I never thought I’d see this day come. David Tracy, the person I know with the most visceral contempt for comfort, refinement — hell — even a level of cleanliness on par with your average raccoon, has gone Hollywood. Did you read his last article,”Why I Bought My Currently-Broken BMW i3: LA Was Making Me Fall Out Of Love With My Old Cars“? He’s sold out! I wish there were another explanation, but I can’t think of one. Yes, the man who once slept and lived in a filthy, rusty metal cube on wheels optimistically called a “Postal Jeep” for days on end to the point where the authorities got involved — this same man has now used the sacred megaphone of The Autopian to tell the world that he’s too fancy for that mess now that he’s an Angeleno, and needs to drive a less than a decade old BMW, like a King or a sultan or a Pope or something like that. Well, Prince David, I’d just like to remind you that I lived in LA for nearly 20 years, and during that time I daily drove three cars, the newest ones of which were from 1973. So this is where I get to call you a candy-ass, because it’s fun.
Part of why this is so fun is that this is the David Tracy we’re talking about here, a man whose blood type is 10W-30 and whose pores I believe secretes grime when he’s hot, not sweat. This is a man who will happily offer you a fistful of gravel as a snack because they’re cheaper than mixed nuts, or, if he does offer you mixed nuts, be wary, because they’re the screw-on-a-bolt kind that he scraped off his garage floor. This is a guy who could fall asleep in a pile of broken glass and Doritos, and then wake up and complain the Doritos were stale. A beast. He’s a beast who wears pants and cares too much about grammar.
Well, he was a beast. Now he lives in LA in a clean apartment and spends time with a stylish woman and goes to day spas and uses a fork and pees indoors and, yes, has decided that driving half-a-century old deathtraps is no longer what he wants to do. Well lah-dee-fucking-dah. Someone moves to dreamland and all of a sudden decides that discomfort and the near-constant threat of painful, rusty death aren’t appealing anymore. I may be an old, tiny, funny-looking, and, let’s be honest, stupid man, but I never gave up driving slow, smelly, dangerous cars during my entire Los Angeles Experience.
I lived in LA from the late-ish 1990s to 2014, and during that entire period of my life my daily drivers were one of these three cars: a 1973 Volkswagen Beetle, a 1968 Volvo 1800S, and a 1973 Reliant Scimitar. They were all deathtraps, all manual transmissions, none could come close to modern car conveniences (hell, the 1800S had a manual choke), and I loved driving them all.
David gives three reasons in his guilty admission of vehicular capitulation, which he uses as subheads in his article: “LA’s Roads Will Chew You Up And Spit You Out,” “Parking Ain’t Easy,” and “Gas Prices Are Tough.” Okay, I’ll give him the last one, but the other two? Come on! Grow a pair of your preferred genitalia, man.
David’s arguments in the part about LA’s roads “chewing and spitting” is a sort of catchall about the poor condition of LA’s roads, the often strange road patterns and narrow roads of the city, the intense and painful traffic, and the weird and often carelessly aggressive driving behaviors of tightly-wound Angelenos doing dangerous things in cars are absolutely true. But I also know these travails can be braved from behind the wheel of an archaic deathtrap, because I did it. For years and years.
Was it easy inching along in 2.63 mph traffic on the 5 in the middle of summer, in a Beetle with no air conditioning, the calf on my clutch leg three times the size of my other leg from the non-trivial effort of pushing that heavy, spring-loaded, cable-operated near-agricultural-grade clutch in and out? Fuck no! And was it not harrowing as all hell when the road would open up and I’d be doing a buzzy 70 mph, knowing that if that idiot in the BMW weaving between lanes so much as taps me at these speeds I’m going to end up looking like something that belongs inside a burrito? Yes, it was often terrifying.
Sure, my Reliant Scimitar offered more speed, but it was a strange RHD car that more than once deposited its muffler on the road, and its fiberglass body was not exactly an upgrade in safety, if we’re honest. The P1800 was lovely and fun to drive, but its defogger worked about as well as a horny gnome panting against the windshield glass, and it was only about the height of the wheels of most of the huge-ass SUVs that would weave right next to you out of their lanes as their drivers fished in bags for ketamine pills or whatever.
