Our writer eschewed a Citroën and a Peugeot, and now has her heart set on her dream alternative rural school-run car (it’s not a Defender)
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Living in the middle of nowhere, my husband Charlie and I worked out a long time ago that we need three cars in order to operate our twice daily labyrinth of school runs.
The rationale behind this motoring excess? If one car won’t start or has a flat tyre due to striking a pothole, as we head off in different directions each morning, we need a spare set of wheels in addition to our Toyota RAV4 SUV and Land Rover Discovery 4.
The problem is that Charlie keeps changing the third car (as often as he changes his socks) and so far hasn’t bought one that I feel comfortable driving.
Several years ago he bought a super-fast convertible Mini which he called his midlife crisis, but soon swapped it for a van which he pretended he needed to deliver paintings from his gallery to around the country.
At the end of last year Charlie bought a Peugeot 3008 SUV (this time his excuse was that it had a small enough engine to insure for our son) despite the fact that our son has still not passed his driving test.
Although he has been thoughtful enough to buy automatic cars on my behalf (my licence covers me to drive automatics only), given that I have been too scared to drive any of them he might as well have saved his money and bought manual cars that appealed only to him.
The F57 Mini Cooper S convertible did provide amusement on the school run in high summer. The reality was that Charlie had to scrub the canvas roof during the winter when it went mouldy from disuse – soft-tops are less fun in the freezing cold. In the end I never drove the Mini as the engine was too powerful and, being accustomed to driving 4x4s, I found it far too low to the ground. It felt and looked like the sort of car in which Noddy would take Barbie on a date.
On the one occasion I was meant to take it out for a spin around the valley I put my foot on the accelerator only to be promptly put off by the mighty revving of the souped-up engine. I normally drive an old banger and I wasn’t used to such a vroom – James Bond I ain’t.
The Mini was painted starlight blue and had a Union Jack hologram that lit up when you opened the door in the dark. It was great fun and very pretty – a pity I was too scared to drive it. When my son accidentally dented the door once, the mark showed up like a sore thumb, unlike all the bangs and scrapes that decorate my scruffy old cars.
If we still owned it I would have been very concerned about driving the Mini around the rural roads here on the Essex-Suffolk border. One nosedive into a pothole while deploying some of the 176 horsepower might very well spell a visit to the nearest ditch.
Sensibly, given my dislike for powerful engines, next time around Charlie bought a van with a smaller engine. It was a Citroën Berlingo Enterprise in very good condition and still had that new car smell.
Charlie kept encouraging me to drive it but the camera that you need to monitor the rearward blind spot (no rear windows, remember) freaked me out, not to mention the van’s intimidating length. I found it too unnerving looking behind me and not being able to see out of the back, so again that was a no go.
Now that Lovejoy-like gallery owner Charlie does not transport so many mega-sized paintings, and in a bid to find a car that our 19-year-old son could also drive, he settled on a Peugeot 3008. Charlie is now very fond of his Peugeot and uses it to ferry two of our children to school every morning and run every errand. He claims to have squeezed 50 paintings into it with the back seats down, which rather confirms my hypothesis that the van was bought for romantic rather than practical purposes.
Last week he announced he was going to give me a lesson on how to drive the Peugeot “as it’s such an easy car to manoeuvre”. Well, he might say it is but to me it is certainly not straightforward. The gear “lever” amounts to a button (yes, a button) and it seems very much akin to a space rocket which after one small movement might propel one to the moon.
Safe to say, I took one look at it and, shaking my head, said it was far too technical for my liking. Frustrated, Charlie sighed as yet again I had dismissed the third car he had bought on the grounds of it being too complex. When I offer that the Peugeot is too new, too sleek and too prissy, this doesn’t help matters at all.
But when I explained that “I only like cars that are a decade old” he finally got the point. Instead of eyeing up the brand new Land Rover Defender, which is the school run car of choice here among the Yummy Mummies of Suffolk, I message him with the details of a Skoda Octavia.
Why, the Skoda estate car would be perfect and its inside layout is blissfully old-fashioned. If I scrape it on some stubborn hedge or post it won’t matter in the slightest. It has done 93,000 miles, is eight years old and costs just under £8,000, a great deal less than the Peugeot.
I think I am going to take over the acquisition process for our third car. It will be a lot cheaper and, better still, I might even be able to drive the sodding thing.
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