Why I Will Drive My 2005 Pontiac Vibe Into the Ground
Americans are hanging on to their old cars longer than ever. I hope my General Motors-Toyota hatchback lasts forever.
4 min
The terrible news began with a knock on my front door: My neighbour, doing his best hat-in-hand routine while holding a driver’s side mirror, kept on apologising.
Moments earlier, he’d somehow managed to back his vehicle out of his driveway and directly into the side of my 2005 Pontiac Vibe. This past winter in Michigan was rough. Things happen. I get it.
But the damage was a concern. With a two-decade-old car, I was sure the Vibe would be declared a total loss, and thus force me into the melee that is the new and used car market .
The typical age of U.S. vehicles on the road today keeps getting older, pushed upward by aging cars like my Vibe hatchback.
For many drivers, the average new-vehicle price of around $50,000 is enough to keep them on the sidelines . That’s partially why I felt a sense of dread when I saw my neighbor had done more than give the Vibe a love tap.
I also feared I would lose a vehicle I adore, which I amplified in a frantic series of messages to my co-workers.
My wife and I had bought the Vibe in the fall of 2020, while living in Brooklyn. We knew eventually a move back home to our native Michigan was in the cards, and therefore a car would be needed.
At the time, the used-car market had been upended by the pandemic , and a light at the end of the tunnel was hard to see.
I spent countless hours poring over Reddit posts and old car reviews for what my then-employer Consumer Reports then ranked as the best used vehicles under $5,000, which, believe it or not, was a thing not that long ago. The 2005 Vibe stood out.
The Vibe is a product of a once-groundbreaking joint venture between General Motors’ Pontiac brand and Toyota Motor.
The automakers co-owned a company that assembled the Vibe, essentially a rebadged variant of Toyota’s Matrix hatchback, at a factory in California. The Matrix and the Vibe rolled off the line together starting in 2002.
The car has its enjoyable quirks: The hatch glass opens up with the press of a key fob button. There’s a sweet AC outlet connection, too—a prescient feature from the pre-USB era that’s great for charging my gadgets.
Much about this car now feels like a collection of footnotes in a history book. The Pontiac brand is no more, closed in GM’s bankruptcy a few years later.
The GM-Toyota joint venture has also been dissolved. The factory that built it now belongs to Tesla , cranking out electric vehicles. And small, affordable cars like the Vibe are a rarity in today’s automotive landscape.
But once, it got plenty of hype as a genre-defying machine.
“Although Vibe ultimately defies traditional vehicle classification, it plays comfortably in nearly every automotive category, while fitting neatly into none,” GM gushed in a press release around the time the Vibe was introduced.
“It offers the handling and performance of a sports car, the utility and rugged, go-anywhere range of an SUV.”
We weren’t seeking sports-car performance. We only wanted to get out of our neighbourhood—and the Vibe did more than I could’ve imagined.
A Brooklyn dealer had a 2005 Vibe in stock with only about 60,000 miles on it. The car’s history included one owner who, according to the salesman, lived nearby and mainly drove it around the borough. For us, it was perfect.
The day after we bought the car for roughly $6,300 all-in, we drove upstate with my American Eskimo-Shih Tzu mix to go on a hike at some park. I don’t remember exactly where we went or why, but I was happy to leave New York during pandemic lockdowns.
Looking at photos from the day, that much is obvious: The image of my dog peacefully snoozing in the back seat as we puttered north, the serene emptiness of the landscape, the cheerful selfie we took with masks pulled down around our necks.
We make memories in our cars, and I didn’t waste any time making good ones in the Vibe.
The Vibe’s cargo space astounded us at times. I once needed to drive an old 1958 hi-fi console to a repair shop an hour away. A truck would surely be needed, I thought. Nope—the hulking piece of furniture neatly fit inside the Vibe’s trunk.
And for a small car with a small engine and an automatic transmission, it’s fun—I swear—to drive. I feel like I understand the Vibe when I’m at the wheel, something I can’t say about the much newer compact SUV we bought to tow my family around in.
The Vibe draws random remarks of praise all the time: Shortly after we moved, a construction worker in Ann Arbor waved me down as I idled at a stoplight. He let me know how much he loved his own Vibe, which by then had been running for over 250,000 miles. “Hell yeah,” I said. He gave me a thumbs-up.
To give you a sense of how attached I am to the Vibe, my wife and I have repeatedly remarked—only half kidding—about how we hoped it could one day be the car our kid learned to drive in.
So, faced with the damage caused by my neighbor, I told my colleagues: “The best outcomes in order are: 1) repairable; 2) an absolutely comical settlement payoff; 3) it’s totaled and I get enough money for a bulls— lease.”
Then, when the onslaught of worry and annoyance over my Vibe’s abrupt damage subsided, I started to crunch the numbers.
Perhaps it would be fine to take a check from the insurer and get into something new. Since buying the Vibe, I’ve kept track of every repair made. All told, we’ve put about $10,400 into it until now.
I feel ridiculous when I read that number, but it works out to about $150 a month on average. Sure, I could get a lease on a small, modern car.
But until I’m paying more on average for repairs, setting aside money for those fixes each month feels like the better trade-off than dumping the Vibe.
In the end, my neighbour’s insurance company said the Vibe was valued at about $4,500, which comfortably exceeded the cost of repairs that included a new mirror and door. I was relieved, as I conveyed the news to my colleagues later.
Over time, I plan to freshen up the Vibe and give it some much-needed love. A new tire rim to replace one lost when I needed a new wheel would be a nice start. Replacement floor mats and an intense detailing could go a long way to boosting its curb appeal.
The Vibe lacks modern creature comforts and safety equipment that come standard in new vehicles sold today. I don’t care. “That’s dada’s car,” my kid would sometimes shout.
It is, and it will be as long as I can keep it alive.
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