None of them were easy! But I used them all, regularly, and loved it! I took my Beetle to trips out in the desert, I carried things on the roof rack that were far too large, with some significant failures, and I changed fan belts on the shoulder of the 405, an absolutely terrifying and stupid thing to do, as trucks whizzed by inches from my back, every single time causing a small, terrified squirt of urine to leap to freedom in my pants.
I remember I bought the 1800S initially to be the car for my girlfriend at the time, and she found it such a pain to deal with she left it in the middle of an intersection on Wilshire Boulevard one day, forcing me to scramble out there and get it going and out of the way before the cops impounded it. She ended up getting a new Civic because the demands of a beautiful old car from the late 1960s were too much for her. Sound familiar, David?
As far as parking goes, okay, the Beetle is pretty small, but the Volvo had no power steering, making parallel parking a genuine chore, and the Scimitar, well, maybe that one was fine, too. So I can’t gripe about that.
Were any of these old cars good in the rainy season in LA? Hell no. The Beetle has two speed wipers – really slow, and still not fast enough, and if the Volvo’s defogger was the panting breath of a horny gnome, this gnome wasn’t even aroused. LA panics in any sort of rain, and it’s not a great time to be in a literal deathtrap. I get that David’s Mustang is a mess in rain as well, but, dude, just keep a rag under your seat! That’s how you keep seeing out the windshield! Have you turned you back on rags, too, David? Do you only use fresh slices of Nova Scotia salmon to wipe your nose and other valuables now? Jeezis.
It’s not like I didn’t have commutes, either, because I sure as hell did, commutes that make David’s little Valley-contained jaunts from his place to Galpin seem like a joke. Yes, David, a joke, a silly little joke, compared to me hauling my Eastside/Los Feliz ass all the way across town to Culver City or Westwood, which I had to do daily for years. I had commutes into the Valley, to Midwilshire, to downtown, to Santa Monica, hell, often to Irvine or other godless places in Orange County, I did all of these, often, in cramped little underpowered cars from the era when people were still worried about Soviets but Walkmen weren’t even thought of yet and Pong was bleeding edge tech.
Hell, I took my child, my only son Otto, all over LA in the Beetle! A human child! In Los Angeles, in an old car! And he loved it! The heat, the noise, the excitement of possible breakdowns, the adventure of it all!
Yes, David, a child thrived in LA in an old, archaic car. Sure, he had no choice, and to many, this is terrible parenting, but still. My point, whatever it is, stands.
So, yes, sweet, sweet David, as much as I adore you – which I absolutely do– I’m going to relish this rare, beautiful moment where I get to call you a candy-ass. A candy-ass who left Detroit winters in creaky Plymouth Valiants and J10 pickups and other shitboxes, came to LA and not even, what three months (!?) into his new Los Angeles life abandons all of his old car principles, and has been seduced by the considerable and enticing comfort and safety of a 2014 BMW i3.
As you drive that thing, David, gliding along in your cushy electrical carriage, the hum of the electric motor drowned out by the languid vocals of Enya or Enigma or whatever, drinking electrolyte water from one of those water bottles with a big crystal inside it you probably got from Goop or something, just remember that some of us happily trundled around LA in old-ass, noisy, clunky, uncomfortable shitboxes, and did so happily.
[Editor’s Note: The truth is, I took ownership of my free 1959 Nash Metropolitan specifically so I could daily-drive it in LA, so I was willing to drive an old junker when I first go here.
My J10 and Mustang are too valuable for me to want to daily around the city (So convenient, JT, that you forgot to mention that your car literally got stolen in LA! And that thing wasn’t even valuable — none of your cars were back when you drove them!), one is technically not SMOG legal, they both suck gas like you wouldn’t believe, the other is my brother’s (I want it well-preserved). The rest of my fleet is broken.
Fixing the Nash is going to take a while, and though I could just drive the big, thirsty J10 for now, I’m curious about EVs! I run a car website in 2023 and have no EV experience; that’s not ideal! Also, the i3 is a fascinating carbon-fiber car that I can top up in my apartment’s parking garage. Have I gone soft for buying a fascinating machine that runs on a different fuel source? I don’t know. Even if I have gone soft, I deserve it — have you seen the shit I’ve done. Trenchfoot! Bathing in the freezing Baltic Sea! Leave me alone.
