Foreign Cars in the Motor City

Those dark and snowy nights and those frigid early mornings.

For ten years or so, I commuted from southern California to Detroit to teach at Center for Creative Studies (now called College for Creative Studies).

During good weather, this was not much of a problem. I kept an old Toyota Celica hatchback parked in various out-of-the way locations near the airport (mostly at a hotel I could get a shuttle to). The feat was to start up the car after its days of inactivity, sometimes over a winter break, which could be as long as a month.

During the seasons of snow and deep darkness, when I would arrive either very early in the morning (after a redeye flight), or late at night (after a noon or later departure from LA), and there could be a foot or more of snow on the ground, I was always anxious about the car. Would it be there? Would it start? What a relief to see it, even with snow mounded on and around it. Every time I turned the key in the ignition and it fired up, I patted the dashboard in gratitude and promised to treat the car to a good dinner in Greektown. That, of course, meant treating myself and my daughter while the car bided its time nearby, but that’s okay. The monumental dependability of that car deserved its reward.

Like my VW van—the car I drove cross-country from Berkeley to Detroit, and which I had sold several years earlier to a young woman about to embark on her own cross-country odyssey to Colorado for college, this Toyota, over the years, showed more and more signs of wear, especially from rust. I caught on to a technique of using special ignition spray—where, early in the morning, or in the dead of night—whenever I arrived and made it through the snow to the car, waiting patiently under its layer of snow—I’d open the hood, expose the carburetor, and spray this stuff in, and the car would start up, deserving another good dinner. I just had to remember to always keep a can of that starter in the car (and hope the weather wouldn’t be so frigid that I couldn’t turn the key in the door lock).

Eventually, the hotel tightened up its parking surveillance so I couldn’t just leave the car in the lot, and I had to unload the car. A CCS student bought it for $350 to use around campus, and I started renting vehicles every other week. It was more costly, but it was also a relief—no more wondering whether I would have a ride that weekend, or whether the car would start, or whether it would have been towed away somewhere. Renting a car wasn’t as colorful, or as exotic, but it was much less potentially treacherous. I hated to join the ranks of ordinary long-distance commuter monotony in that small way, but at the same time, it made life a little easier and left my mind free for the more important things—seeing my daughter and teaching my classes.

I probably don’t need to make an issue of this but I will: I had two Volkswagen vans, and then I had Toyotas. This in Detroit, and during the years when a group of drunken thugs beat a Chinese man to death, mistaking him for Japanese and wanting to take out their anger and frustration that the Japanese were so far outstripping American automakers in sales and product quality. We are now in a near-recession, American automakers have lost some 30-40% of sales, but foreign carmakers are holding their own. This current situation reaches back at least twenty-five years. I owe some debt of gratitude to Toyota, who made a car that withstood years, weather and semi-neglect, and kept running.