The Worst Car I Ever Loved
I was already driving my dream car when I bought the BMW that would repeatedly impact my life for the next decade.
That dream car? The ‘95 Jeep Wrangler that had carried me through my graduate program on Long Island, that moved my paltry belongings to Indiana for a new start after a failed engagement to my high school sweetheart, and that dragged me through a Mid-West polar vortex to teach night school at the local community college -- the Jeep that I dreamed of owning since I was a kid -- decided it no longer wanted to start.
Add to that some front end damage from an accident years earlier, brake pads that were more of an idea than a reality, and a muffler that had come completely detached from the rest of the exhaust system, and I reasoned it was time to invest in a more reliable form of transportation.
(In an unexpected twist, the Jeep would spring back to life with just a little TLC and eventually went on to a new life as a dedicated off-roader. But that is its own story.)
I went online and found a used BMW 5 Series at a local auto dealership. It was nearly 10 years old -- made in 1998, the same year I graduated high school -- but priced reasonably for its 70,000 miles. Without haggling, I signed the contract for the loan and drove my not-so-new BMW off the lot.
The problems began almost immediately. When idling for any length of time, it would overheat thanks to a sizable crack in the engine from which coolant bubbled and spit. This made city driving -- with its stop lights and traffic -- a nightmare and caused me to race at top speed down crowded streets whenever I had enough open road in order to force air into the radiator to cool the engine down.
The dangerously bald tires were high on my list of parts to replace, but before I could save enough money for new ones, Indiana experienced a series of snow storms that made driving a white knuckle experience.
The windshield washer fluid bottle cracked and leaked dry, so seeing could be a challenge in the wrong circumstances. On wet, slushy days, I kept an old towel in the car so that I could reach out while driving at speed and wipe the glass “clean”.
One warm day, I opened the sunroof on the drive to my college’s satellite campus an hour into the Indiana countryside. When I arrived, it wouldn’t close. It stayed open until the weekend, and when I was finally lucky enough to get it closed, I never opened it again.
The first window to break was the front passenger, a failing motor causing it to get stuck about 6 inches from the top. The driver side window would break soon after. Then the one behind it. My father and I would take the driver door apart to replace the window’s motor twice before he said he wouldn’t do it again. It broke again a few months later. I had to open my door at every ATM, drive-thru, and toll booth after that.
Purchased in the winter, it wasn’t until the first warm days of spring that it became clear the AC didn’t blow cold air. Once I was able to get it working, it needed to be recharged almost yearly. When I eventually parted ways with the BMW, the AC was broken altogether. So when it got hot out, there was no way to get relief: no cold air, no sunroof, and no windows that opened.
When I reached for the door handle one day, it broke off in my hand. I soon learned it wasn’t a part I could get new from a parts dealer. I had to climb in through the passenger door and hop over the center console to the driver’s seat until I located a used replacement from a junkyard in Pennsylvania.
One morning, after moving to California, a student on campus ran into the parked BMW and drove off, leaving a few scratches down the driver’s side door. The scratches buffed out, but it caused a new long term issue. The alarm would now inexplicably go off at random, even while I was moving down the highway at 70 mph. Or at 3 am when parked on the street in front of our apartments. Or in line at the drive thru. Eventually, I would just pull the fuse to disarm the alarm permanently.
Towards the end, it began leaking gas if you filled the tank all the way to full, so I could only fill it to ¾ of a tank of gas at a time or risk trailing a line of flammable fuel behind me. Every trip to the gas station now required a level of math too complex for an English professor in order to ensure I didn’t become a fireball while driving down the road.
The poor BMW would eventually be rear-ended on the 5 freeway in San Diego’s relentless rush hour traffic. Not once -- but twice. Thankfully, the damage was mostly superficial.
Despite its many, many issues, the one thing my BMW never did was break down while I was driving.
Not. Once.
It did sputter out on me one time when I was house sitting for a friend living in a gated community, but it turns out I had only run out of gas. Clearly, we can chalk that one up to user error. Otherwise, it never left me stranded… though I was in constant fear that it would.
From nearly day one of owning the BMW, I was already regretting my purchase. To be plain, it was a lemon. And the money I put into keeping it running (on top of the loan payments) quickly became a burden on myself, my credit cards, and even my family.
I used to fantasize about crashing it. Just letting it slide off the road and into a tree. It did, after all, come equipped with an abundance of air bags.
Or leaving it parked unlocked with the keys in the ignition in a my less than savory neighborhood and hoping to never hear of it again.
Eventually, I would pay off its loan. And as investments go, it only made sense to get as many miles out of it as I could to offset my myriad losses.
Shortly after paying it off (and joking I was now a “homeowner” if things got bad), I chose to move from Indiana to California. I sold nearly all of my possessions for dirt cheap and packed the rest into the BMW. I turned my car west on Interstate 70 and didn’t stop driving until I was in Orange County.
The next summer I would drive the BMW to Chicago by way of Arizona and New Mexico. And then returned to Southern California through Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah to Lake Tahoe and then down the 101.
I anticipated that the car would die at any moment. In the hot, dry deserts of the Southwest. In the mountain passes of Colorado. Driving down the California coast. But it just kept going, mile after mile.
In the end, though, the car had damage to the rear bumper and trunk, a non-functioning AC system, no working windows, and endlessly more issues. Even the cupholders broke. So as soon as I was in a place to get a new car, I jumped at the chance to upgrade my lifestyle.
I was just going to donate the BMW to a local charity, not expecting that I would get much in trade-in value. Then a coworker told me that his car’s engine was shot and he couldn’t afford to get it fixed. He was stuck and needed some transportation. So I gave him the BMW, no questions asked. The car itself was still a solid BMW, and it ran strong, even if everything ancillary on it was broken.
He invested effort (and no small amount of cash) into fixing it up and keeping it running well. He even got the AC working again -- a priority in a San Diego summer.
About a year later, he passed it on to another coworker of ours, paying it forward if you will. I lost track of the car after that when I moved on to a new job. Or so I thought.
But it wasn’t the end of the saga after all. I received a bright blue notice in the mail. The BMW was found illegally parked with no license plates on it, so it was towed to the city impound lot. I was the one getting the letter because neither of its recent owners bothered to register it.
I could claim the car and pay to get it out, or I could abandon it. In the case of the latter, they would auction it off to cover the towing company’s fees. I told them to keep it, once and for all ending my relationship with the BMW.
I like to believe that it went on to live another life with a new owner -- shuttling a poor young student to their college classes or helping a single mother pick up her children after work. But it is much more likely that it was junked for parts. In pieces, my BMW would be far more valuable than as an actual functioning car.
I don’t like to think of my BMW torn apart and dissected into its individual pieces. But knowing it might be a parts donor, like the BMW that offered up its door handle to my injured car years earlier, giving new life to BMWs all around the country, if not the world, fills me with hope that all things can serve a purpose, even when they are broken from the start.