IT COMES AROUND once every three years or so, and it's here again - time to do obeisance before that monument to planned obsolescence that calls itself the automobile industry. Buying a new car is something I view with the affection I usually reserve for small children, ptomaine poisoning and hemorrhoids.

Actually, it isn't even a new car, or won't be. Our present crate, a Ford now four years old, was bought when it had one year already on the clock. That, I've determined, is the time it takes a previous owner to detect and eradicate the new auto bugs that come as built-in extras to keep the car company's maintenance folk in champagne and caviar.

It's not as if there's really anything wrong with our current pile of nuts and bolts. As cars go - which, in my experience, is far too often not very far - it has been relatively trouble-free, doesn't drink a lot, doesn't run up huge bills and has steered clear of the wardens down at the local repair shop.

So why trade it in? In that, I bow to my wife Elizabeth's impeccable if rather irksome logic: When the car loan is paid off, planned obsolescence kicks in and the thing immediately turns into a vehicular geriatric with wonky electrics, dodgy valves and a CD player that skips tracks on your Doris Day discs.

That means mounting repair bills. Or, as she puts it, "that's money down a plughole." Or a garage oil sump, as the case may be. Time to put the old Gluepot (so called because the license plate reads N363 GLU -the British have no imagination when it comes to these things) out to pasture and get something used - that is, less used.

Not new. My two experiences with new cars runs roughly along the lines of the old saying, "Once bitten, go back and do the same stupid thing all over again, you silly schmuck." Both evidently were built by graduates of the engineering school that gave us the Titanic, the space shuttle Challenger and ballpoint pens that leak into your shorts.

The first was a Thunderbird convertible that in 1963 I ordered, custom-made - cream-white, power steering, black leather interior and AM/FM radio (a big deal in those pioneer days), and air conditioning, which made driving in Texas almost bearable.

Within the first 24 hours, the power steering went out, and over the next three years, so did the engine (replaced three times), the electric windows (I finally short-circuited them in the "up" position), the air conditioning (which made my solution to the window crisis a bit dubious), the electrically operated convertible top (stuck three times in the half-up position during Texas thunderstorms), and various lights and other stuff.

When the marriage of the time went down the tube, I off-loaded the T-Bird on my newly ex-wife as part of the divorce settlement back in Knoxville. She gleefully set off to flog it for maybe a couple of grand. Then the starter motor dropped off at speed in the middle of Clinton Highway, and Nathan's Auto Parts snapped up the remains for $500.

Almost exactly 30 years on, having learned exactly nothing, I bought another new car, a sleek, silvery with all the gadgets and knobs and bells and whistles. With about eight miles on the clock, the transmission started making metallic upset-tummy type noises, and within eight months it sounded like it had a second job grinding coffee beans for the entire nation of Brazil.

By the time we got rid of it three years later, in part exchange for the Gluepot, the silver slug had also developed the knack of breaking into a sort of mechanical version of St. Vitus dance at speeds above about 70 mph. So, yes, no more new cars.

I think I was the victim of a cruel deception, or at least misconception, stemming from the days of my first car, a Model-A Ford, that I conned my father into cashing in four World War II victory bonds to buy, for $100. That gave me the freedom of the open road, not to mention making me a sort of minor league folk hero around Central High School in Fountain City, Tennessee.

The deception, or misconception, was in the area of maintenance and expense. Maintenance I knew - and still know - from nothing. I have zilch awareness or less about what goes on under the hood, or all those wires, or what that thing that looks like a huge teapot turned upside down is supposed to do. (My expertise with the A-Model was limited to hot-wiring it after I lost the ignition key while swimming up at Camp Pellissippi.)

As far as expenses were concerned, that was solely centered on gas. Which meant that when we needed juice, I and Spanky Metler and John Newton and Twerp Kerr would hop into the A-Model, hie ourselves down to the Pure Oil station, assemble about 25 cents between us and buy enough gasoline to keep purring, or putt-putting, on for a week.

Today, a trip to the petrol station (as they call them here) can, and usually does, set me back about $65. Until recently, even that hadn't overly concerned me - I figured it was just that the car had a big gas tank, albeit a very big gas tank.

Then it dawned upon me that we are not talking good old American gallons here, or even British Imperial gallons. We are talking Frenchified thingies called liters, and it takes about 60 of them to fill up my car's tank. For 65 bucks, that still sounded reasonable - until I discovered that a liter is about 1.75 pints, or less than two mugs of beer.

I got someone with a degree in advanced calculus and a decent calculator to do some numbers for me. After a lot of conversions, it turns out that in Britain, I am paying close to $5 a gallon for gas.

Down at the Pure Oil station in Knoxville, it cost 14 cents (and when you could find a gas battle under way at a four-station intersection in Kannapolis, North Carolina, the price per gallon was even less than a bottle of Pepsi).

I'm not really carsick. Just sick of cars.

Thought for the Week: Love is grand - and divorce can be a hundred grand.

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