The Dutch fleet is aging. The average age of a car here has risen to 10.6 years. I read it with a chuckle. My own car quartet is well above that with a fossil average of 21.5. The A2 is the youngest at fifteen years old, the SL the oldest at 27. My young-timer collection goes fist-deeply into the last decade of the last century.
“Poor fool,” you think. “Kind at home at the garage”. “And just patch”.
No.
According to the German weekly Der Spiegel I can uncork the champagne. This week in a nice article that honors the nineties as the golden age for the car. “Not a few say that around 1990 particularly durable cars were developed, which, if properly maintained, last practically forever.” As a witness, the magazine mentions the Audi driver who, with his 25-year-old 100 2.6 Quattro, can travel 140 kilometers every day without any problem. No rust to be found and the six-cylinder is still underarm fresh at 240,000 kilometers. The owner has tried out an Audi A6 ten years younger, but too much was destroyed. Since then he swears by his young timer.
I fully recognize myself in the sketched image, in which some nuances are made. This story is about the Audis, Volkswagens and Mercedes from before 1995, not about the rotting Omegas and
Scorpios of those years. The Spiegelman’s 100 C4 is indeed an astonishingly solid car. I once took such a fully galvanized 2.3E with me to Germany with a Klokje Rond-worthy odometer reading of well over three tons and fell from one surprise to another – sovereign and flawless. Generous development budgets, intelligent technology and strict quality control paid off – until today. I have similar experiences with the oldest showpieces in my Swedish-German fleet. The 850 Estate, purchased this year with a mileage of 169,000 km, is rust-free, the paint is intact, the interior is wear-free, the automatic transmission shifts like new, the indestructible five-cylinder block hums like a young dog. The interior and exterior of the SL, mine for ten years, are indistinguishable from new after 27 years without any exaggeration. It is probably no coincidence that these are the most trouble-free cars in the collection. The beloved A2 of 2005 is already clearly more maintenance-sensitive, although the high average quality is also striking. There is no crack in the leather upholstery after 172,000 kilometers. While I have seen lease Mercedes whose seat bolsters showed visible signs of use after 80,000 kilometers.
In this statistically terminal car household, for example, maintenance costs are a thousand percent lower. To keep it in top condition, I only have to do the regular turns on time except for a single incident
feed. And then I don’t even run empty on it, not even on the most expensive of the bunch. At the last check, there was again little wrong with the SL. The plastic covers of the seats were loose, there was a tiny leak somewhere, the Hirschmann electric antenna was malfunctioning – all trifles that the experienced specialist had remedied for a total amount that would not cause average Golf men to suffer from heart failure. The thing is screwed together so chillingly solid that I gleam with pride at the sight. Well, he has a virgin 62,000 miles on the clock. But two tons further, the interior still looks just as showroom-worthy, get to know my classics. That is how you will love cars.