Maybe you should consider a summer beater just to get around town
Up in the north, there’s a tradition called the winter beater. It’s a car dependable enough to get you through the snow, but not so good that you care about what potholes and salt do to it. If it falls apart, that’s just the cost of doing business in an inhospitable land and you go get another $2,000 Jeep.
My mother-in-law has a summer beater. It’s a 1991 Saab 900 Turbo Convertible. The top doesn’t work, I don’t think it locks and this summer I finally convinced her to get the wheel bearings done before the wheels fell off, which they were literally actually about to do. Also, only one of the brakes worked.
By any measure, that’s a beater. It’s a car you wouldn’t want to trust, but if your life isn’t too important, then it’s the perfect thing to get full of sand and mud and kids and dogs and whatever else the season throws your way.
The question is, has sand and mud and kids and/or dogs ever changed your plans? Maybe you have a nice car. Maybe you don’t want to park at the state park and bring it home full of empties and wet towels.
Maybe you need to drive your co-workers somewhere on Monday and look nice, and you don’t want to spend a hundred bucks on detailing. Maybe you have a teenager or a cousin who wants to borrow the car but not, you know, your car.
Imagine if you didn’t have to worry about a scratch or a spilled Coke (depending on your tolerance for hornets). That funny rattling noise? Ignore it. Oil change? Put it off another week. It’s your summer beater, if it dies, it dies. You still have your real car.
My criteria for the ideal summer beater begins with fun, but fun can come in a lot of shapes. A bare bones, base model 25-year-old Toyota Corolla could be a hoot. Crank windows and a cassette player? Break out the Wreckx-N-Effect tapes!
You can also get truly pimpin’ old man cars for a song—a big Oldsmobile or Buick will happily haul a half-dozen people around with room in the trunk for all the coolers and chairs you can throw at it. And with a truck, the world is your oyster.
A car like that is the one you can stick bags of mulch or 2x4s in and drive off without a care in the world. Leave it outside under a tree in a thunderstorm. Leave it unattended in Highland Park. What’s the worst that can happen?
More than anything, the summer beater is about peace of mind. You know that no matter what happens on Sunday, you’ll still have something that will get you to work and the kids to camp on Monday.
So go ahead and grab yourself a discount Cadillac and hit that jump. Haul the family on over to the Tail of the Dragon and wash the vomit out later. Beat on that summer beater because when you have freedom, that’s when you can have fun.
David Traver Adolphus is a freelance automotive researcher who quit his full time job writing about old cars to pursue his lifelong dream of writing about old AND new cars. Follow him on Twitter as @proscriptus.