19th June 2013
Weather: warm and sunny, but close and now feeling unsettled.
What is the lifespan of a Transit van?
Here’s another unit of time I am wrestling with. I seem to be having some kind of existential crisis over an MOT failure.
My workhorse, family transport, home away from home has reached that moment when rust has eaten away at it to such an extent that it really has to be let go.
It is fifteen years old, and I have owned it for ten. At its’ heart is the legendary Ford 2.5 litre diesel engine which have been know to do half a million miles if they are looked after; but the “backbone of Britain” tends to rust, and so it is with mine.
So I have been pitched into that twilight zone of the wheel-less; forcing me to run my wife to her work so that I can use her car for mine. Having to run two vehicles so that we can both work is one of those facts of life for many of us, but is it more true to say that in part we both work in order to run two vehicles? It is true to say that my work has been completely subsumed by the search for a new vehicle.
I find that buying any major item always induces a tendency to think you can afford more than you really can, because what you really want is almost always just a bit over the absolute upper budget limit you have set yourself. Combine this with the fact that your absolute upper budget limit places you in that zone of second hand vehicles where you are at extreme risk of buying the problems that the previous owner has just avoided by trading it in for something newer and you have a toxic combination.
This is especially true now that no vehicle that is less than fifteen years old is free from a host of electronic management systems that are prone to failure and require a host of technicians with expensive diagnostic tools to fix.
My heart tells me that I want old technology, that can be fixed with a spanner on the side of the road, but my head tells me that I need new technology that whisks me down the Autoroute in six-speed, fuel efficient and low-emission comfort. One I can still just about find for £1,500 or so, the other will set me back at least £8,000. One minute I find I am seduced by the silken words of the guy trying to part me from £10K for a gleaming Euro 5 compliant machine, the next I am kicking tyres in the scummy old yard of some bottom feeder dealer who buys the trade in’s off the bloke selling the ex lease, low mileage beauties.
All the while I am trawling the web for the perfect vehicle that isn’t two hundred miles away and being sold by some poor bugger who is being forced to sell the camper van of his and his families’ dreams because he has lost his job as a result of the “challenging economic climate”. I have spent hours consulting web forums discussing the relative merits of different engine and gearbox configurations trying to find some light amongst the fog of indecision.
So, the life of this particular transit is a useful measure not only of time (fifteen years) but also of change. In those fifteen years our need and ability to be hyper-mobile has increased just as our need and ability to be still and localised has been made possible by the internet and necessary by the devastating affect our mobility is having on the planet. During the last fifteen years we have also become less self-reliant and more dependent on “specialists” to fix the increasingly complex systems we all rely on. At the same time these systems keep us focused on the endless upgrade path they demand. We are at once liberated and enslaved by our technology.
None of this is especially original thinking, but it is an interesting (and exhausting) process to be going through and gives me pause to reflect on what I am trying to achieve in this re-think of my working practice.
