It seems that there were 2 model years of the Subaru Impreza Outback during which the hubcaps were kind of mis-manufactured. There was some defect in the clips that were supposed to hold the hubcaps in place and... well... after a while the hubcaps would fall off.
I don't remember when I lost the first one. Or the second one, for that matter. I know that the third one came off one morning while I was commuting from Saint Paul to Minneapolis. I remember that I was stuck in traffic, doing about 30 miles per hour, and I heard a strange noise next to me in the curb lane. I glanced in the sideview mirror and saw the hubcap just happily rolling away.
I don't remember when the last one fell off, either, actually. But these days I drive around without hubcaps. (I looked into buying new ones, but they're way out of my price range.) It has become a kind of game, where I drive around and try to spot cars of my Subaru's era so I can see how many hubcaps they have left.
The reason this came up, today, is because I had parked across the street from the Guthrie Theater (so that I could go in and buy tickets for this Thursday's performance of "The Importance of Being Earnest"), and there was a Subaru on the other side of the street from me. It was a white model, about the same age as mine. And it had one hubcap on the side facing me.
As I made my way into the building, I looked back and saw that there were no hubcaps on the other side. I wanted to strike up a conversation with the driver, but he pulled away before I had the chance.
Ah. We proud. We Few. We, the Fraternity of the Hapless Hubcaps.
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