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" With snow flurries in the forecast, I decided last Saturday it might be a good day to take my 1934 Ford Fordor Deluxe out for one last drive before winter trapped it in the workshop. Also, I needed to warm up the engine for an oil change.   The car was overdue for a little maintenance, as Barb and I had just returned from a 1400-mile road trip, following the Dillinger Trail all over the Midwest like a motorized pinball. With no filter in the Ford&amp;#039;s lubrication system, the oil was looking a bit darkish.   So I fired the old girl up, drove around the country roads for a while and then headed into town to run a few errands. Parallel parking in front of our post office on Main Street, I fearlessly left it right between a hulking Dodge pickup truck and a rusty minivan with visible hail damage.            When I first got the Ford, I would never have parked it in a spot like this. But after driving it in all kinds of traffic for a full week\u2014and surviving a trip through Chicago during rush hour\u2014I&amp;#039;ve become a little more cavalier and less paranoid. Maybe the car is starting to seem invulnerable, like that First Cav officer played by Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, who was said to be surrounded by a weird protective light. Achilles, with no apparent heel problem.            With this new relaxed attitude toward traffic, I&amp;#039;ve recently been asking myself, &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#039;t you just drive this thing all the time?&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a real car, after all, and apparently quite durable. Why treat it as a garage queen? It has only 36,000 original miles on the odometer, and my grandfather would have been thrilled to have this lovely old V-8-powered sedan as his family car in 1934. He would have driven it to work and taken the family on vacations to the mountains or the seashore. Or at least to a small lake in Minnesota. So why don&amp;#039;t I?   Well, I was reminded of a few good reasons last Saturday.   First, it was a chilly day\u2014windy, in the mid-30s\u2014and my Fordor Deluxe is not quite deluxe enough to have come with a heater.            Heaters were optional in 1934, and Fords sold south of the Mason-Dixon Line didn&amp;#039;t even come with those odd, canister-like Ford thermostats in their twin radiator hoses. And I would guess\u2014based on its total lack of rust\u2014that my car had its home somewhere in Dixie.   But even the Deep South (as I learned in the Army) can be quite chilly in winter, so I&amp;#039;m surprised at this omission. I guess car buyers in 1934 had lower expectations. With about one-quarter of the American population living on farms, people were probably thrilled not to be standing in a field or sitting on a tractor. Or driving a horse and sleigh. Just getting out of the wind was a real luxury.   In any case, my car radiates a small amount of warmth through the firewall, but it&amp;#039;s not enough to induce heat exhaustion on a winter day. I could probably find an original Ford heater on eBay or install one of the many aftermarket heater kits available, but I have no plans to drive in winter anyway. The chassis has apparently never known salt, and I&amp;#039;m not going to be the first to introduce it. Might as well just wear wool socks\u2014as we did with our 1968 Volkswagen Beetle. Whose &amp;quot;heater&amp;quot; produced about the same level of cozy warmth as the 6-volt speedometer light bulb on the Ford.            On the flip side, the &amp;#039;34 Ford has the best hot-weather ventilation system we&amp;#039;ve ever had in a car. The cowl vent floods the car with air, and the cleverly designed rear quarter windows let it flow smoothly through. If you really want wind, you can also crank open the bottom of the hinged windshield.   It&amp;#039;s so pleasant that the need for air conditioning never enters your mind. If modern cars had ventilation this good, we could shut off the a/c and save some energy\u2014aerodynamics being equal.   Which they probably aren&amp;#039;t. The Ford punches a pretty big hole through the air, and we average between 12 and 18 mpg, depending on driving conditions. In other words, it gets about the same mileage as a modern full-size SUV or pickup\u2014with the a/c running. No commuter-car bragging material here.   Another limitation with the old Ford is speed.            For reasons I can&amp;#039;t fathom, our Flathead V-8 starts pumping water out the radiator overflow pipe if you continuously drive faster than about 55 mph. I&amp;#039;ve tried everything to cure this\u2014cleaning out the radiator, new head gaskets, etc. I installed new high-efficiency water pumps, and they just accelerated the rate of water loss.   I guess maybe it&amp;#039;s time to rebuild the engine and clean the water jackets, or get a modern, pressurized radiator from a hot-rod supplier. And put those new water pumps back on.   In the meantime, the car is perfectly happy cruising at 53 or 54 mph, and will do so all day. Oddly, this moderate speed is seldom a problem. On the rare four-lane roads we travel, the old Ford still catches a wide variety of trucks and dawdlers in the slow lane, and faster traffic simply goes around you.   And the two-lanes?            Surprisingly, very few other cars catch up with you when you&amp;#039;re driving just below 55 mph. When they do, most drivers pass effortlessly and then wave when they go by. Others follow for quite a while so they can watch the car go down the road. You can see them discussing it in your rearview mirror. I&amp;#039;ve gotten so I can actually lip-read the words &amp;quot;Thirty-Four Ford,&amp;quot; backward.   The only headache comes from Shy People.   Here in the rural Midwest, we have a special type of modest, self-effacing driver who probably thinks it&amp;#039;s rude to pass another car. I hate to make generalities, but it&amp;#039;s usually someone of the church-lady persuasion, or else a male who appears to be one of our last surviving Civil War veterans.   These people simply will not pass another car\u2014and I honestly think most of them have never tried. If you pull off on the shoulder and try to wave them around, they slow down behind you and stop. Perhaps to see if you&amp;#039;re all right.   It&amp;#039;s a nice instinct in this dog-eat-dog world, but it also drives you crazy.            On our big trip, I finally just got in the habit of pulling completely off the road (roadside parks work well) to let these folks go by. Only to catch them a short time later. This is what&amp;#039;s known as &amp;quot;a good time to stop for lunch.&amp;quot;   So a 1934 Ford can be almost\u2014but not quite\u2014a daily driver and a replacement for the modern, all-weather car. And this has led me to a quandary.   When I bought the Ford, my plan was to take that gangster trail trip, enjoy the car for a while and then sell it, moving on to the next big phase. Yes, for some of us, restlessness and destiny are exactly the same thing. We are never there.            As usual, I&amp;#039;m looking at a mixture of old cars (Morgan Plus 4, E-Type project, etc.) and new stuff. I miss my old Boxster S, and have recently driven a couple of current Corvettes that are astounding for their power and handling\u2014and mileage: 436 bhp, with 10 mpg more than an 85-horse &amp;#039;34 Ford on the highway. Seems there&amp;#039;s been progress. And the Corvette has hydraulic brakes!   On the other hand, the &amp;#039;34 Ford looks like...well, a &amp;#039;34 Ford. To my eye, one of the handsomest cars of the 20th century. I sit in the carpeted garage band corner in my workshop some evenings, practicing guitar, and I can&amp;#039;t take my eyes off that grille and those fenders.... Or the hood, headlights and roofline. A three-quarter front view is best. It does for me, in the American idiom, what an MG-TC or a Bentley 4\u00BC does in the British.            We&amp;#039;re supposed to get real snow this weekend\u2014not just flurries\u2014so maybe the car will be trapped in the workshop and I&amp;#039;ll have all winter to ponder my options. And to remain mesmerized while I sit on that shop stool and practice guitar. Not such a bad thing, really.   By coincidence, the song I&amp;#039;m working on right now is called &amp;quot;Gimme Shelter.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a17898/observations-from-an-elderly-car/>