Somewhere between Brigadoon and Bora Bora
Life has been good. Well, let’s just call it a nicer shade of OK with a few interesting surprises along the way.
You get out of your morning cobwebs, and walk up to your driveway knowing that the car in front of you will be your last ride ever.
After this one solitary ride, you will have to pursue other non-automotive things with your life. Reanimating the dead. Playing volleyball with Tahitian bikni models. Bringing back the ukulele and bassoon into prominence. Important things.
What car will you be driving?
Keep in mind that you won’t be damned into the Hades driven domain of public transportation. You can enjoy a motorcycle, boat, hovercraft, pretty much anything other than a car. But once your ride is over in, oh, about twenty miles or so, the clock that is your daily life will continue ticking without the daily adventures that come with four wheels.
What car will represent your personal bridge between your old life and your new life?
That’s too sad for me to contemplate.
However, I believe I’m driving my last minivan (09 Sedona), given the stations in life of my children. Being the nostalgic type, I’ll be sorry to give it up.
I don’t know exactly, but it’d probably have an Aston Martin badge on the nose.
MY last ride? Never!
Sadly though, I will most likely be buying my last W-Body Impala in a few weeks. That DOES depress me, as there’ll be no more…
Every car I’ve ever owned has been a 4 door sedan, NO MORE 4 DOOR SEDANS, I must have a hatch and 2 doors only, Mazda 2 in a few years when I can get a used one.
Hennessey twin-turbo Ford GT. I wanna go 250 mph, and that car could take me there, and if I’m not gonna drive any more cars, might as well go out with a bang.
A breathed on 200hp Miata, heading north from Bodega Bay on Highway 1 in CA, with no one in front of me. No one.
Lotus Exige through the mountains of Vermont or West Virginia.
I’m torn. Corvette, manual trans, empty highways?
1968 Cadillac Fleetwood with all the options?
Cruiser style motorcycle with plenty of power and an open road?
Don’t think 20 min is enough though Steve. It would be fun to make your last ride from Gallup, NM to Pie Town, NM for the Pie Festival. (That will take you over an hour.) Driving and pie, two things I love.
“Cruiser style motorcycle with plenty of power and an open road?”
“Keep in mind that you won’t be damned into the Hades driven domain of public transportation. You can enjoy a motorcycle, boat, hovercraft, pretty much anything other than a car.”
I would love to see a personal hovercraft sitting in traffic
Duh, silly me, I read that as I could choose anything wheeled for a last ride. Need more coffee.
Where this drive is matters a lot in the selection.
But without knowing where, my first thought was a long list of childhood dream cars, Mclarens and Lamborghini’s and Corvette’s. I own the Corvette, and I once had a 355 spyder for a weekend. Both are amazing. But if I had my last drive choices I am torn between vintage thunder like a ’67 Corvette and outrageous fury like a Ford GT. I always want to remember (until the old man pills kick in) the thunderous cacophony and rumble of a big engine small body car.
Then it hit me. My last drive should be in a rental so I can go out P.J. O’rourke style:
http://heretical.com/miscella/reptile.html
Do I have to accept it as it is? Or can I use it as a blank canvas to do with as I please?
If I have to accept it as it is, I’d take a clean late ’70s Chevy Nova four-door 9c1. That was the police model, and they built many of them as “detective’s models” with creature comforts that would make this four-door Camaro a livable ride.
If it’s a blank canvas, I want a 1986-87 Chevy Chevette. It’d be my rolling test bed for sick small-bore, go-fast stuff. Stock on the outside, way too sick on the inside.
OK, ok, I’ll go back and take my meds now …
“If it’s a blank canvas, I want a 1986-87 Chevy Chevette.”
And people think I’m crazy for my Impala love!
1969 mustang convertible 351 windsor through the santa cruz mountains ending at the ocean.
Put my ash urn in a Ferrari Daytona and I’d be happy through eternity.
Everyone is thinking it so I’ll say it, Bugatti Veyron. Why not?
If I get to keep the car and never buy another vs just drive 20 miles and be done, I would go for an Escalade ESV AWD. It can be used in nearly any situation.
Only ride… not keep…
I’d go with an Icon Bronco…and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near a road for my last 20 miles.
Something like a ’98 Cavalier. That way I won’t miss having a car.
61 Lincoln Continental convertible. Nuff said.
A Ford Taurus hearse?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/triciakilgore/7431384042/
I cannot process this hypothetical. There is no reasonable scenario in which this could occur. Enjoying my ride is too basic a joy to me to take this at face value. I just cannot understand the question. It makes me angry. What horrible cataclysmic thing has occurred on the planet to bring this about? Have aliens landed and unleashed millions of aerial drones bristling with lasers to immediately disintegrated any four-wheeled conveyance they come across? Have the governments of the world been taken over by a mind-controlling econazi? Screw this, I’m revolting. I reject your reality and substitute my own. You can have my sports car when you pry the wheel from my cold dead fingers. Chase me and I’ll Thelma-and-Louise this baby. Your scenario is too absurd, too devastating to contemplate, and the fact that you could even propose it makes me seethe with thought-numbing fury. To Hell with you.
