It’s probably not that beneficial to your mental health to spend too much dwelling on things you should or shouldn’t have done because you can’t change what’s happened.
But suppose you could. Let’s pretend for a moment that you could climb into one of those Doc Brown-modded Deloreans and jump back in time to give your younger self one piece of car-related advice. What would you risk upsetting the space-time-continuum to tell the you from the past?
Maybe you’d advise the fresher-faced you not to sell a certain car because prices are going to spike almost as soon as you’ve handed over the keys and you’ll never be able to afford another one. Or in a similar vein, perhaps you’d tell young you to stop dithering and buy that special car because, while he doesn’t realize it, it’s now or never.
Related: The Internet Is Full Of Bad Automotive Advice So Let’s Enjoy Some Of The Worst
You might want to caution yourself not to switch out the stability control on a certain rainy day three months down the line, or to slow down for the cop behind that billboard who’s going to restrict you to a bus for three months if you don’t. And yeah, while you’re at it, tell the less wrinkly you not to put off that oil change, because he’s going to regret it big-time three visits to the redline later, if he skips it.
Like most of you, there are tons of cars I should have bought and shouldn’t have sold, crashes and speeding convictions I could have avoided and money and time spent rebuilding wrecked engines I could have saved if I’d not been so wreckless. I can’t go back and change any of it, but my own son gets its license this year, and if he takes onboard even a sliver of the advice I would give my younger self he might save himself a lot of pain, as well as the agony of hearing his own son 30 years in the future ask him multiple times every year: “Dad, why did you sell that cool old car, again?”