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As I neared the exit of the parking lot a familiar face spotted me. He approached and I rolled down my window. Looking at my BMW Z4 he said, “I love your James Bond car.” “Thanks,” I replied. Hearing those words filled me with pride but not for the reason he would assume, and perhaps not for the reason you would either.
Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. This is episode 677, “Driven by Fear,” and I’m Darrell Darnell. Over 3.5 million vehicles are sold in US salvage auctions each year, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
I’ve not owned many cars in my life. I’ll be 50 in just a few months, and I’ve owned only 5 cars in that time. My first was a 1982 Ford EXP, next was a 1995 Ford Ranger, after that I owned a 1984 Toyota Celica, once my son took over that car I purchased a 1972 MGB GT. Then two years ago I made the decision to sell the MGB GT and get…something else.
So if you tracked all that detail, then you may have noted that the most modern car I’ve ever owned is from 1995. In fact, once I owned that vehicle, which was only 2 years old when I bought it, I then went back a decade to the 80s for my next car, and then back another decade to the 70s after that.
While there were a variety of reasons that I chose the Celica and the MGB GT, one of the primary reasons I chose each of them was my comfort level. Long time listeners will know that I enjoy working on my own cars. This often includes simple things like oil changes, but also includes most of the maintenance that happens under the hood.
And while the MGB GT was a carbureted engine rather than a fuel injected one, and I had absolutely zero experience with carburetors, I still felt confident that I would be able to work on and service the car. Why? Because it was old and used old technology. I felt comfortable with old technology.
That meant the opposite of that was also true. That is, I am not comfortable with modern automobile technology. When it came time to completely strip out all of the wiring in my MGB GT and rewire the car from scratch, it was a project I was willing to take on. Sure, it was certainly a project that I knew would stretch me to the limits of my skills, but I still looked at it as a repair I was capable of doing. And I did. But the idea of servicing a car beyond the year 2000? That was too much.
Why?
Because to me, modern cars were too complicated. They had computers for everything. According to NPC Automotive, the average modern car has between 30 and 50 ECUs, which are essentially small computer boxes that run all the systems in our cars. This is up from 10-20 ECUs in the year 2000 and 3-10 ECUs in the 90s. Cars from the 80s had only 1 or 2 and cars from the 70s had zero, so you can see why I stuck with cars from those eras.
But it’s not only ECUs that scared me. When you pop the hood on a modern car you may not even see the engine. There are more hoses and wires and…things under the hood that I don’t understand. How could I possibly service that?
When it came time to sell my MGB GT, I wanted to get something that worked in all the ways the MGB did not. What I mean is, I wouldn’t drive the MGB if it was too hot or too cold or too wet. If I wanted to run a quick errand I wouldn’t drive it because I didn’t want to wait for the engine to warm up. If I was taking it across town I didn’t want to drive it because I didn’t want to risk the doors getting dinged. My wife couldn’t drive a stick, so that meant when I took her car, she was left without transportation.
All of this meant that the time had come for me to consider a modern car. And so I began nerding out and researching. I did my favorite thing: I created spreadsheets.
I knew I wanted a car that gave me sunlight. Trying to narrow down cars by which ones had sunroofs was too difficult and I don’t really care for soft top convertibles, so that narrowed my search down to hard top convertibles. After looking at every hard top convertible ever sold in the US, I narrowed my search down to two options: a Mazda Miata RF which Mazda started selling in 2017, and the E89 generation of the BMW Z4 which BMW produced from 2009 until 2016.
Once I had my search narrowed to these two vehicles, I was able to dig in deeper to each one. I liked the styling of the BMW better, but I was fearful of all the technology that BMW is known to stuff into their cars. For that reason, I was initially drawn to the Mazda. But the more I looked at the Mazda, the less I liked it. Literally. I didn’t like the look of it as much as the BMW, and I couldn’t get past that.
Regardless of which car I purchased, my goal was to spend no more than what I’d sold my MGB for. This put pretty much all of the Mazdas out of my range, which helped make that decision easier. Since the BMWs were an older car, they’d depreciated more and there were several available in my budget. So I dug deeper into the BMW.
I watched YouTube videos, read articles, scoured user forums and Facebook groups. I downloaded the maintenance manual and got as educated on the cars as possible. I learned that over the course of production, three different options were available in the US and one of those engines was known to have timing chain issues.
Knowing that replacing the timing chain would be a job that would require me to purchase specialized equipment or hire a professional mechanic, both at great cost, I mostly avoided those cars. When I did consider one of those cars, I made sure the car had received the timing chain repair, or used that point as a negotiating tool.
I learned about the fuel system, cooling system, hydraulic system, and normal maintenance. After watching all the YouTube videos and reading the forums, I discovered that despite being loaded with technology, the car was surprisingly approachable for someone like me who likes to do their own maintenance.
Once I learned that, I began looking at cars being sold at salvage auctions too. I was confident that I could not only perform the necessary routine maintenance on the car as well as the most common repairs, but in the right situation, I could take a salvage car and get it back on the road. Looking back at my spreadsheet, I seriously considered nearly 30 cars from California to Washington, from Florida to Massachusetts.
After months of research I decided to bid on a crimson colored 2011 model located at a salvage auction in Texas. I was the only bidder. Two days later it showed up at my driveway in over a dozen pieces…hundreds if you count all the screws and fasteners that I found in baggies in the trunk. Interestingly, I also found a bullet in the trunk.
Here’s what I learned.
It took me a couple of months working evenings and weekends, but I eventually got the car back together and fully functional. It still has a few scars from the accident it was in that sent it to the auction lot, but she’s a beauty.
So when my friend approached me in the parking lot and commented on my cool, “James Bond” BMW, I wasn’t proud because the car looks cool, I was proud because I knew the journey I’d taken to get there.
For YEARS I’d refused to look at a modern car because I was convinced it would be too complicated for me to perform maintenance and repairs on. But as it turned out, that was not based on fact, but fear.
And that’s the lesson for today. What are you refusing to do because of fear? How is fear holding you back, limiting you, or controlling you? Fear can be a good thing. It’s a mechanism that can save us. But it’s also a mechanism that can cripple us.
Crippling fear is often based on the unknown, ignorance, and assumptions. It was for me. But once I took time to educate myself and learn the truth about the car, my fear was replaced by confidence and excitement.
In 1974 BMW coined the slogan, “The Ultimate Driving Machine.” While I’ve not owned or driven a ton of cars, for me, the BMW Z4 is by far the best car I’ve ever driven and it is my ultimate driving machine. Driving it is an experience I never would have known if I’d continued to allow fear to influence my decisions.
The truth is, and abundance of ultimate experiences are out there for each of us, but only if we refuse to let fear stand in our way.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag coming up next week on December 29th! The submission deadline is TOMORROW, December 23rd. Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page.