Have I got the investment for you! Over the years, as we grow older, our needs change. We start life in diapers, go on to tighty whities, and on to boxers, then, well, back to diapers. We start out sleeping all day, then at night, then not even then, then at night again, then all day, just intermittently. Our lives come full circle, but there is one area that has disappeared from the scene. Old people cars…complete with deploying Depends feature.
Always derided, never appreciated, the butt of a century of jokes, old people’s cars have still always been there for us. The day we traded in that old truck, or sports car, for the Buick Lesabre, Chevy Caprice, or Ford Crown Vic, was a day we all hoped would never come…yet it came nevertheless. And the cars were always there, waiting, almost with a grin, saying to us Resistance Is Futile. You get old, you buy a Buick, you drive slower and slower, you get short, and you die, simple as that. Then the nephew you end up leaving the car to just enters it in the next Demolition Derby. Best of all worlds, he even paints your name on the side in day-glow orange rattle can.
Herein lies the conundrum. In order to fulfill our destiny, we are pre-destined by our gene pool for our “last ride” as it were, to be large, quiet, smooth, with 4 doors (preferably no day-glow rattle can sayings yet), kind of like driving a simulator, or better yet, a video game. Only those properties will safely see us off into the netherworld, and we all know we won’t get past the Pearly Gates without one. But here’s the rub…those cars no longer exist. The last Chevy Caprice remained police cars until ’96. The last real full-sized Buick was the Park Avenue in 2004. Today I realized the Crown Vic, the car that started as a cop car, went on to live as a taxi, ending its life as a three room apartment for illegals, will cease production this fall.
Simultaneously, we as a nation are looking at an increase in the number of old people like never before. We baby boomers are all about to come of age, with retirement monies in hand, and nary a fat-assed car to be seen. And, if not for us, what about my nephew’s Demolition Derby dream? Or stock prices for rattle can spray paint?
I realized just how stupid the powers that be in Detroit are. Just as they have fully integrated the “young” into the new automobile, they have left all us walking history lessons sans ride. Here is where the investment comes in…
In 2007, Russia bought all the tooling for what is arguably the worst car to come out of Detroit in a century, the Chrysler Sebring, and now manufactures it in Siberia somewhere. They’re selling like hotcakes. Russians are not the brightest bulb on the international chandelier, so the Sebring must look like a fucking Bentley compared to what they are used to.
What we need now is for somebody who wants to be THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN, for some 30 million crypt keepers. Please just step up and leave your money on the table. I want to purchase the rights and tooling for the 2004 Buick Park Avenue. There are some 25 old factories still left in Michigan, and with near 20% unemployment, workers will not be hard to find. The ’04 Park Ave (the last year they were made) was the largest, most fuel efficient, most powerful, roomiest, most durable, safest, most reliable car that ever came out of Detroit (4 doors, 5 body trunk, 25 mpg, big old 3.9 V6 with front wheel drive…and nearly invisible, might I add). Cops never saw them, thieves never wanted them. If you left one in the Bronx with the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition overnight, you would return the following day to see a note on the windshield saying “We locked it up for you, keys under the mat, please don’t do that again.”
Time to step forward…come on, who wants to make a killing? It can’t lose. Old people cannot even get into the new cars, physically. The high side bolsters on the seats are like the Matterhorn to an old ass. We want a large flat soft leather seat, like a Barcalounger, where you can almost here Ricardo Montalban saying, “fine Corinthian leather” or even “I’ll chase him ’round the moons of Nibia and ’round the Antares Maelstrom and ’round Perdition’s flames before I give him up!” Sorry. Sometimes I Khan help myself.
Don’t forget, low slung bucket-type seats will make the cars seem driverless to oncoming traffic. Rescue workers will need the Jaws of Life to get them out after a nasty accident. We want ass-height seating. We don’t get down into, or up into anything. We sit, period. No low-slung sports cars or high-riding SUV’s for us, oh no. Open door, plant ass, swing in legs. Oh, and I think a feature that shuts off the turn signal after five miles would be an added bonus.
I plan marketing to be full page ads with large type in: AARP Monthly, Osteoporosis Today, Depends Newsletter, and on TV on Dancing with the Stars, and on re-runs of Marcus Welby M.D., Matlock and Perry Mason. I also plan a tour of Senior Living areas all over the southwest and Florida.
Invest now, at my website www.phatOldRide.com. Be a part of the future and the past at the same time. See the ‘new’ 2013 Cruiseship Sedan.
The CRANK
