There’s a VW Beetle in my parking lot which hasn’t moved in quite some time. It’s not in the greatest of shape - one tire is very low, the paint has a very suede-looking finish to it, and the interior could use some work. But it looks like a very fun little automobile, admirable for its utilitarian nature.

I’d love to own a Beetle. My grandpa had one when I was pretty little, a red coupe. Not sure if it was a Superbeetle, as my memory isn’t that sharp. But the charm of that car has always stuck with me, and I know owning one would be a blast.

It seems like low-cost transportation used to have much more personality years ago than it does today. The inexpensive cars we have now - the Dodge Neons, Chevy Cavaliers, and Honda Civics - are much more reliable than their predecessors, and they feature things like air conditioning and power locks/windows, which were parts of luxury packages back in the Beetle’s heyday. This comes at a price, though, since Neons and Civics by and large lack the spirit of their forefathers.

I’d love to drive a car like the Beetle, a VW Bus, Corvair Monza, or Datsun 510. I’d be ecstatic to have an Alfa Romeo 1750 GTV. These cars had style and zest which made up for whatever technical faults they might have had, faults which were often part of the charm of ownership, the ongoing love affair between owner and automobile.

There aren’t many “modern” cars I could say I’d actually be enthusiastic to own. The only one that comes immediately to mind is the reincarnated Mini. I’d actually probably prefer the new Mini to the old one, which strikes me as somewhat odd. The car is incredibly tiny, but I really won’t need a large car for a few years yet. I’m not incredibly tall or broad, nor do I have several children or massive amounts of stuff I need to move on a regular basis. I could totally get by with a car the size of the Mini and be just fine.

But other than the Mini, I can’t really think of a car in production I’d really rather have over one of the oldies. Dodge has come out with a couple of provoking concepts in last few years which pique my interest, cars like the Slingshot, M80, and Hornet. Yet each one of these has drawbacks.

The Slingshot is a very pretty little sports car. But there’s the key word, little. The Slingshot, based on the Smart microcar, is downright tiny, the spiritual successor the MG Midget or Austin-Healy Sprite. It’s too tiny for a trip over 100 miles (unless that trip was from Minneapolis to Winona on Highway 61), and the lack of storage space would cause problems for even the most efficient of packers. But what a fun car it could be.

The M80 isn’t a car, of course, but it’s a very sharp-looking little truck. Of the three vehicles, it would be the one I’d be most likely to buy, though I wouldn’t be too happy with the gas mileage. Whatever the trade-off in fuel consumption, the M80 would make up for it in practicality. I rarely go anywhere with more than one passenger, and the bed would allow me to still carry a lot of stuff around if the need arose. It strikes me as the kind of vehicle you could load up with a friend, a cooler, a basket of food, and a couple of dogs and go spend a wonderful afternoon in a park somewhere.

The Hornet is new this year, and while I like the some of the features, the styling bugs me. It bugs me too much for me to actually consider the car seriously, which means that I’d never get it, no matter the gee-whiz utilitarian features. It’s nifty, but it’s ugly, too.

Thinking about cars is something that happens several times a day for me. I know it’s a result of my upbringing, a part of me nurtured by both my dad and step-dad. I take notice of the kinds of cars characters in movies drive almost without noticing. For example, Agent Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore) drives a early-Nineties Ford Mustang coupe in Hannibal. Brian McCaffrey (Billy Baldwin) has a maroon BMW 2002 in Backdraft. Bobby Blaine’s (Delroy Lindo) wheels in Heist is a black Volvo 780.

So it’s a natural thing for me to whittle preference in a car down to minor details like interior trim. The quirkier the car, the more I’ll like it. And they don’t make quirky cars like they used to.