Right as I drove past Baker House last Wednesday, about to park and running late for some work at The Cascade’s office, something went wrong with my car. First I heard a hissing noise. Then I smelled a sweet smell that reminded me of baked goods my grandma makes. And then I saw something that looked like either steam or smoke coming out from the space above my stereo controls. I rolled down the windows and hurried to a parking spot, but by the time I found one the air had cleared. Some research told me that it’s probably coolant leaking onto something hot and evaporating, and it (hopefully) won’t blow up in my face. It’s probably going to cost me a few hundred dollars to order the parts to fix it, and the better part of a day to install it, but that’s just part of the cost of driving a car older than some UFV students.
I’m not a car guy by any means, and the choice to drive an old one had a lot more to do with the $1,000 price tag than anything else. But this isn’t the first problem it’s had, and some of the recurring issues do wrack the environmentally-conscious millennial inside me with guilt. I’ve had power steering fluid leaks dripping all over the ground, oil burning and shooting out in thick blue smoke, and now antifreeze steam blowing out of my dashboard. But what can I do about it? I live in a rural area, even if I wanted to take the bus to school, I’d have to drive 20 minutes to reach one.
The obvious answer to appease my inner-environmentalist seems to be that I need an electric or hybrid car, but again, the issue comes down to money. As much as I want to cut down on my emissions, the cheapest options I can track down still start at around $20,000, which no amount of tax credits or savings on gas can incentivize me to spend at this point in my life. Having a reliable, green, cheap to run car would be fantastic, but it’s a luxury. And that’s not even accounting for the lack of charging stations in some areas (though they’re certainly becoming more common) and limited battery life restricting travel options, and the cost of insuring a new or almost new fancy electric car is no doubt going to be a lot more than I pay for my late-‘90s Volvo.
We’re surely nearing the year early adopters of electric vehicles will start to upgrade, and those first models will start to slowly fall in price at the used car lots. Sure, the early models won’t be as good as the state-of-the-art ones, but that’s something those of us who drive older cars are used to. But it won’t be until the first widely accepted electric cars start to age that they’ll really be in the price range of broke university students.
What’s interesting, though, is that this seems like a massive untapped market. If even half the generalizations about my generation are true, we’re certainly more concerned with the environment than older demographics, and it’s also an age where a lot of people are buying their first cars. If some genius can come up with a way to undercut the market and sell electric cars at a bargain price, they’ll be a billionaire in no time. I know I’d buy one to avoid spending the next weekend tearing apart my greasy old car’s engine and fumbling around trying to stop this leak, and I don’t think I’m alone in that.
Jeff was The Cascade's Editor in Chief for the latter half of 2022, having previously served as Digital Media Manager, Culture & Events Editor, and Opinion Editor. One time he held all three of those positions for a month, and he's not sure how he survived that. He started at The Cascade in 2016.