I intend to drive a stickshift GTI on my 90th birthday.
Ariel Atom.
0-60 in 2.9 seconds!?! I want to FEEL that kind of insane speed once. I’ve been on the bullet train (Eurostar) so I’ve gone nearly 200 mph on the ground before. Granted its not the same as driving a car at those speeds but my impression of driving a car fast (130 mph) is that as you got faster things just get more blurred out the window, its louder, stuff start shaking/vibrating and your hands get sweaty… but that’s about it. However that feeling of being forced back into the seat as the rush of pure acceleration occurs as you mash the pedal – now that’s what I want.
My last ride will be likely be “whatever.” My last days will be for me, for where and for what I want to do. For who I want to spend it with. The car is just a machine that will be nothing but a servant, and will not be the focal point of the period.
A custom Cadillac station wagon. I’ll be the guy in back.
Koenigsegg CCXR. Open road. No traffic anywhere. OR same situation and a Saleen S7. I want to find a perfectly round tunnel and drive upside down. Hell if its going to be only 20 minutes why follow the rules of gravity, go out with engines roaring….
A red XKE and and Vodka McBigbra’s 24yo granddaughter
Hey… she has a 20-year-old daughter. Said daughter looks like a pop star and has the mind of a pit viper. Handle with care.
My sincere apologies Jack. Rewrite: In a red XKE with the top down and a blonde young enough to be my grand daughter. Last ride before I get the red hoveround scooter
I think driving a 1934 Mercedes Benz 500K is a classy way to say ‘ciao’ to life.
I always assumed I’d have a sweet little convertible. But the older I get, the more like my parents I’ve become (cars are appliances!). So, I’ll probably be driving the 2030 equivalent of a Nissan Versa. At 10 miles below the speed limit. In the left lane. With my right blinker on.
Better think about it. Time gets away before you know it I may have already bought my last new car. Retired and living in a small village in Mexico, my average miles per day is less than ten. The speed limit in this town is twelve miles an hour. I buy gas every two months whether I need it or not. My current car should last for the next twenty years. Fun on the road is by motorcycle, not car. An enduro bike works well on the combination of cobblestone streets, paved highway and dirt trails in the mountains.
Of course I’d probably blow my last ride because I’d be too frustrated trying to decide between the two candidates: 1935 Auburn 851 Boattail Speedster or 1937 Cord 812 two-seat cabriolet.
I don’t know if this was the last year for the A-C-D auction in Auburn Indiana. Native Hoosier here, that auction was a bucket list item for me.
With the thought of my GF’s head in my Lap it has to a AMG CLK DTM sidways at 300KPH into something subtantial so no one can restore it after my funeral.
Your hypothetical was not what I thought it was going to be. I think the answer to your hypothetical is “I don’t care.” I say that because under all foreseeable scenarios in my personal time horizon (next 20 years; I’m 63)no one is going to be forced to give up a car. People may chose to do that by, e.g. living in a dense city like New York or San Francisco, where owning a car is both very expensive (you gotta keep it somewhere) and a pain in the neck, or they’re living on a boat or whatever. People who choose to say bye-bye to cars probably aren’t going to care what their last ride is.
What I thought you were asking is, if people imagined getting old (and recognizing, as one must, that the end of life is in view in some indeterminate distance), what car would you own, knowing it will probably be your last? My own personal, real-world answer (i.e. not a Mercedes SSK), based only on what I read and see is a Jaguar XF. Conservatively styled, inside and out, well appointed, and fast in a not “look-at-me!” way. Yeah, I know about Jaguar’s famed non-reliability. But this car would be a daily driver for a time in your life when you don’t have to make a daily drive, but drive only when you want to.
Easy: A modern F1 car. I remember watching both Top Gear and Fifth Gear doing segments on driving an F1 car. Both Tiff Needell and Richard Hammond have lots of experience driving fast production cars, and both had their minds literally blown when they drove a modern F1 car. I would love to experience that. And after that, what would be the point of driving an ordinary production car, even a “supercar”?
Well having attained the ripe old age of 70, and my God it did not take all that long, I feel I am ready to aspire or respire to a Lexus ES 350. To me it symbolizes a classy old dude or a dirty old man an I like to feel I have attained both categories.
When that happens you either very old, or very sick, no way you would want to ride in something hard-riding, loud, and with hard sport seats like the car pictured. You probably would want to ride in something comfortable like a Cadillac DTS or Lincoln Town Car, or luxury minivans not available in the States with captain seats like first class seats in an airliner, with thigh support that fold out from under like the Toyota Alphard/Vellfire or Nissan Elgrand.
My last ride will be in a Cadillac hearse. It’s only fitting.
The ’59 I wanted was sold to someone over the other side of the country, but there’s a ’60 not too far away,
Hopefully I have a few more years before it’s a problem.
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