Former investment adviser gets kick out of convertible
Susan Fisher is a retired investment adviser. After she sold her brokerage business, she went to culinary school and received a diploma from Le Cordon Bleu in baking and pastry.
On my birthday in 2011, just as my daughter was going off to culinary school in St. Helena, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Last year, she graduated and she decided to continue her education at UC Davis in food science. I’d been driving my old 1998 Nissan Pathfinder SUV since she was a toddler, riding in a booster seat in the back. Surprisingly, it only had 100,000 miles on it, so I figured that it was about time to give her the car to take to school.
I had planned on buying a plug-in hybrid, as I consider myself a practical person. On my birthday in 2016, my husband found a 2014 Mercedes SLK 250 two-seater hard top convertible, advertised at a dealer in Walnut Creek. It was listed for about the same price as a brand new plug-in hybrid.
Initially I said no. The car just seemed so impractical. He said, “It gets 35 miles per gallon. Why don’t you at least go and test drive it? It’ll be fun.”
So with me feeling slightly guilty and sheepish, off we went to Walnut Creek. It was a beautiful sunny day, and it turned out that the car salesmen was one an old friend of my husband. Was this coincidence or kismet?
With the top down, I took it onto Highway 680, where the average speed is about 80 mph. Woo-HOO! Now I could see why my mother had loved her 1963 Mustang convertible that my parents had ordered at the Detroit car show.
Then I thought, “Still... I really should go and test drive that plug-in hybrid.”
So up the road we went to the hybrid dealer, and off I went on another test drive. I tried to merge onto Highway 680 at North Main in Walnut Creek. I had the car floored, and I was going “c’mon... c’mon...” but nothing was happening. It took me until the Willow Pass exit to get it up to the requisite 80 mph.
As I pulled it back into the dealer’s lot the salesman said, “Look — it has four USB ports!” I thought, “Why do I need four USB ports in a car?”
So back we went to the first dealer and I bought the Mercedes SLK 250, because one thing that cancer has taught me is not to defer the things in life that make you happy.
The next weekend we took it to Death Valley, where I might have tried to see how fast the car could go. I got it up to 120 mph, with the top down. It would’ve gone a whole lot faster, but I kind of lost my nerve because I’d just gotten the car.
Someday soon I hope to go back to an undisclosed lonely road in the desert and see how fast I can get it to go, now that I’m more comfortable driving it.
Now, a year later, I still get a kick out of it every single time I’m behind the wheel. However, I have had to learn the hard way that it’s a cop magnet. I got pulled over twice in the first month, once for having my stereo on too loud in a residential neighborhood and once for speeding. I’ve since learned to lay off the stereo while driving with the top down, and I also finally got myself a radar detector.
Within a month of the time my daughter took that old ’98 Nissan Pathfinder up to Davis, the old tank finally bit the dust. The transmission went out, and it’s virtually impossible to find a replacement for a car that old.
Maybe it was kismet after