I’m currently reading Stephen King’s latest release, 11/22/63, and, so far, I’m enjoying the hell out of it. If you haven’t heard about this one, it’s a time-travel story in which our protagonist Jake learns there is a portal back to the year 1958 in the pantry of his local diner; the diner’s owner persuades him, naturally, to use the portal and attempt to change history by preventing the assassination of President Kennedy. But that’s still a few hundred pages ahead.

At the point where I am in the book, Jake has just completed his first lengthy foray into the past, kind of an exploratory mission, during which he spends several weeks driving a ’54 Ford Sunliner. Upon returning to 2011, he makes this observation about his “real” car:

As I turned off the engine I thought about what a cramped, niggardly, basically unpleasant plastic-and-fiberglass shitbox my Toyota was compared to the car I’d gotten used to in [1958].

As someone with — ahem — a bit of experience driving classic cars, I can totally relate. Modern cars get you where you need to go and of course they’re far more fuel-efficient than the chromed phantasms from Detroit’s golden age, but once you’ve been behind the wheel of something that feels like your living room, it’s really hard to get comfortable in a footlocker.