Back in 2008—after completing a run of contracts with one of my previous em(x)plo(it)yers—I decided to treat myself to a car I always wanted: a Subaru rally car. But with those prohibitively expensive, I found something that looked the part at least: a ’99 Impreza 2.5RS coupe.
I’m not sure when I started referring to the car as Scooby, but the name is based on English rhyming slang: Subaru sounds like Scooby-Doo. The cars are known as Scoobies there, and the name stuck here. Scooby quickly acquired a personality—even an account on Twitter.
As an aside, the designer of Scooby-Doo, Iwao Takamoto, previously worked at Walt Disney Studios before joining Hanna‐Barbera. He learned to draw while he and his family where held in an interment camp along with many other Japanese Americans after the bombing of Perl Harbor. His father had emigrated from Hiroshima years prior…
Anyway—Scooby was almost ten years old when I bought him, and yes my car was a him because I’m not always about traditional gender conformity. He was in excellent condition, although I knew as soon as I’d driven the car a few blocks it was a good one. I’m not sure exactly if the previous owner loved it, but it had been well‐cared for. I, on the other hand, did grow to love the car, and we went everywhere together.
See…
In the nine years I had him, in the 130,000+ kilometres we travelled together, Scooby never once let me down. Never once was I stranded anywhere because he wouldn’t start or keep running. This car had a sled dog spirit. Subarus are notoriously reliable when they are looked after, and this one treated me better than some people I know, and I’d known it for longer than most people I know.
But at over 18 years old and with 300,000 kilometres approaching on the odometer, the car was starting to show its age despite being notoriously reliable. The bodywork was rusting in crucial, expensive areas.
I call them crumbly dogs—those wonderfully old dogs who are still clearly pups on the inside, still smiling through their eyes, still wagging their tails as they drag themselves around in a body you know isn’t long for this world. They are the best of the best dogs. Scooby was becoming a crumbly dog.
I’d always wanted to take Scooby to the moon as symbolic gesture of companionship, a nod to always being there, and that meant getting the odometer to read at least 384,400 kilometres—the average distance to the moon. Light makes this journey in just over a second. For Scooby it’d been almost 20 years, he still had a little under a third of the way to go, and I knew he was going to crumble first.
It was a tough call, but Scooby was replaced back in April with another Subaru—this one a ’07 Impreza 2.5i SE wagon. His official name is Scooby-Too, but after a few months I know the spirit of the old car is alive in the new one. He’s Scooby, of course, just in another form. There are lots of carry‐overs from the old car: the same silver colour, the same basic EJ25 engine, the same AWD system, the same gearbox that won’t go into 1st smoothly unless you’re completely stopped, the same wipers that will stall a third of the way up the windscreen if you flick the mist function too lightly, the same air filter, and the same wheels and tires—actually they are exactly the same wheels and tires: Scooby donated them to Scooby-Too.
But there are lots of things different about the new car—the gearing and throttle response, for example, which are tuned for economy on the new car vs. performance on the old car. The new car is more powerful, and it needs to be, because it’s also a little bit heavier. But it drives and rides excellent—if the brakes were stronger I’d say it would easily out‐corner the old car. Plus it’s got heated seats, tinted windows, cruise control, and a CD player.
Original Scooby—thank you for being a good car. Thank you.
Scooby-Too, you have some big shoes to fill, but you’ve got the same sled dog spirit in you. You’ll be a good car. And we’ll get to the moon this time.
Only 160,000 kilometres to go…