2 more BMW’s
I replaced the SEC with a red 1997 BMW 540i. I bought it used from the dealer with the excellent BMW used car warranty. It was a very nice
car, comfortable, fairly quick, great handling. But after the warranty expired it became expensive to maintain – mostly fluid leaks, but expensive to fix, so I traded it in at the same dealer for the car I have now, a 2007 BMW 550i. It is
much faster than the 540i (0 – 60 in 5 seconds) and is also comfortable and has great handling. I have an extended warranty on it and will keep the car until it expires. Then, who knows?
Honorable mention
While in high school
one of my friends owned a Jeep. I think it was a CJ-3, basically a WWII Jeep. He let me use it one summer while he went off to work the wheat harvest on his relative’s huge farm in one of the Midwestern states, maybe Nebraska.
We lived in the Valley below Los Alamos along the Rio Grande, surrounded by open range Indian land. It was a great place to have a Jeep. Two incidents stand out: One time I got it high centered on a boulder. That is, balanced on the
skid plate under the engine – transmission with no wheels making good contact with the ground. Not good. Lots of jacking and digging to get it off.
Another time I was driving down an irrigation ditch which unbeknownst to
me had recently been dug up to install a pipeline. The ground was soft sand, saturated with water and the jeep went in completely over the tires on the left side. I walked upstream and diverted the water into a field and started digging.
It was essentially hopeless until a neighbor came by and saw my problem and went and got his big truck and pulled me out. My mother asked why was I driving in the ditch, but I thought the answer was obvious, I was in a Jeep and the ditch was a great
place to splash through.
BMW M5 – My good buddy Gary had a 2008 BMW M5. The M5 is a very high performance four door sedan, the same body style as my 550i, but with much more power and handling capabilities. He has season
tickets to the San Diego Chargers, and invited me and another friend to go to an afternoon game. The distance from Irvine, California to San Diego is 100 miles. We left Irvine, and had our first beer in the Chargers’ parking lot one hour
later. That is a simple calculation: 100 miles in one hour. Gary has a radar detector, I was watching the freeway onramps for CHP and our buddy was in the back seat watching behind for police. Cops and speeders, risky game, but this
time we won.
Gary traded this car in for a Mercedes 63 CLS AMG. He did that because his BMW dealership set his car on fire while doing some work on the fuel delivery system in the trunk. They put the fire out and detailed the car, called
Gary and told him about the mishap, and said that the car was fine. Gary was so mad at the agency he bought a Benz.
Currently our other car is a Toyota Prius. Prius (What is the plural of Prius, Prei, Priesi, Priuses?) are great cars in
many ways: inexpensive to maintain, reliable, economic, they hold an amazing amount of stuff with the rear seats down and are invisible to the Highway Patrol – not that we ever speed. I think that the hybrid gas and electric car design is the more practical
compared to all electric cars, which still have serious range restrictions, even the Tesla. For strictly commuter cars, and some delivery vehicles where the trip distance is very predictable, the electric solution is great. But for a general purpose
family car, not so much. Alternate fuel vehicles are impractical, at least until there is infrastructure in place to support them. And food for fuel such as corn to make ethanol is a really bad idea. Not only does it result in more expensive
corn tortillas, but it is very inefficient. See http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/alternative-fuel/biofuels/4237539
I
believe that the alternative to using gasoline or diesel for transportation, which result in CO2 and other probably harmful to the environment emissions, will be, or should be driven by economics. As the world begins to run out of oil, other sources
of energy will become less expensive and because of this will be attractive to the general population. In the US I believe that this cost driven energy choice should be aided by higher taxes on gas and diesel, with the revenue generated through
this tax increase going to transportation infrastructure improvements. But the government should not mandate the solution through gas mileage requirements, ethanol production or electric vehicle sales.
That said, I applaud the benefits of past
EPA and other environmental agencies in cleaning up the air in the Bay Area. When I first moved to California in 1965, and specifically to Mountain View, there were many days when you couldn’t view the mountains. The air was too smoggy.
Cars were polluters. Not only did they not completely burn the gasoline, the gas was leaded. But the performance cars were fast, even if they didn’t turn or stop well. (Exception – my Corvette did turn and stop.) I
had a 1968 Dodge Charger for a while as the family car, 383 Cu In (that is 6.3 liters) with the four barrel engine which put out a very conservative 335 HP. It had great acceleration but handled poorly.
From this point on cars went
through an evolution of big engines with all kinds of anti-smog stuff bolted on, like smog pumps that injected air onto the exhaust manifold, and very restrictive catalytic converters, and they had very bad performance and got bad gas mileage.
The 450 SL we owned had a 4.5 liter engine that only put out 180 HP. But over the next 20 years both US and foreign car manufactures have figured it out, and offer both cars with small engines that perform well, and cars with relatively big engines
that perform great. Example, my BMW 550i has a 4.8 liter engine that has almost 2.5 times the horsepower as did the 4.5 liter SL, and I get 21 – 26 MPG.
And now you can view the mountains from Mountain
View.