L.A. forced me to stop daily-driving my classics—maybe, for the best

Los Angeles is an incredible place to be an automotive enthusiast.

Car culture courses thick and pure through L.A.’s veins like grease dripping from a street taco. There’s as much automotive variety in this city as there is cultural diversity; if there’s an automotive niche—or a niche of a niche—you can find it on full boost in southern California.

Certain streets and parking lots shimmer with a perpetual parade of interesting cars, a patchwork quilt of gleaming hypercars, buzzing imports, hopping lowriders, and sunburned survivors. You’ll meet some of the most welcoming and wonderful people out on the streets, with communities and clubs for every type of enthusiast. And the roads! Oh god, the roads. When I die, bury me somewhere alongside Angeles Crest.

Los Angeles is an awful place to be an automotive enthusiast.

Tainting this kaleidoscope of vehicular wonder is a toxic stew of hassle and sunk cost. Traffic, exorbitant gas prices, lobotomized drivers, and the omnipresent threat of the overzealous LAPD are the obvious bummers that tamp the physical act of driving, but it’s hidden frustrations that can make ownership a nightmare.

As of this writing, the average price of a home in L.A. is right at $1 million. So, if you’re an enthusiast of regular means, you live in an apartment, which means you automatically must fight for parking if you live in one of the many buildings who do not offer assigned spots. This is annoying if you own a car. It is all-consuming if you own several cars.

Regular street parking almost invariably leads to regular dents, dings, and scrapes. If you’re near the ocean, the marine layer will render anything old into a pile of brown dust. Something breaks? You’re working on it where it lays unless you bring it to a shop. If you have assigned parking at your apartment, you’re usually forced to bring it to a mechanic anyways, since the majority of complexes do not allow you to work on your own car for anything beyond a battery replacement or bulb swap. Ask me how I know. And you’re going to want to keep your car in tip-top mechanical shape, considering I can think of fewer scenarios scarier than a blown radiator on the side of the 405 at rush hour.

This is to say nothing of the physical hazards of L.A.’s rotten infrastructure. Hollywood’s silver-screen representation of L.A. has done nothing to prepare visitors for the deteriorated roadways that await their hapless rental Camry. Busted stretches of highway expansion joints on the main arteries interrupt conversation and will convince you of a newfound flat tire. A significant portion of parking lot entrances are perplexingly steep and apex at a sharp point, while the interiors of some L.A. garage structures can prove treacherous for even a Mini Cooper.

Don’t stray too close to the dips and missing chunks bordering the edges of surface streets, lest you seek catastrophic sidewall damage. If you take any of the strange V-shaped drainage ditches scattered around the city at speed, you can expect to leave the concrete some gratuity in the form of oil pan fragments and the fidelity of your control arms.

In short—this is not a place friendly to the average classic car enthusiast.

I love classic cars. I’ve dedicated my career and most of my rapidly dwindling brainpower to the worship of the older stuff. It’s a shame, then, that I am mentally unfit for relying on a classic car for regular transportation in Los Angeles at this time. As a professed neurotic, driving anything through the City of Angels that could be considered unreliable or problematic is an exercise in hyper-fixation and weaving anxiety from the threads of tranquility.

Hold up—did I just hear ticking? Is that my lifters? I just had the oil changed—maybe the mechanic put in the wrong oil. He’s a specialist with three decades of experience with this particular car, but people mess up, you know? I bet there’s catastrophic engine failure brewing, I just know it. I know it! Then, I’ll be stranded. Then—then!—I’ll have to call Hagerty roadside services, and wait while they thread through the same traffic jam that did in said engine. Man, isn’t the shop rate at my place like $200? This is going to cost five-figures. How much is this whole car worth? God, there goes my weekend—no, my month.

Oh. It was just the A/C compressor cycling on and off. Haha! We’re good!

I know, I know—I need to relax, I need to chill. It’s not like this mania is fueled by a history of disastrous automotive incidents, either. My family’s 1981 Porsche 911 SC never once died on me, nor did my cranky and very sketchy 1974 VW Baja Bug I daily drove in college. So far, my 2002 Carrera has been rock solid, as was my 2005 Pontiac GTO. In fact, it’s the traditionally reliable stuff that’s left me stranded. My unmodified 1999 Miata caught fire en route through the Mojave desert—thank you, cheap coil pack!—a few months after I grenaded the valvetrain of an automatic 2016 Corvette Stingray convertible press car.

Point is, even if it’s possible to drive a classic every day in Los Angeles, it simply isn’t enjoyable. My daily driver for the past six months has been a 1998 Volvo S70 T5. This five-speed, front-wheel drive turbobrick is a grand Swedish thing with oodles of character and barrels of torque—or is that tjörk? In theory, it’s the sort of modern classic that a young collector can use as an actual car. In reality, the air conditioning doesn’t work, the engine is absurdly thirsty for a 2.3-liter, some parts are hard or impossible to come by, and I don’t always want to drive stick in gridlock when I just want to get the hell home. Yeah, I don’t think it’s fun driving manual in traffic. Sue me!

I needed a new car before summer hit and I sweated through the seats of my Volvo. No, not a different car, a new car. Something I don’t have to pay out the nose for and won’t burn my ass in severe depreciation when this wild market starts to settle. Something with a known history, something that I can sustain simply with oil changes and tire rotations for 100,000 miles while I spend the big bucks on keeping my 996 on the road. Naturally, I made a list of all the hot hatches, compact sports cars, and generally interesting rides that would scratch the fun rash during errands and not turn to stapled Jell-O when snaked through Malibu canyons.

I bought a 2022 Subaru Crosstrek Sport.

Please, stay your jeers and hatemail—this has already triggered every sort of identity and existential crisis that you can imagine. A crossover. No, a CVT crossover. Are you ok, man? Have you considered medication? Therapy?

Yeah—this is my therapy. Air conditioning, CarPlay, and the zone-out CVT is what keeps me sane during my daily trudge through L.A. Plus, the Crosstrek is, dare I say it … good. Plenty powerful, big enough to carry my stuff, small enough to park anywhere.

So why do I feel so bad? Modern car culture has warped me to feel ashamed that I would trade character for comfort, and acceleration for A/C. For many enthusiasts, there is no Goldilocks option. If I moved back to rural Michigan or my hometown of Dallas, you can bet your lugnuts I’d have found something with a stick and a stoke—but not in L.A. I can’t do it, I just can’t do it.

Maybe I’m a cautionary tale. Southern California, the place were America’s love affair with the automobile really took flight, has become utterly inhospitable to car lovers of ordinary means.  That likely will become even more the case if Californa succeeds in upholding its 2035 gas ban, leaving regular-joe enthusiasts to fight over a dwindling supply of fun ICE cars.

Or, maybe, I’m just maturing. Our own McKeel Hagerty has gone on record that we’re here to save driving—not necessarily commuting. I still have my (manual) 996 for weekends and short trips, and I’d add an MGB GT to the fleet if the coastal air wouldn’t melt the poor thing down to its tires. Save the special cars for the special drives. For the rest of it, there’s my Crosstrek.

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