There are amusing sayings in the vehicle world. The best days of boat ownership are the day you buy your boat and the day you sell it. Motorcycles are like sex, even when it’s bad it’s still really good. Flying a plane is no different from riding a bicycle. It’s just a lot harder to put baseball cards in the spokes. Ok, that last one was actually a line from the movie Airplane!
Anyway, enthusiast wisdom would suggest you shouldn’t buy an old German car, especially one with lots of computers, unknown mileage, and parts you’ve never heard of. Some joke that an old German car could put a mechanic’s kid through college or buy that mechanic a nice boat.
Today’s COTD winner from this morning’s Shitbox Showdown, StillNotATony, offers another German car ownership musing:
Remember in the movie Wargames how Joshua, the computer, learns that the only way to win at global thermonuclear war is not to play?
This is the automobile equivalent of global thermonuclear war.
But I think I can win with the Beemer…
Here’s a simulation of the cascade of repair bills you’ll face with either of today’s pretty 12-cylinder opulent cruisers:
Automotiveflux generates a second COTD win today for realizing that I accidentally made a double entendre in the headline about the Camaro 1LE:
With no AC it truly was the hottest Camaro
Have a great evening, everyone!
(Top Image: MGM/Mercedes Streeter)
Well it’s a movie. Can you win a nuclear war? Depends on your definition of win. No more humans that cause the war? How do computers define winning the war? If you are worried have all computers built with chips susceptible to the EVP wave. Then all computers fail no humans to repair them. That is the worry computers taking over? Design human interface requires existence.
Poor German cars always get bashed on. It isn’t the car, it is the neglected maintenance by those with the need to cosplay as having money who really have no business buying one.
I love old German cars and find them very reliable – once I fix all the issues that have been ignored by previous owners. Please note that I fix, not a shop. If you need to use a shop then it is best to just step aside and buy a Toyota. What I really like is I can buy them cheap and then enjoy them while spending money on just gas with no payments and no repairs. To each their own I suppose.
That is why buy cheap strip and sell parts is the only financially reasonable decision.
(/_)
Here’s one that’s stolen from a celebrity on the Tonight Show: “the phrase the Germans use to say ‘hello’ is ‘you need a new…'” Being a three-time VW owner, I’ve started to believe it was true because the German write-up technician at the local dealership said that every time I brought one of those cars in.
Can’t say I agree with this statement… if you are willing to turn the wrenches yourself.
One of the cars I have is a 11 year old W204 C-Class. Yes, things have broke on it, it has 125,000 miles. In my 20,000 miles of ownership I have replaced a coolant pipe, valve cover gaskets and ignition coils. The most expensive part has been around $100. A lot of German cars are so common that the parts are cheap and easy to get.
With that said, I did take it to the mechanic to get quote on the valve cover gasket and they wanted to charge $1,500… i quickly noped out bought the gaskets for $30 online and found a russian on youtube explaining how to do it.
I think the requirement to have to become a youtube mechanic to simply replace a valve cover gasket says a lot about the unnecessary engineering that seems to doom German autos in general.
I was going to replace the valve cover gasket on my old Suzuki SX4 and, having no experience in the field, I sure as heck YouTubed it first.
This is certainly not the reputation German cars used to have. And I can let my 1970s air-cooled Porsche sit for a year and the Bosch fuel-injection still fires up immediately.
I blame three factors, the first two of which happen to coincide with reunification:
-The Germans have stopped selling the kind of basic, no options cars that earned them the durability reputation. Complexity is the enemy of quality.
-The Germans have accepted some planned obsolescence. This is not necessarily their fault, people were not willing to pay the lasts forever prices (a 1990 300E started at $45,950 in 1990,
$107,719 adjusted for inflation).
-The German dealers and independent shops are horrible, you better be ready to do the work yourself unless money is no object.
It looks like a 2023 E 350 starts at $56,750. Certainly a lot of that is automation and process improvement, but when a car costs $40,000 less than it used to adjusted for inflation there is a legitimate question of whether it will last as long.
Ah 1983. First there was “Wargames”, then “1983 Soviet Nuclear False Alarm Incident”, then “The Day After”
Oh you haven’t heard of that middle one? Guess what kids, sandwiched between those classics of cold war fiction was a very real almost ACTUAL Global Thermonuclear War even more precarious than the Cuban Missile Crisis:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident
Why Hollywood hasn’t picked on that story yet is a mystery. I mean if HBO can do “Chernobyl”…
There are too many of those false alarm and accident stories for any sane person to feel comfortable with. Just read Command and Control, by Eric Schlosser, if you want to feel like maybe the only thing keeping humanity from accidental extinction was intervention by some sort of deity.
Ignorance truly is bliss.
I dunno, maybe we’ve just become so good at dodging bullets we don’t even think about it anymore.
The world was saved because a Soviet Colonel knew that their early warning system was an unreliable POS and disregarded the false missile launch detection. We are all alive today because this one guy didn’t have the knee jerk reaction of telling his superiors that it was time to push the big red button.
US-Soviet relations were already on a knife’s edge because of Regan’s saber rattling and the Soviets having recently shot down a civilian airliner (Korean Airlines 007), killing all on board including a member of the US House of Representatives. Holy shit-balls we came close to Armageddon.
The saddest part was how he was punished for doing the right thing because to recognize him would have been to admit what a POS their system was, both the detection network and the entire kneejerk heirchy.
I hadn’t heard that part! Sadly, I’m not surprised; it fits with how the Soviets (mis)managed so many other things, too.
Mismanagement is a pretty common problem. The US had and still has its fair share too.
Still the US is the only country to ever use nuclear weapons during a war dropping two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
And?
How is a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima or Nagasaki worse than the devastation caused by firebombing Tokyo?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
As bas as those nukes were they were nothing compared to the horrors the Japanese were responsible for
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhejiang-Jiangxi_campaign
My family must lose a lot. Since I was born my parents have had a W124 and W126 Benz and 3 different e38 7 series. We just purchased our 3rd one and hope to keep it for a long time. My twin brother and I have had an e39 M5 and currently daily and e36 M3 and have an e36 328is as a project car.
They are just such delightful cars to drive, an generally pretty cheap to buy.
Do you have a two and/or four-post lift?
I’ve loved those big Beemers since my boss many jobs ago bought one for his wife. Hers was a beautiful forest green with a tan interior.
I sure wouldn’t want to nuke my finances by buying one today, though.
Thanks the the award!!!
I once walked out of the grocery store with a full cart and my daughter asked me what the old 7 Series we walked past was. I told her it was why we could afford groceries.