STRAIGHT TALK

But it’s just a car. Why would you have any emotional attachment to a car?” That’s what I got confronted with when I stupidly told a non-car-guy neighbour that I was pretty sad at selling our beloved and faithful old Chevrolet Silverado crew-cab dually pickup. Plonker. We’ve done 160,000km (100,000 miles) in it. Fifteen years of ownership. Hundreds of road trips. Countless race meetings. Seen every corner of the country in it. Used it as an everyday drive car for the first few years we had it. Carried five people and pulled five tons all at the same time. And it’s cool. Yeah, there’s a price to pay — $260 to fill the huge fuel tank each time. Ten miles per gallon from the sequentially injected 454 big block Chev petrol engine — that’s 23 litres per 100km in modern speak. So … I got to wondering how much fuel the ol’ dually used in amongst all that. Let’s see … where’s the calculator … there it is … that’s … um … here we go … 36,000 litres. What? That can’t be right. Can’t be that much. Let’s add that up again. Oh, that was right — we burnt up 36,000 litres of fuel in it over these past 15 years. Oops. No, wait — got that wrong, sorry. Half of that mileage was towing a race car of some description, and the economy pretty much cuts in half when we’re towing. So … it’s actually more like 54,000 litres of fuel burned up on our watch. Holy shit. At $2.20 per litre in today’s money, that’s around $118,800. Ooooh — over a hundred grand’s worth of fuel? Really? Yup, really. But shit, we’ve had a great time together.

You might say that if it had been a diesel Hilux we’d have saved a fortune. But we wouldn’t have. A diesel Hilux wouldn’t have pulled five tons’ worth of trailer in the first place, and in the second place what we saved in fuel we’d have lost in depreciation. Believe it or not, thanks to the US dollar being in our favour at the time, after 15 years and 160,000km, we sold it for what it owed us landed, converted, and complied. Didn’t lose a dime. I’ll bet new owner Adam won’t lose anything on it, either, if he looks after it. Anyway, even if it had depreciated, I still wouldn’t trade back that $120K in fuel for anything. It’s been awesome.

Linda and I bought the dually during a big trip to the US in 2005, from the original owner in Los Angeles, who’d ordered it brand new from his local Chev dealer. The owner, Gabriel, didn’t even collect it from the Chev dealer until all the aftermarket work had been carried out. When he’d ordered the truck from the dealer, he specified all the custom stuff he wanted done to it, which included the chassis C-notch, lowered springs front and rear, dropped spindles, Alcoa alloy wheels, custom grille and front bumper, chin spoiler, rolled rear pan, custom lights, hard lid, hidden hitch, killer stereo system, and a set of headers and three-inch twin exhaust system with Flowmasters that sounds better than most race cars.

The dually was only seven years old then, and we wondered how a guy as young as Gabriel could own such a cool truck. Turns out that the US’s tradition of being dripped up to the eyeballs was alive and well. He’d been paying the thing off for seven years when we went with him to settle with the finance company, but what we were paying him for it didn’t quite settle the outstanding hire purchase. He got zero out of it, but, I remember him saying at the time, “That don’t matter none; I’ll just go buy another truck on no deposit and start again.” When you see how cheap the interest rates are in the US, that starts to make a little bit of sense. But still …

Now, owners of European cars might want to look away at this point while I tell you how phenomenally reliable the Chev has been. By the time our faithful old truck finished its time with us, it had done 290,000km (180,000 miles), two-thirds of which were clocked up by us. Guess what we’ve done to it in that time? A wheel bearing and a fuel pump. That’s it. Not a damn thing on the engine has failed. We haven’t done a radiator or a water pump or an alternator or a starter motor or an anything. Quite a contrast to the nine failures — three needing a salvage truck — which that pile of junk Mercedes-Benz caused me in almost exactly one-tenth of the mileage. The Merc’s nine failures (in my ownership) happened between 45,000km (28,000 miles) and 63,000km (40,000 miles), whereas the Chev’s two little problems happened on the high side of 250,000km (155,000 miles).

The transmission has never been touched save for a fluid flush every 30,000 miles, and I’ll bet that trans is still in great shape inside — even after towing five tons for the past 10 years. What an absolutely awesome machine. Don’t ever tell me that American vehicles are rubbish and Euros are great.

“You forgot to take the little flag off the visor,” new owner Adam called out just as he was about to drive away.

He’d spotted the little American flag hatpin that buddy Mark Branford, who lived in Bakersfield at the time, had pinned to the sun visor just before he handed the truck to Steve Curle in Los Angeles for shipping out to God’s own. It was Mark II’s little good-luck omen.

“No,” I said. “That thing’s been pinned right there for 15 years, so it needs to stay.”

I hope Adam loves the old truck as much as we did, and I also hope that when Adam decides to sell it, I can afford to buy it back. I’ll have absolutely no use for it, but what the hell does that matter?

DON’T EVER TELL ME AMERICAN VEHICLES ARE RUBBISH