IMPURE THOUGHTS

Apoisonous V8 Mercedes-Benz experience. A soothing antidote via a good old V8 Holden. A V8 Audi that gave me the all-round best year’s driving I’ve ever had. That pretty well sums up the previous three years as I contemplated the next move on this interesting but treacherous board game of motoring. Next move? Yes, damn it, that Audi A8 had whispered seductively in my ear, and, mile after pleasurable and reliable mile, it had lured me into liking it very much, all the while planting the seed in my subconscious that perhaps most European car experiences would end well.

With the Audi’s odometer telling me that closing time was approaching, my research eventually steered me towards BMW’s finest luxo-barge — the flagship

750i Motorsport. Same formula as the Audi A8; full-size, luxurious, beautiful interior, and this time a twin-turbo 4.4-litre V8 producing over 400 horsepower — good enough for satisfactorily brisk travel with mid-13-second quarter-mile performance levels. A seductive sound system comes standard, as does suspension setting adjustability, providing me with a Caprice when I’m listening to Mark Knopfler or a ClubSport when I’m listening to Metallica. Like the Audi, this was a car that cost the original owner well north of $200K, and I paid less than 10 per cent of that for it in ‘as new’ condition with 51,000 kilometres on the clock.

I got great support on my choice from Kevin

Walsh of Custom Street Rides in Taranaki when I popped in to see him in my first week of ownership.

“Anything you can think of that will go wrong in a car, it’ll go wrong in a BMW 750i,” said Kev.

Helpful — but, truth be told, I kind of knew that. The 750i has a terrible reputation. But, of course, I’d be fine — I did my research, found a mint low-mileage example, and checked it over carefully. What could go wrong?

What went wrong started within the first week of ownership. Dash lights started coming up, and messages on the instrument cluster told me that

I had a transmission fault and that I should “drive moderately”. Then, before I could get it to a BMW dealer for some diagnosis work — this was all unfolding during the last Christmas period — the transmission started slipping, which knocked out the cruise control, cancelled ‘Sport mode’, and, best of all, under moderate acceleration threw the transmission into second gear and locked it there regardless of what speed I was doing. See how that works as you pull out to pass a stock truck and trailer — just as you get alongside the trailer it slams itself back to second gear and it won’t upshift. You’re already doing 110kph while pulling 6000rpm; you need to give up on the pass and drop back in behind the stock truck and trailer, but there’s a line of cars right on your rear bumper that have pulled out to pass too!

Once out of danger and over the immediate embarrassment of a train of cars tooting at me and calling me a BMW wanker — for the fifth time that day — I have to pull over, turn everything off to let it all reset, and then get going normally again. For about five minutes, until the next gentle throttle depression sends it into a frenzy again. Technology eh? Never noticed any of that going on with a Turbo 400 or a C6. Or a Muncie …

That was the beginning of a long story. The shortest possible version is that the BMW dealer replaced a thing in the transmission called a

I COULD SEE THIS TRAIN WRECK COMING A MILE AWAY

‘mechatronic’, at a cost of over $5000, which didn’t make a scrap of difference, so then a transmission specialist replaced the rest of the transmission at a cost of another $6000. I had to wait a month for parts to come from Germany, and when they arrived they were the wrong parts. So then, more parts had to come from Germany, which took another month. The good news was that this time the transmission was fixed, but the bad news was that I got about two hundred bucks worth of change out of 12 grand to sort it all out.

So this, right here, right now is the moment of my Euro car experience at which you can gleefully say, “I could see this train wreck coming a mile away, so how come you couldn’t?” I have no argument with that. I can say in my defence, however, that while I’m stupid enough to buy a used European luxury car, I’m not stupid enough to buy one without a damn good mechanical warranty — and it’s at times like this you know whether you’ve got a good one or not.

My Mercedes-Benz experience taught me some great lessons about warranties — ‘mechanical breakdown insurance’, or ‘MBI’, as they’re generally called. The first lesson is to be awake as to what the policy you’re looking at covers. But more on that next month.