Around 11 years ago I bought a new second-hand car, a Honda CRX Del Sol. It was a little red two-seater sports car with a removable roof, and I loved it. It was shiny and beautiful and drove like a dream.

Within a few days it had been banged into while parked. That was the first of around 17 ‘events’ and eventually I stopped fixing things unless I really needed to. It’s a killer when you lose your no claims bonus on the insurance and have to pay a huge excess anyway.

13 months ago I had to spend a couple of thousand dollars on it to get a warrant. Some fairly routine things needed work or replacing, some of them quite expensive. That was a shock to the bank balance that had effects reaching well into last year and even this year.

At the end of December I took the car for its regular Warrant of Fitness. When they called me I imagined the car needed some costly part, but the news was much worse than that: structural rust bad enough that fixing it would cost more than the car was worth. My little car, whose engine ran so well, had reached the end of its days with me.

The photo above shows the Del Sol in the Honda workshop and is fairly flattering. In fact the paint work was a mess, the driver’s door had a huge rusting dent and the carpet was growing weeds as a persistent leak had never been resolved. The leak probably contributed in large part to the structural rust.

Meanwhile my partner Deb had been considering for the last couple of years replacing her car, and we’d discussed maybe sharing one car, rather than having one each. Deb had a 2-door sedan; getting our little dogs in and out and safely attached in their harnesses was always tricky.

Deb had known others who had done thorough research and concluded that the Honda Jazz was economical, fuel efficient and produced low carbon emissions.

I work from home and most of my driving is for shopping or to take the dogs to the beach. Last year I bought a bicycle to reduce my need to drive.

Deb commonly works in town and often only needs to get to the office and home again. While our last bus to the top of the hill leaves town at 6.30 pm and Deb often works later than that, a bus is often a suitable option.

So, over the last week or so we’ve done the deed: traded both cars for a 3-year old Honda Jazz, shown in this second photo.

It’s a 1300cc, 4 door with pep. It has a tiny turning circle, and the seats fold up and down and every which way allowing for plenty of possibilities for transporting long or tall loads.

I’ll be interested to see if I can fit my bike in, given that the Honda website appears to show a bike in the back, albeit with the front wheel removed. Although another movie actually shows a fully assembled bike upright in the back.

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Tagged as: cars, CO2, transport