Everybody say “Hi!” to Justin, a reader from across the pond who is here to tell the story of his diesel BMW station wagon (cue premature Jalop-ulation) and how it wormed its way into his affections — JB
In your youth you never saw yourself out there, the low-revs-high-torque deadzone of combustion, the unthinking strip mall deadspace of the A-to-B’ers, the commuters, the easy-iron crew with one eye on their pensions and the other on their economy gauge. The oil-burners….
Your motoring career had promise. That’s how it started, anyway. The Mini Cooper. The three CRXs (how does the rhyme about Henry VIII’s wives go? divorced, executed, died…). The MGF, the Prelude. The Audi TT with its inverted national competencies – German styling, Italian electronics – dead pixels and dead dull, but still on an arc, a trajectory. A gasoline trajectory. NSX. A couple of silly Siebners, their bodies bigger than your house, their displacement bigger than your bath.
And then one day your mind is on other things. Maybe you’ve got that house you were negotiating for a year. Maybe you’re thinking about contractors and rewiring and the zoning regs in that pitch black midwinter morning. Maybe that tanker moving into traffic has stopped for some reason, dead in front of you…