"Do not, my friends, resist the Toyota Camry."

January 5, 2022 7:32 PM

Seat Safety Switch posts slightly askew short fiction primarily about the joys and trials of owning terrible cars; and has posted something most days for the past six years or so.
posted by solarion (17 comments total)

Source post of title quote.
posted by genpfault at 8:05 PM on January 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

So much to like about this! That every post is titled 'Untitled' is just the start. I'm in awe of someone that can just create something like this pretty much every day.

The way trucks used to be, before the academics came down from their ivory towers and demanded things like carpet and being able to survive a crash resonated with me, purely because I own an F100 a full 26 years older than the one he's referring to.
posted by dg at 9:09 PM on January 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

A Fiat broke my heart and spirit
And I miss her more than I miss most people.
posted by markbrendanawitzmissesus at 9:33 PM on January 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

As someone who has owned and sadly relied upon a wide range of junkers, this is gold - certainly made me a better road-side mechanic, but it was a hard path and if it’s taught me one thing that is ‘carry enough water, not for the car, but for the long walk home in the sun.’
posted by memetoclast at 3:04 AM on January 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

A Fiat broke my heart and spirit
And I miss her more than I miss most people.

Obligatory.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 5:35 AM on January 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

As a Camaro owner, this one sang to me.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 5:43 AM on January 6, 2022

From one of the pieces:

"For instance, last week I was driving down the collector road outside my neighbourhood in my Volare, sawing at the steering wheel so that the floppy ball joints wouldn’t suddenly spooky-steer me into a ditch or lawn flamingo. This is normal behaviour...."

Holy crap. This is exactly why my parents ultimately noped out of our own Volare back in 1979 or so - it had developed a sudden and disturbing tendency to spontaneously make random turns, and it happened once when Mom was driving my brother and me home from the library or something and we almost drove into someone's yard for a couple seconds. We were about a block from home, so Mom was able to get us into the driveway fine, and after we got out of the car and got into the house she immediately called Dad at work and said "get RID of that thing."

(That was more of a last-straw situation - it had already started declining, with some weird rattle someplace that we couldn't figure out and which caused my father to nickname it "The Flying Typewriter".)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:33 AM on January 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

Speaking as a Camry owner, I read the post title in the voice of Immortan Joe.
posted by reclusive_thousandaire at 7:46 AM on January 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

These posts are really good, and resonate with me as a shadetree mechanic and fan of older cars. If you like this kind of writing, you may also like the videos over at Aging Wheels. (That dude has a Trabant!)
posted by xedrik at 7:53 AM on January 6, 2022

Despite the fact that plastic bin saturation has no doubt already happened in our lifetime, industry keeps pumping them out, and we keep buying them.

I decided once and for all to get enough plastic bins for the lab four months ago, so they'd be all the same and stackable and we'd not run out for years. I ordered 50 large, divided containers directly from the manufacturer. . . and three weeks later the company cancelled my order and refunded me with no explanation and did not respond to email. So I looked around and found that the same item cost half the price at walmart as through our usual vendors. Instead of sending me the 8 packs of 6 units that they charged me for, I received six individual units thrown randomly into a crushed box. I returned them, hoping to get the actual order, and they were replaced by another single pack of 6 containing two that had shattered in shipping. So I decided it was dumb not to just buy them for twice as much at Grainger. . . but their estimated ship date was more than two months out. As far as I can tell, it is literally impossible to buy plastic bins in the US today. Which is such a tiny problem that it seems silly to be annoyed by it. But, it's not the cheap plastic containers market I've been trained to expect.

What were we talking about? Right, cars. These are quite fun, even to someone who hates cars.
posted by eotvos at 8:26 AM on January 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

...but they don’t stir the soul in quite the same way as a rotary engine, which is effectively a full-ass jet turbine that has only grudgingly allowed you to feed it some citalopram.

Oh, this blog has made my year, and is making up for the last one, too. Thanks for the post!
posted by hwyengr at 9:00 AM on January 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

I had a Camry for a while. It was a perfectly serviceable and inoffensive appliance. I understand why some people appreciate such vehicles, but I hated it as I did every other bland underpowered uninspiring econobox I ever owned.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:57 AM on January 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Chuck Berry drove a Camry. He said it made him invisible to cops
posted by toodleydoodley at 11:16 AM on January 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

I owned a series of Camrys. All with manual transmissions that served me well in their own ways. A 91 v6 that had an unfortunate run in with a brand new sports car piloted by a 16 year old with poor distance perception. An 89 All-trac sedan that was just a weird beast. A 90 wagon that was just tired and had lots of questionable work done to it, followed by an 89 wagon that was mechanically sabotaged by a terrible transmission shop.

Finally I got a 97 sedan that I took to 300k from 165k without ever replacing the clutch. Don't even remember how many years that throwout bearing screamed at me when I first started it up. It lost 5th gear at 289k and I never bothered to fix it. At 295k I T-boned a car that darted in front of me around a stopped vehicle and got a nice insurance check for more than I could have sold it for. Kept on driving it until 301k, then entered it in a demolition derby and won a grand. It had the decency not to catch fire until the race was over, and I even drove it off the field afterwards. The 5spd made what would otherwise be a boring car interesting and dependable. It was predictable in the snow, and I felt more comfortable driving it in inclement weather with all season tires than I do my AWD Honda Element.

There is no more freeing feeling in the world than driving a car that you can count on, while not caring at all whether or not something happens to it.
posted by BishopFistwick at 12:08 PM on January 6, 2022 [7 favorites]

These are fantastic and I absolutely hate cars ("cars" as in: "Yeah, I'm into cars."). Mechanics I have a lot of respect for, but people who talk about rotary engines are basically crypto-bros. Roto-bros.
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:07 PM on January 6, 2022

But...but...I was told that the piston engine goes boing-boing-boing, but the rotary goes hmmmmmmmm...?
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:59 PM on January 6, 2022

They go hmmmmmmm so smoothly that RX-7s have a warning tone that you’ve hit redline.
posted by hwyengr at 5:01 PM on January 6, 2022