Because apparently $2,000 cars don’t exist anymore.

Let me take you on a journey — back before anyone knew what a pandemic was, before it became perfectly normal to walk into a bank wearing a mask and not get shot.

Happier times, for sure.

Rewind 10 or 15 years and buying a cheap second car was pretty simple. You’d look for something that was:

“Gently used.” — Yeah, right.

“Previously enjoyed.” — Mmmm… that’s one way to describe it.

“Pre-owned.”

“Secondhand.”

Or, as many people I met when I first moved to Canada called them, “winter beaters.” Back then, you could find them for $250, $500, maybe $1,000 or $2,000 if you were feeling flush.

That was pretty much my mindset when Junior first decided he wanted a car.

Unfortunately, this was around 2022/23, when the used-car market had apparently decided that none of those rules applied anymore.

I mean, the price of an F-150 was more than I had paid for my X5 the day before the world closed.

That’s probably a story for another day too — the wife turned 50 on the Sunday, and the world closed on the Monday. I have a feeling there might be a post in there somewhere.

Anyway, Junior had worked all summer and wanted to buy his own first car. The conversation about what he wanted was remarkably straightforward.

“What make?”

“I dunno.”

“What style?”

“I dunno.”

“What colour?”

“I dunno.”

“What year?”

“I dunno.”

Excellent.

So I started searching AutoTrader.

$500? Nothing.

$1,000? Nothing.

$2,000? Nothing.

$3,000? Nothing worth buying, anyway.

There were a few cars around $3,500, but most appeared to need an engine, a transmission, accident repairs, or some combination of all three.

I checked the filters. They were correct. I extended the search radius. Still nothing. Then I checked Kijiji. Same story. So we started visiting some of the local car lots. And this is where things got interesting. There were plenty of cars sitting on these lots that looked like absolute POSs, yet somehow had price tags attached to them that suggested they were made of gold.

One of my favourite phrases was:

“Safety yourself and save.”

Now, I’m not entirely sure what that was supposed to mean, but personally I thought a better business model might be to learn a little about customer care and actually “safety” the car yourself, rather than making the customer discover the actual condition of the auction special after they’ve bought it.

Some of these cars hadn’t even been cleaned. The inside of the windows were dirty. There was garbage in the trunk. At one particular lot, we decided to take one for a drive.

Not because we liked it.

It was buried about three cars deep. It was the middle of a Canadian winter, so we decided to make them dig it out. Just so we could relieve some of Junior’s boredom, and at least let him drive something.

Now, having been around cars, trucks, planes and pretty much anything else mechanical since I was about eight years old, I’d picked up a few things along the way. Little checks and tests you can do to figure out what a vehicle is really like.

If you guys want, we can make a post about “What to Look For When Buying a Used Car” at a later date.

The first one is pretty useful in a Canadian winter. Start the car and let it warm up while you have a look around it and check under the hood — or bonnet, for those of us who grew up calling it that.

After a few minutes, I had Junior pull the car forward. As I’d suspected, after checking the dipstick, there were a couple of nice black drip marks exactly where the engine had been sitting about 30 seconds earlier.

That told me three things.

One, the engine had a leak.

Two, the oil was black, so they clearly hadn’t bothered servicing it.

And three, when I got to drive the final portion of the route back to the car lot, I was going to test the “gently used” portion and see if we could make it go bang.

Driving it down the road, you could hear the air gaps around the door. The heater had a musty smell. And the car pulled to the right the entire time — and not because of the road camber. This was considerably worse.

But as I had initially feared, this POS wasn’t the one for us. The search continued for a few weeks, with pretty much identical results, if not worse.

There was one place that will remain nameless, but somehow is still in business, that had a former police cruiser. Absolutely brought in from an auction, so guaranteed “gently used.”

Probably No high-speed responses anywhere.

It had no rear seats, holes in the dash where the police equipment had once been mounted, holes in the floor and roof where the cage had been bolted in, holes in the doors, and the centre console sitting where the back seats should have been.

All this could be yours for the bargain price of $10,000.

And somehow, despite all of this, Junior wanted it.

That was a short argument. And he lost.

A few weeks passed and the wife spotted a red Nissan Micra at a small car lot on her way to work. We took a drive over, but it was a Sunday and the place was closed. We had a look through the windows anyway. The Micra looked okay, and so did the one parked next to it.

So we went back a few days later, met the owner, looked at both cars and took them for a drive. They were okay. Neither of them wowed either of us. The owner then took us up to his shop, where he had another car. He had taken it in on trade and hadn’t even looked at it yet.

It was a 2013 Hyundai Accent.

We took a look. We went for a drive. The price was one of the best we’d seen.

Junior liked it.

Mom liked it.

The owner cleaned it, completed the safety inspection and plated it for him.

And Junior got his first car.

And just like his dad had done 33 years earlier…

He was now the owner of a small blue hatchback as his first car. Only his was 600 CC larger with a whopping 94 more horse than mine….. oh how the world has changed in 33 years.