Welcome to Minerva

“We” got our first car in 1997. It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college when my then boyfriend called me up to tell me his folks had bought him a car, a manual transmission silver Saturn. My mind was *blown*. Who got new cars while in college? Adam named the car Olaf, and refused to let me drive him until we were married. (Since then, I’ve done 99% of the driving when we’re both in the car.) Olaf had canoes strapped to him. He did the trip between Connecticut and Massachusetts many times (at high speeds) the year Adam and I spent engaged and apart. We passed him to my brother when my brother graduated from college, and rumor has it Olaf still lives on in the roads of Minnesota, some 20 years later. (Please note: Olaf was named well before Frozen!)

Our second car was also a Saturn – green with an automatic transmission. In 2002 our commutes pulled us different ways and it was hard with a single car. We loved our Saturn and were sorry to see the rubber bumpers replaced with colored ones, but I’d vowed after a three hour, three mile journey on the tollways of New York not to get another manual. They just don’t make sense in the kind of traffic we live in. This car was named Brunhilde, on the viking theme. (Elsa would’ve been a great name on the Wagnerian theme – phew! Narrowly missed that one!) I was very conscientious in those early days about the traps that women fell into with finance. (I read a lot of Money magazine for a while after a panic-stricken realization I had no idea how insurance worked. It was full of horror stories about women and divorce.) So I proposed that we alternate ownership of the cars, so we’d build equal credit records. Brunhilde was mine. Brunhilde ended life donated to WBUR.

Olaf was replaced by Hrothgar – a 2007 Blue Toyota Matrix. That was my Beowulf phase – we named the car Hrothgar (or Hrothcar if I was feeling punny) about the same time we named our youngest son Thane. Same inspiration. Hrothgar was bigger than our Saturns (we were sad when they went away!) and was more of a “family” car. We brought Thane home from the hospital in it. We took it on our first ever camping trip in White Lake State Park. (In cleaning the car out, I found an old Mapquest-style printed set of directions to our home away from home!) Hrothgar was Adam’s in name, but the last few years I’ve been the primary driver. In an otherwise reliable workhorse of a car, the lack of audio line in or Bluetooth has driven us both crazy. Also heated seats. Today, Hrothgar drove off with new plates under the guidance of a friend of mine, after 93,000 miles of service. It’s good to know that a car that still has some working years in it will get that time on the road.

It was really the camping that made us need a bigger car. I wanted one with great gas mileage, so I test drove quite a few and ended up with a 2011 Kia Sorento. (The gas mileage ended up being a disappointment.) I was reading Herodotus in the Humanities Book Club at the time, and so we named our new car. It’s still our “big car”, and hopefully will be for quite some time (significantly to exceed three years, please…) It does have heated seats and Bluetooth. The only real annoyances are that it doesn’t have a thermometer (so annoying – I never even thought to check!) and the tan seats were a grave mistake. The car just hit 60,000 miles on our drive down to King Richard’s Faire, so I think it has quite a few good years left!

The time came, and then passed, when I’d budgeted for another new, smaller “commuter” car to replace Hrothgar. I dreaded the buying process. I dreaded the picking process. I’d driven my parents Ford C-Max (Rosie!) quite a few times on my trips home and I’d liked it a lot. The second car is definitely a commuter. It’s purpose is to schlep my husband or me the 11 miles between Stoneham and Cambridge, with heated seats and easy podcast syncing. So when we decided not to go camping Labor Day weekend (a mistake I still regret), I decided to use my time and attention on his task I knew would take both when it was needed. And I decided to focus on the C-Max, which was basically designed for the kind of commuter traffic we do constantly!

I put down a deposit on Minerva, a blue 2017 Ford C-Max Energi. She’s named after Minerve, the small fortified village in France we visited which is itself named after Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. (There was likely a temple there in the Roman era.) The “Energi” part of the C-Max is pretty cool. The car is an electric hybrid, or a plug-in hybrid. It has a fully electric motor with an approximate 20 mile range. (Remember? Cambridge is 11 miles from home. And my workplace has an EV charging station!) I have no range anxiety, though, since it also has a full gas/hybrid engine. When fully charged and gassed up, the car has an over 600 mile range. It also has pretty much no trunk space, but you can’t have everything. So I’m trying to find an electrician who knows how to install a charging station (I bet our next “big” car will be at least partially electric too!) and currently classily charging the car through a cord strung through the window. I discovered there are no EV charging stations in Stoneham, and have already dropped a “friendly observation” to an elected official or two. Minerva is used. I don’t understand the mindset that turns in a same-model-year car with 1300 miles on it, but someone did. And I benefited from a nice used car discount (and that crazy person also installed remote starter, so there’s that!) It was a bit of an adventure for the dealership to get the title (I guess it actually got lost in the snail-mail – who does that?!) which accounts for the delay. But it’s mine now!

Twenty years, and we’re on our fifth car. It does feel rather monumental!