Used Cars

Because Springsteen openly described this album as his most personal (Marsh, 382) it seems reasonable to read this song at least in part autobiographically. Often during his monologues at concerts he would reference his family's run of bad luck with used cars as he was growing up. As he wrote this song, however, the success of The River would have put a lifelong end to any stress related to cars ever again for Springsteen. But in line with the mood that runs through the entire album he puts himself back into his childhood to observe what the effect of lower middle class conditions are on families, a needed lens in 1981 when the country was experiencing its largest unemployment numbers since the Great Depression.
The song opens with a subtly startling scene of isolation. The boy narrator is standing in a used car lot watching his father, mother, and sister drive out of the lot to test the vehicle. It is clearly not an issue of space as his little sister sits in the front seat and his mother sitsin the back "All alone". While his sister gets to sit shotgun and eat an ice cream cone, this boy is alone to internalize what this all means. Springsteen makes no secret of the fact that he often was isolated as a child, voluntarily and otherwise, and this little boy encapsulates just that insulated feeling. It looks as if he stands there as collateral, the most dispensible part of the family.
When they return to the lot the boy continues to hone in on what appear to be meaningless details like his mother playing with her wedding ring and the salesman's fixation with his father's hands. We can imagine the latter pair as being rugged and worn, the hands of a man who works an endless string of hard days. The salesman is not familiar with such hands, but he knows that they are the tools of an honest man, the easiest sort to swindle. The boy's tone begins to change when his father is told there is no deal available. In an ambiguous promise to himself he says if given the chance he "swears" he knows what he would do. What is clear is that he is unhappy with the situation his father is in and he wants to change it.
Lacking any effective means (physical or financial) the boy imagines the impending day when he wins the lottery. It is only because he is a child that he can actually expect to win this impossible game. He is not old enough yet to have to wonder if "everything that dies someday comes back". Death and defeat are far from his mind. All he knows is that when he wins he will have a new car and all will be made right. What he does not yet know is that he already has "debts no honest man can pay", debts that will only grow as he does, debts that no brand new car can make go away. It is in this boy's vain optimism that the song painfully drives home the refrain of the album, there is no escape from this world, not via crime, women, cars, or atonement.
When the full family drives up to the house in their "brand-new used car" the entire neighborhood comes to see. This public reaction shows the condition of the lives that surround the family. The purchase of a measly used car creates a comotion in the streets. The boy is not satisfied with this simpe world. Instead he wished his father would do exactly what the driver does at the end of the "State Trooper", the song that preceeds this one. As he expells his last prayer he goes shooting down the dark highway and lets out a Lizard King-like ecstatic yelp that echoes throughout the night. The boy's father is not nearly as free of reckless. Instead the family slowly pulls in to the driveway as the boy's mind silently screams his wish for defiance from what surrounds him.
The purchase of the used car changes nothing. His dad still works the same job and the boy still "walks the same dirty streets where [he] was born". The implication here is that, like his father, he will walk these very streets until he is no more. This realization takes him back to the lonliness he felt the day of the test drive as he can still hear his sister honking the horn with one hand as she holds her ice cream in the other. She is experiecing a taste of freedom he has yet to feel. If we can be allowed to use the rest of the album as a lens, it is safe to say he never will. Despite all the emptiness he sees around him the boy awaits the day his "number comes in" so that he can finally get the new car that will save him. Sadly we know on this album every road leads to the same place. Unlike Thunder Road that leads to "heaven waiting down the tracks" and a chance to "case the Promised Land", Michigan Avenue eventually leads to barren Badlands.