Getting a new car was my wife’s idea, not mine. Our old car is virtually brand new. The odometer measures a mere 180,000 miles. In our family, that’s fresh off the lot. Our last Honda CR-V — or rather the one before that, now that we’ve just added a third CR-V to our illustrious line of vehicles — boasted 320,000 miles. And even then, it didn’t die of its own accord. My younger daughter’s boyfriend at the time totaled it on the Taconic State Parkway. A novice driver, he overcompensated, causing the car to perform several flips on that part of the Taconic where it widens to three lanes, before coming to a stop upright on the side of the road. Miraculously, they hit no other cars and walked away with barely a scratch. Our gratitude and the vehicle’s performance in combat prompted us to replace it with another CR-V. My wife’s thinking, which I suppose I reluctantly agree with, is that we’re not getting any younger. One of us shouldn’t be left without a car when the other is on a trip somewhere. But my understanding, based on doom-scrolling the news all day, is that this might be the worst time in human history to buy a new car. Prices are high with tariffs threatening to drive them even higher, and interest rates are higher still. On the other hand, perhaps now is as a good time as any to make a purchase, before cars become completely unaffordable. I momentarily flirted with the idea of buying something other than a CR-V. As dependable as Hondas are, they’re not exactly sexy. They don’t shout the romance of the open road. Nobody is going to do a double-take at a stop light and ask themselves, “Who is that dangerously attractive fellow behind the wheel playing Carole King at a sensible volume?” We visited a Toyota showroom to look at the RAV-4 — not that a Toyota is quantitively glitzier than a Honda, but it was slim pickings. We were told we could have any car we desired so long as it was white or red, and even then it would take weeks to deliver. Those shades and colors don’t represent our family’s palette, not that we tend toward the mod. Both of our previous CR-V’s were gray. My preference would be forest green. Wouldn’t you assume that a tasteful shade of green would be every thinking person’s first choice? Yet such vehicles are virtually impossible to find. That they don’t exist can lead me to only one sad and depressing conclusion: Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. In the meantime, our last Honda — which hadn’t given us a single concern and lived to late middle age without requesting anything more than a humble oil change, a new set of tires and maybe some brake pads — suddenly conked out on the Taconic. My wife was behind the wheel. I wasn’t around to witness the incident. I could easily have become suspicious of her story since she wanted a new car, but then it started bucking while I was driving. Mission failure couldn’t have come at a worse moment. We were planning to take a 10-day, thousand mile trip to Maine and Canada the following week. It turned out not to be the car’s fault. To hear tell, it was mine in my eternal quest to find the lowest price gas available: We took the car to a Honda dealer that diagnosed the problem as bad gas; $2,500 later, the car was good to go. While it was in the shop, my spouse visited the Honda showroom. Conveniently, it was connected to the repair shop — you didn’t even have to travel outdoors — and she called to report that she had found several attractive options. I frankly didn’t see why we needed a new car now that our old car was new again — it made it to Canada and back without a hiccup — but I was also forced to acknowledge that the writing appeared on the wall. Each of us has a lifespan — that goes for cars, too — and while we might deceive ourselves that we can keep going forever, the actuarial tables suggest otherwise. On my own visit to retrieve the car from the repair shop the next day, I also looked at new vehicles and found one that seemed right. There’s a grain to life as there is to meat. Some of us are more fortunate than others to recognize and cut along it. Thus, the bottom-of-the-line 2026 CR-V seemed to fit the bill. Despite its modest price, it came with a sufficient number of bells and whistles in a becoming shade of gray, more like clay. So now we’re a two-car family. I still haven’t quite gotten used to the sense of freedom. I’m still thinking that I have to plan my life, or at least my errands, around my wife’s schedule. And now that the new car will become our default ride, our old car, clocking far fewer miles than it once would have, will probably be around forever or until some act of God or boyfriend totals it.