Wall Street Journal reporter Ryan Felton’s 20-year-old Pontiac Vibe recently faced an unexpected threat — not from mechanical failure or rust, but from a neighbor’s backup mishap. The neighbor, Felton wrote in an article published June 13, knocked on his door “doing his best hat-in-hand routine while holding a driver’s side mirror” after backing into the car. The accident happened this past winter in Michigan.
Felton initially feared the Vibe would be declared a total loss, forcing him into the new- and used-car market where the average new vehicle costs around $50,000. Instead, the neighbor’s insurance company valued the Vibe at about $4,500, comfortably exceeding the cost of repairs that included a new mirror and door. “I was relieved,” Felton wrote.
The Vibe is a relic of a once-groundbreaking joint venture between General Motors’ Pontiac brand and Toyota Motor. The two automakers co-owned a factory in California that assembled the Vibe alongside the Toyota Matrix from 2002 onward. The Pontiac brand was discontinued in GM’s 2009 bankruptcy, the joint venture dissolved, and the factory now belongs to Tesla, where it produces electric vehicles.
Felton bought the car in fall 2020 for roughly $6,300 while living in Brooklyn, ahead of a planned move back to Michigan. He said he had spent “countless hours poring over Reddit posts and old car reviews” for what Consumer Reports then ranked as the best used vehicles under $5,000. The 2005 Vibe, with about 60,000 miles and one previous owner, stood out.
Since then, Felton wrote, he has tracked every repair — totaling about $10,400, or roughly $150 per month. “Sure, I could get a lease on a small, modern car,” he wrote. “But until I’m paying more on average for repairs, setting aside money for those fixes each month feels like the better trade-off than dumping the Vibe.”
The car’s cargo capacity surprised him: he once fit a 1958 hi-fi console in the back. Its hatch glass opens with a key-fob button. A power outlet from the pre-USB era still works for charging gadgets. “It offers the handling and performance of a sports car, the utility and rugged, go-anywhere range of an SUV,” General Motors said in a press release when the Vibe was introduced, Felton noted.
Beyond its utility, the Vibe carries sentimental weight. Felton and his wife took it on pandemic-era trips to upstate New York with their dog. A construction worker in Ann Arbor once flagged him down to praise his own Vibe, which had passed 250,000 miles. Felton and his wife have “repeatedly remarked — only half kidding — about how we hoped it could one day be the car our kid learned to drive in,” he wrote. His young child, Felton said, calls the Vibe “dada’s car.”
Felton said he plans to keep driving the Vibe as long as possible. “That’s dada’s car,” his child would sometimes shout. “It is, and it will be as long as I can keep it alive,” Felton wrote.