Confession #45: I drive an old car, and that's perfectly fine

(Zac Estrada photo – Click for more photos of cars in Cuba)

The average age of the cars on the road today is 11 years old. In theory, the average car in this country could enter the sixth grade. The notion that Americans buy and sell a car every three years is completely gone. It could be the economy and continuously tight credit situations forcing people to keep their cars longer. Or it could be that cars from that era are just too good to give up.

Think about the time period these cars fall into. The late '90/early '00s time period produced some seriously good machines, a few of which haven't really been bettered by their successors. I'm starting to understand all of those people who've only owned Golf Mk2s or E39 BMWs because they say they were never beaten. Or my grandfather, great automotive philosopher he was, who searched for a car he liked better than a VW Beetle and never found one. Let's ignore that, OK?

Confession #32: You’d never feel the same way about a microwave as you do about a Swiss Army knife

2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee Overland
(Chrysler Group LLC photo)

I met someone the other day who described his perils in car shopping. It didn’t start well, as he went out, hungover and somewhere in the Boston suburbs where the accents get thick, on a windy Saturday morning. He wandered into some dealerships, looking at some lightly used cars and then questioning their smells. Then he tried some new cars and came away unimpressed by just about everything he drove. But coming from his Porsche Cayman into something large and with four-wheel drive, I’d probably feel similarly. He did, however, like the Jeep Grand Cherokee, but came away feeling a little cold about it, perhaps like it was a little too sensible despite its go-anywhere capabilities.

The Grand Cherokee was a founding member of the ’90s suburban grocery getter, the SUV, and perennial also-ran to the Ford Explorer. Both kind of lost their way and popularity in the 2000s, but recently reinvented themselves. Jeep took the Grand Cherokee back to its roots and made something that was just as good on-road as it was off. Yes, you have to select a few option packages to get the Grand Cherokee “trail rated” these days, but it’s still as capable as any Jeep before. What’s more, it finally has the quality of materials befitting of a $40-50,000 car, which is what the upmarket Overland models cost now.