[tom406]

I'm almost 50, but after I moved to Seattle 25 years ago, I had a run of 5 years or so where my vintage cars were my DD. I had a 20 mile commute (mostly to a classic car dealership, so parking security wasn't really an issue). I used 1955 and 1963 Ford Country Sedan wagons, a 1966 Ford LTD 4dr HT, a blow through turbocharged 1972 Nova, and a 1966 Ford F100 for commuters. The F100 served me until we had our second child and a standard cab just wouldn't do anymore and in '06 I got an extended cab 2005 F150 that I still have. I enjoyed driving them quite a bit, and didn't consider it too much of a burden-I even drove that '55 on bias ply wide whites with power drum brakes in the rain and lived to tell about it! There was, in retrospect, a fair amount of normal old car troubleshooting on the fly that I just wasn't willing to deal with anymore once I had multiple small children in the car. They're all older now, but I still tend to want my DD to be stone reliable. All the drivers in my family LOVE/LOVE/LOVE back up camera technology and really miss them when we drive the cars that don't have it. I'm leery of intrusive automated safety things too, but I'm a huge fan of the emergency braking in our new Mazda3 commuter. None of us really knew it had it until I turned my head to merge onto the freeway and didn't see everything stopping in front of me. I heard a quick series of beeps and the brakes applied. I then hit the brakes as well, and we came to rest a few inches from the car in front of me. Without that technology, I'd still be parked in that guy's trunk. I think its a great thing, especially for older drivers in congested areas. As for insurance-it does tend to be cheaper, but make sure your policy actually covers you. Many are set up with the assumption that you have a late model DD with a standard policy and may not cover you if you sell your late models and don't tell them. Even in the late 90's, I had trouble finding a regular insurance policy that would use stated value on my vintage vehicles. I ended up with Country Companies because their farming vehicle background was the only one that gave their agents the latitude to handle my request for stated value policies at the time for those cars and trucks I listed earlier.