James's Weblog

Last month the transmission failed in our 1994 Ford Taurus station wagon, and we finally got rid of it. This was my primary car for about 9 of the past 12 years. Everyone I knew—myself included—made fun of it. It was a refugee from the island of misfit cars.

By far the goofiest design decision was that it used a separate key for the tailgate. A separate trunk key for a station wagon! To avoid having to carry two keys around all the time, I usually left the trunk key in the coin compartment, but it was still weird and inconvenient.

Another oddity was that the locks for the front doors were different from the locks for the rear doors. The front door locks were pegs that were pushed in to become almost flush with the door panel. The rear door locks, however, were pegs that were pushed in to look almost like the unlocked state of the front door locks. Unsurprisingly, this inconsistency usually confused people who rode in this car, and they often couldn’t tell whether doors were locked or unlocked. Since we didn’t get power locks with this car, I consequently had to go around the car to lock all the doors.

The cupholders were almost useless. They could hold cans okay, but large cups from fast food restaurants usually had trouble clearing the overhang above and required being tilted at an angle that often would spill their contents. (And the mostly(?) defunct supersized cups were completely out of the question.) Additionally, drinks in the cupholder obstructed the radio, and at some point soda probably spilled onto it, because some of the radio buttons sometimes would stick. Ford added limited radio controls to the dashboard in an apparent attempt to address the obstruction problem, but they didn’t work with the aftermarket car stereo that my dad installed (the original one had no CD player).

This station wagon also had the feature of including two spare tires: a full-sized one under the cargo area and a compact one in a side compartment. In retrospect, I probably should have taken one (or both) of them out to try to reduce fuel consumption.

Goodbye, 1994 Ford Taurus station wagon. I’m glad to be finally rid of you.

Getting rid of this car was kind of painful too, but not in the emotional sense. In the days before its transmission failed, I had spent a few hundred dollars replacing its battery, a couple of tires, and getting its oil changed. Donating it was more trouble since the car was in my dad’s name and went into a trust when he passed. I had forgotten that I wasn’t a trustee when I contacted the donation service, which complicated the paperwork.