Who knows, maybe the i3 will bore me like the last sensible car I bought did and I’ll be back to my old ways. We’ll see. But even if not, I’ve built up more shitbox cred than I need to get away with this, Torch. -DT].
I was happy because I genuinely loved each of those cars, and despite the discomfort and inconvenience of it all, LA is a city that appreciates old and weird and interesting cars, and there’s so much joy and fulfillment that comes with the bit of extra effort. Sure, David will still have a fleet of old, interesting cars to trot out, and everyone will be delighted and fawn over them and all that, but when I look deep into David’s eyes, perhaps during one of our business-embraces at staff meetings, I’ll know that he’s taking the easy way out.
Well, maybe driving those things wasn’t always happy, but it sure is fun to gloat about it now, in hindsight. So there.
Candy-ass.
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This seems like a distraction – torch has given us extremely few updates on the CHANGLI!
Read the whole article and not a single comment so far, best thing I’ve read on this site just for the hilarious biting comment of it all.
I think this is more about being “unfamiliar” with a new place, which I understand. I am certain that if David was more comfortable with the directions, landmarks, and traffic patterns, then it would be a breeze to drive a junker in a big city. All of the “scarry” things David described are just made worse when you can’t see (mediocre wipers or defoggers), accelerate slowly, brake poorly, etc. In a modern car, you don’t need to worry about any of that and you can focus on “the road”.
Maybe the BMW will be a good transition vehicle for him to figure out his new home. Think of it like training wheels.
All I’ll say is, it’s amazing what near-year-round sunshine and a lack of road salt does for you.
I, for one, cannot WAIT to see what the Autopian does for April 1st.
Ha ha – funny article, Torch! I LoLed multiple times.
But Mercedes Streeter kicks both your sorry candy-asses.
So, Alternate-Universe Torch Who Never Left LA is still dailying the Beetle – because the Changli in LA, usable on surface streets only, would be unthinkable there and there would be no room for other cars. He’s on Day 3 of hauling present-day as-tall-as-dad-and-still-a-year-away-from-teenagerness Otto out to whatever back office on the Galpin property serves as Autopian Towers because of the school-staff strike and Sally’s Tiguan is every bit the unreliable money pit it is in North Carolina.
He’s not in any mood to give up the keys to that Ioniq 6 press car anytime soon.
Tell me he’s at least got a jacket with a scorpion embroidered on the back?
As soon as David’s Bimmer gets stolen in LA he’ll wish he had a less desirable car like a Beetle that won’t get nicked. … Oh wait…
Torch you’ve also had your engine stolen out of your Beetle, and that’s before LA got worse.
Seems like in a lot of places there is really only one type of car to own: Cars that never had catalytic converters, which includes older ICE cars as well as most BEVs.
I’m not ever going back to LA unless the only connecting flight I can get is LAX, and I doubt that.
Best of Luck to you DT, you’re one of the few actually moving *to* LA.
I drove the old weird stuff. My wife tolerated it for a couple decades. One day, she’s hauling herself out of our Miata, and she looks me dead on; that wife telling husband to listen up look.
“I’m starting to be an old lady and I like my comfort.”
Ya know what? She’s freaking right.
I’m an old man and I like my comfort sometimes, too. No shame there.
When David gives up shower spaghetti, I’ll know we’ve lost the man we all know and love.
Of course, there’s always shower cavatini…
“Now he lives in LA in a clean apartment and spends time with a stylish woman”
Talk about burying the lede!
During my six-year tenure in LA I dailied a beat-to-snot ’81 Buick Skylark that I eventually sold for $200 to some shady dealer in Wilmington and a ’66 Mustang convertible – but I’m still with David here. We faithful Autopians trust that DT will continue to engage in plenty of other amusing shenanigans for our entertainment.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Detroit started using David’s “massively wide and traffic-free streets” quote to attract new business and inhabitants.
You do realize the reason they’re so ‘traffic free’ is because the potholes ate all the cars that tried to drive down them in winter, right?
Can we nominate Torch’s roast on David as COTD?
Wait! A lede has been buried! No mention of the pic with Jason on the hood of the Scimitar with a guitar? Was there a “Torchinsky The Troubadour” phase that’s never been spoken of? A girlfriend thing (convenient buck ass btw)? What?
