Our family car, a 2007 Hyundai Entourage minivan, gave up the ghost a few months ago, with the odometer just short of 175,000 miles.
The Entourage model was only made for two years, and sold just 25,000 units in that time. Up until the end, seeing another Entourage on the road was as rare and arresting as catching sight of one’s own doppleganger.
Sometimes we called our vehicle “The Prisonermobile” because of the decorative static cling car stickers it bore, featuring images and sayings from the TV show The Prisoner. Most of the time, though, it was just the Entourage, which always seemed appropriate in more than just the obvious “this-is-the-name-of-your-car-model” way.
The definition of “entourage” is “a group of people attending or surrounding an important person.” Our Entourage often transported groups of people, and what better indication that you’re an important person than driving around in an old Korean minivan?
The name also worked well for wrangling dawdling family members before an excursion; the words “The Entourage is leaving” meant you’d better hustle or you were going to miss the party—such as it was.
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We purchased the Entourage, with its toxic but appealing new car aroma, when my son was a year old and my wife was pregnant with our daughter. Now, it was old and dilapidated, but pregnant with memories, preserved mostly in the form of the smells that lingered inside it for the bulk of its lifetime—a potent mix of wet dog, stale sweat, rotten Go-Gurt, and french fries, along with the eye-watering artificial air freshener scents sometimes introduced to conceal those smells.
Add to that the car’s mechanical malodors (some combination of overheated brake pads, burning oil, and the occasional dead animal on the tires) and it’s no wonder the dog used to stick her head out the window.
The sensory extravaganza wasn’t limited to smell; there were signature sights and sounds as well. Dust and dog hair abounded, the latter stubbornly clinging to the floor’s fabric like furry velcro.
A rumbling sound kicked in at 45 mph, replaced by a harsher thumping noise around 65 mph. At that speed, the steering wheel began vibrating noticeably, followed by the rest of the car. While experiencing this phenomenon, my nephew once enthusiastically observed from the back seat, “It’s like being in a helicopter!”
Ironically, from 70 to 75 MPH, the ride was smooth as silk.
The rain guards on the windows fell off years ago, along with most of the lettering on the trunk. By the end, I was driving an “UNDAI ENTO.” Working airbags? Not since about 2012, thank you.
The passenger doors first lost their “automatic open” feature when the motors burned out with use; over time, manual wear and tear took its toll to the point where the doors would barely close at all. More than once, we drove some distance with my kids tightly gripping a door to keep it from sliding open, while we were serenaded by a chorus of warning bells.
For a brief time, we experienced perfect equilibrium, as one side of the minivan didn’t open, and the other side didn’t close.
Despite its many flaws, the Entourage served us well. I’m not usually a car guy, but I am a creature of habit, and there’s a certain respect and appreciation that’s earned when a vehicle serves reliably for 15 years. The Entourage survived long drives to Quebec, Ohio, and Florida, among other destinations, and with a little aquatic James Bond-style retrofitting, I’m sure it could have made it across the Atlantic.
One of the car’s final full-capacity drives delivered a car of passengers to a concert at PNC Arts Center. On the Garden State Parkway, a large tire suddenly appeared on the road (probably a spare from the undercarriage of a car ahead of us). Unsure of my ability to avoid it without losing control, I simply ran it over and hoped for the best. The car instantly got a lot louder—clearly, something in the exhaust system had been dislodged.
But by that point, I had enough faith in the Ento that I didn’t doubt our safety for a moment. We made it to the concert on time, and somehow ended up in the VIP parking section, to boot.
No one challenged us as I accidentally entered that high-end parking section, despite the fact that I hadn’t paid the extra fee to do so; one of the advantages of driving an old, loud, dented vehicle is that parking attendants and other drivers tend to avoid direct confrontation, assuming from your car’s desperate appearance that you have nothing left to lose and that any provocation, however slight, could result in a disproportionate and possibly dangerous response.
Another old-car bonus I enjoyed with the Entourage was the insurance cost, a mere $800 per annum for the final few years of its life. When a car loan is more than the value of the car, it’s called negative equity; when your insurance deductible is more than the value of the car, it’s called complete freedom.
In those final years, end-of-life signs emerged consistently: the brake light that didn’t turn off, requiring a new brake light switch; malfunctioning air conditioning, which led to several sweaty summer weeks before the cause was determined and fixed; a suspension system that needed replacement sway bar links, probably the result of too many speed bumps taken at faster than recommended speeds.
But I stuck by the Entourage. As I once said to my wife, I’m the kind of guy who likes to stick with the original model, even if it’s a little past its prime and more prone to breaking down. She responded by saying that she was more open to replacement, the kind of woman who preferred to trade in for a new model every few years. No longer certain we were talking about cars, I quickly changed the subject.
When more door problems arose, I knew that, as with another car I once drove on a regular basis, we were nearing Dukes of Hazzard status, where entry and exit would be restricted to those limber enough to slide in and out of the windows. Maybe it was time to retire the Entourage to the car pasture, where it could romp and play with other old, unpopular, and discontinued models— look, there’s a DeLorean!—until it died a natural death and peacefully rusted away in a grassy meadow.
Alternatively, maybe it was time to to get whatever cash I could in exchange for the car, to defray the cost of a new vehicle. Loyalty and sentiment only extend so far, and when I managed to negotiate a sight-unseen $700 trade-in credit, the fate of the Entourage was sealed.
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I’ll miss a lot about the Entourage; around this time of year, I always relished the contradiction of blasting heavy metal from a minivan’s open windows. Its long life is memorialized by “Canadian Entourage,” a card game I created, modeled on the French game Milles Bornes and based on our drive to Quebec.
In the game, an “Entourage card” can overcome any obstacle: flat tires, foreign languages, unexpected Nazi leaders. What greater tribute?
Thanks to the mechanics at Hamilton Lakeside Shell for keeping the old hulk going all these years; next month, the story of its replacement.