Wheels of Time

I got my driver's license in 1985. My folks had been holding it back as an incentive for good grades, but I was an incorrigible slacker and daydreamer and the GPA stayed relentlessly mediocre. With my 18th birthday approaching (and with it, my ability to go get it on my own stick) they relented and granted permission before I could present them with a fait accompli.

I bring this up because the year 1985 was nineteen years after the last Studebaker, a 1966 Cruiser, rolled off their Canadian assembly line. Their South Bend, Indiana plant had been shuttered a few years earlier, in December of '63.

Growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, Studebakers were old cars. I don't really recollect seeing any around when I was in high school, but this was still the era when domestic cars had five-digit odometers and were considered a pretty well-knackered hooptie when one passed the 100k mile mark. This was also the days before galvanized body panels; it wasn't too bad down south, but north of the Ohio River, cars would often be rotting before your eyes before the note was paid off. (I vaguely remember family members exclaiming at visible rust on my uncle's fairly new mid-'70s Camaro during a holiday visit back north.)

Anyway, if a high school student in 2024 goes to get her driver's license, nineteen years in the past is 2005.

Oldsmobile produced its last vehicle in 2004.

Plymouth went under in 2001, and Eagle...the last non-Jeep vestige of AMC, by then just a division of Chrysler...in 1998.

To the Zoomer, the names "Oldsmobile" and "Plymouth" are as quaint as "Studebaker" and "Packard" are to Gen X, with the difference being that by the 1990s rust-proofing and cars that would run with some degree of reliability for a couple hundred thousand miles had become a thing. I don't recollect seeing Packards when I was a teenager, but you can't swing a jumper cable in a grocery store parking lot today without hitting a clapped-out Oldsmobile still limping along.

The Olds in the photo is an '01-'04 Silhouette in Light Sanddrift Metallic, a thoroughly forgettable badge-engineered GM minivan of the era. It was photographed in December of 2021 with a Canon EOS Rebel T3 & EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS II zoom lens.