The day after the odometer on his father’s 1973 Ford Maverick “turned over” from 99,999 to 100,000, my friend Scott skipped school for the first and probably last time in his life. Can you blame him? After all, everyone in our rather upscale suburb had seen the eight-year-old compact Ford rolling around at a walking pace for the better part of the previous evening, Scott’s father honking the horn and pointing excitedly to the old white bedsheet he’d duct-taped to the faded green paint of the driver’s door for everyone to see. A series of numbers rendered in shaky black shoe polish told the story: “100,000!” In the other front seat, sitting next to a similar bedsheet on the passenger door, was Scott. His father had made this participation mandatory.

Scott was beyond humiliated, of course. This was a yuppie neighborhood before anyone knew the term, and our church parking lot was so clogged with brand-new Mercedes-Benz 240D sedans it looked like a taxi pickup line at the Frankfurt airport. His classmates were alternately contemptuous and slightly impressed: yeah, that old Maverick was stupid and lame, but how the heck did anyone get a car to turn 100,000 miles without blowing up? Ford certainly didn’t expect it to happen; at least that was the fairly explicit message one got after sitting in any of its 70s-era products and realizing that the odometer would effectively declare Tilt! at the 100k mark.