  The author’s 2003 Subaru WRX, not a beater. Click image to enlarge |
It also made traffic a doddle. When surrounded by aggressively swerving drivers, it’s a great boon to be driving something with bodywork that can only be improved by a collision. You don’t blink or flinch, and eventually Joe Road Rage decides that getting house-paint pinstripes on his shiny new BMW is probably not the best idea. Also, once I parked it on the sidewalk beside a bus stop. I left plenty of room for folks to get by, and everyone just assumed it was an especially large piece of litter.
  1980 Volkswagen Beetle Convertible. Click image to enlarge |
There are three main categories of vehicles in this life: the Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent. True beaters are most assuredly in the second camp, with maybe the odd overlap into the third, but they somehow transcend their innate feculence. They become so terrible that they actually cross through into another dimension and become good. It’s probably something to do with the space-time continuum or whatever.
When funds are low, and expectations lower still, the beater is the car that gets the broke to work, and the young out of the house. It’s the machine that braves the elements while the pampered garage queen preens in the garage. It’s the battered old war horse that soaks up the indignity of somebody honing their nascent manual transmission skills while making noises like a chunk of rebar stuffed in an industrial fan. They’re the cars that somehow manage to hold it all together when the laws of physics dictate that the whole shebang should come apart at the seams. The Bluesmobile? Now that was a beater.
They get absolutely no respect, and that’s the way they like it. When a car isn’t a classic, or a collectible, or not even particularly fancy, the beater is the end stage of its life. Some machines can’t hack this brutal existence, and are soon found in the wrecking yard – or worse, as an Autos.ca writer’s demolition derby weapon.
But some, like my long-lost Escort GT (I eventually sold it for $500 – hey, duct tape ain’t cheap), go from being a humdrum sort of background prop to a character, a battler, the kind of car you’d buy a beer in a dive bar, were such a thing possible. Think Relic from The Beachcombers.
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They won’t get no glossy pictures in no fancy car magazines, they don’t run on premium, and if you tried to wash ’em they’d probably dissolve. That don’t matter, a beater’s got stuff to do and places to go.
Slowly.
Noisily.
And probably while leaking something important.
