Taking a gamble on a 23-year-old luxury car to escape the heat came with a cool bonus history lesson.

I NEEDED A CAR with air conditioning. A sensible person would have bought the 208,000-mile Lexus LS430 for $3000 as a summer beater, or maybe the flawless one-owner 2007 Mercury Grand Marquis for $7700.

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A reckless person might have gone for one of several SRT Mopars or manual Cadillac CTS-Vs in the range of $15,000 to $20,000, despite their astronomical and no doubt tire-smoking miles and multiple accident reports. As I am neither sensible nor reckless but some other, different type of person (a friend described me as “a handmaiden of chaos”), I couldn't stomach any of the reasonable choices and had to admit that being the 15th owner of a twice-wrecked and possibly stolen Charger Hellcat was unlikely to be any less stressful than sweating in my '81 Trans Am.