That’s a musician but I forget who, he had an article about it somewhere.
Evan Dando of the Lemonheads, if I remember right.
Should have been “(convenient buck pass btw)”…
Sure, you did that up to 9 years ago, but would you do it again today? In general we’re willing to put up with a lot more pain and inconvenience when we’re younger. Some of the automotive suffering I was willing to tolerate in my 20s would be a dealbreaker today in my 40s. Heck, all of my daily drivers for the last 15+ years have been manual trans, but I’m considering an automatic for my next car since I already have a stick shift weekend fun car too.
Counterpoint: I’m in my mid-50s and so far I have steadfastly avoided learning anything from my automotive experiences.
Exactly this. I was looking at photos of my old cars and thought about checking craigslist for one then I remembered it didn’t have Android Auto or even Bluetooth and I decided to pass. I’m still driving a manual though.
This comment ignores the fact that 9 years ago (if my math is correct), the 51ish JT was already a decade older than the 32ish DT is now.
I was not aware of the age gap.
Torch has an even newer EV import. He’s hardly one to talk.
Right!
JT, you’re even softer than I! My car is at least 5 years older than yours!
I want a Changli vs original battery i3 endurance race.
Torch can just load up the back seat with replacement lead-acid car batteries in parallel and keep going! Not gonna win on speed, though.
Maybe he run a few extra lead acid in series to bump of the speed, or break it, or both.
Ooh boy, now that’s stepped on the old crank with the golf shoes!
I’m taking David’s side here. Knowing family who lived in LA recently and hearing their stories of the traffic, something automatic and comfortable really helped with sitting 45 minutes to go 10 miles to a place otherwise inaccessible.
Give you that one just for the “stepped on the old crank with golf shoes,” going to have to remember that one!
Well Torch if that is your real name. You write a good game but really what is your problem?
Maybe its because you’re the Tracy now?
This is obviously the right take here:
‘The fact that you are uninterested in risking your safety and sanity to be just as miserable as I was makes you a p***y.’
/s
I’m not sure I like the idea of expecting David to defend his choice of what he’s willing to drive in Los Angeles traffic because, among other things, this may eventually lead to expecting me to defend my choice of what I’m willing to drive in Seattle traffic.
https://live.staticflickr.com/3550/5733681301_89a874e566_c.jpg
Actually.
…go on.
Well, extrapolating from Jason’s three personal examples, it seems safe to say that pretty much any old vehicle is fine in the city as long as it’s yellow.
I managed to ride a Honda CB350 in Seattle for 4 years year round. That is until I realized that driving a slow (54mph max) old rusty VW bus was, well somewhat, safer, which I also drove year round.
I went to college at UCLA and my only vehicle the entire four years was a yellow road bike (bicycle, not motorcycle). I rode for errands like going to the grocery store, but also up the canyons all the time, and on training rides as far north as Ventura county, as far south as Orange county, and at least once to east LA.
wait, he’s spending time with someone?!
“… spends time with a stylish woman …”
Maybe!
Pictures or it didn’t happen seems to apply here.
She’s been briefed.
You spelled “bribed” wrong.
Uh, what about tetanus shots? She could catch that directly from David!
Rumor has it she runs one of the local junkyards.
“A bit of the old pick-and-pull, eh? Know what I mean?? Wink wink, nudge, nudge. Say no more!”
Thumb from me for the Python ref. Perfect placement
This! This is more important than going i3
[popcorn gif]
Oh no, our dads are fighting! lol
You know there is only one way to fix this.
Mopeds at dawn!
David rides his from LA while Jason rides his from NC. They meet in the middle of somewhere to eat bad pizza and hash things out. Then they take the long ride home to think about what they did.
I thought bucket helmets and mop handles were going to be involved with this joke.
This is so gonna end up with a Shitbox Court ruling that David gets article-posting rights Monday-Tuesday, Torch Wednesday-Thursday, and alternating Fridays…
:\
But who gets Otto on the weekends?
They’ll have to work out some kind of routine. An Otto cycle, if you will.
Ok, this is the real COTD. We can all go home now.
Stop it! Stop it! YOU’RE RUINING CHRISTMAS!