[The Hack Mechanic / March 2012, BMW CCA Roundel Magazine, all rights reserved]
One of my
favorite Star Trek episodes is the one where the Organians prevent a
war, then dissolve into energy. The rest of us, however, need to live in the
corporeal universe, battered about by our needs and wants, and occasionally
screaming at ourselves “what the hell are you doing?” That’s the proper
context for the 2002 BMW M5 with 290,000 miles.
The ad, with
an eye-poppingly-low asking price of $7000, said that the owner had bought the car at auction with 78,000
miles in 2005, but that it had been well cared-for, with many new parts
including a timing chain and VANOS components. As for the high mileage, the ad
said, “if you care for these high-performance German race cars as I have, then
the miles are not an issue.” Sure, I thought, easy for you to say. You’re
selling it. He added “if you want to drive this car, you must bring cash when
you see it.”
Despite its
“beast” reputation, I had no particular lust for an E39 M5. My E39 528iT sportwagon
was, by a country mile, the most troublesome, highest-maintenance BMW I’ve ever
owned, and I had no desire to magnify that flamethrower through the M lens.
However, there is some degree of academic lure in a 150 mph M car that sold for
over 100 grand new.
So I did my
due diligence. I had the seller text me the VIN. The CarFax came up clean, and
jived with his story of buying the car in 2005. (You never know unless you
check. I’ve caught car flippers telling bald-faced lies.) A web search for the VIN
unearthed a post on M5board.com from someone who had seen the car and reported
that, actually, it wasn’t all that bad. I submitted the VIN to a decoder site,
and it showed that the car was loaded with everything from parking assist to a
suede anthracite headliner (if anything has ever so not impressed Maire
Anne, it was me saying “but… it’s got a suede anthracite headliner”).
I posted a
link to the CL ad for the car on Facebook, with the straw man argument “why not
buy it, drive the living snot out of it until something expensive breaks, and
then part it out?” The Hack Mechanic faithful sounded like guys egging a
frat brother on to chug.
Right about
this time, my son Ethan, not knowing any of this, gave me a pair of cufflinks
with a six-speed gearshift pattern on them. A sign! Saints be praised!
Then the seller texted me and offered me the car for six grand. Curiosity
turned into obsession. Maire Anne said “Just go see it. Get it out of your
system. It’ll be like that Bavaria in Belchertown you kept going on and on
about until you were done with it.” Ah, she knows me too well.
So I made
the call. I pulled six grand out of the bank. But if the seller was clear about
wanting cash, I was equally adamant about wanting to see the receipts for the
engine work.
He met me
early one Sunday morning in the parking lot of a nearby hotel, opening the M5’s
door and saying “get in.” I did. He then pulled onto Rt 95 and proceeded to
weave through light traffic at 100 mph. I asked him to slow down. “Oh, you
don’t like to drive fast?” he asked. “Why would you buy a car like this if you
don’t like to drive fast?”
Actually, an
excellent question.
Even as a
passenger, I could feel the car’s bent wheels. Though he drove the car quite
fast, he shifted in a very slow and deliberate manner, as if he was babying the
transmission. He also said “on a car like this, you don’t use the brakes much,
because the engine’s so powerful, it slows the car down really quickly.” This
is not a statement that inspires confidence in the seller. Or the brakes.
We returned
to the parking lot where I could look at the car. The body seemed intact, save
dents in the front fenders the seller said were due to deer collisions. It
wasn’t dripping copious volumes of fluid. There was a snotty metallic rattle
almost certainly due to an idler pulley on the serpentine belt – trivial to
fix. But… what’s that low pumping/knocking sound alternating from both sides of
the V8? I asked to see the receipts for the engine work.
“Oh, sorry,”
he said, “I forgot those.”
That was
enough. What the hell am I doing? I’m losing access to the storage in
the warehouse where I’ve worked for years. I need fewer cars, not more. The
four-mile-each-way commute I’ve had since 1984 is about to increase to 20. I
need something dependable and fuel-efficient, not a four hundred horsepower
beast with nearly 300,000 miles on it that sucks gas like two Suburbans. Other
than the bragging rights of buying an E39 M5 for six grand, other than having
limitless material for endless Hack Mechanic columns, what would I buy this car
for, really? I don’t want to find the pain threshold where I part
it out when it breaks. When I bought my 1999 Z3 M Coupe, my lust was so strong
that my left brain had to gag my right brain with a sock. This was the
opposite. I admit it. I had no lust for this car. I thought, I should
spend the time and money putting my tii back together. I’d get more enjoyment
out of it than this car. Hell, I’d get more enjoyment out of a ’63 Ramber
Classic than this car.
We’re done
here.
“Do you want
to drive it?” he asked. “No thanks,” I smiled. “I’m good.”
“I don’t
think this car is for you,” he said. Amazingly, I agreed.
But, as
Klingon Commander Kor said to Kirk after the Organians stopped the war, “it
would’ve been glorious.”
