transportation and freedom defined by new technology to meet the needs of today and tomorrow?
I wanted this thing. Now. And if it hadn’t been such an alarming shade of bright blue, maybe I would have done it, even though I know for sure cars really are a “bad” investment.
But that’s not the half of it. In fact, it’s none of it. Cars are nostalgia and the future all in one promising and gleaming creation.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the ride in Heidi’s Tesla. I think that’s what what whetted your appetite to go test out EVs. Anyway, go read the recent New York Times story about EVs and I think it might convince you to wait a bit.
In 1964 my father must have been going thru a mid life crisis and over a period of a few weeks he brought home a Jaguar XKE, a Corvette and a 1964 4 speed stick shift Red Mustang convertible! He settled on the Mustang as our 2nd car!!. He drove a big Pontiac most of the time but this was his country club car as well as my moms and older
sibs ride . I was only 10 but my brother was 16 and he quickly became the coolest guy in high school as he convinced my mom to let him take it to school regularly.