I had the car buying crazies – hell, did I ever
have them!
As always, there was a rationalisation for the
need of another car. The Nissan Maxima V6 Turbo project car had been sold, as
had the supercharged Toyota Crown. Both were around mid-late Eighties vintage
and the Maxima had certainly earned its keep, being fitted with every electronic
kit known to mankind - not to mention also featuring a new radiator, intercooler,
exhaust and cheap sound system. All these mods had been covered in AutoSpeed
stories.
(The Crown? Well, I did a few stories on it but
had ended up largely losing enthusiasm for the car – great engine and trans, but
the rest of the car felt very old-fashioned in design and execution. Comfortable
interior, though!)
After the Maxima, the next project car had become
the ’99 Toyota Prius, a hybrid petrol/electric car. An immensely complex car to
modify, I’d turbo’d and intercooled it, along with making a host of other more
minor mods. As a project car it been extremely effective – the stories on it
generating a huge amount of interest around the world and being an exciting and
(eventually!) rewarding challenge. But now the time had come where its
modification was nearly finished, with just some mounting of the new electronics
left to do.
(It may be near-finished in modification, but
there’s no way it will be sold – this is a brilliant car which doesn’t just run
on the smell of an oily rag, it metaphorically runs on a clean one! And with
that bottom-end electric motor torque, it’s also a lot of fun to drive.)
So I needed a new project car, one that I’d be
happy driving but could also be modified to provide a procession of interesting
and achievable stories. But what sort of car should I buy?
Decisions...
My first desire was for a turbo diesel. A turbo
diesel car, not a four-wheel drive truck. Back in 1999 I’d test driven
the then-new Peugeot 406 HDi and been enormously impressed (see The Parsimonious Peugeot). That drive had been mostly
on rural roads, and then in 2003 I’d had the 307 HDi for a week in urban Sydney
(see
New Car Test - Peugeot 307 HDi
). Both times the fuel
economy had been stunning, and with the common rail fuel injection system and
intercooled turbo, there was clearly plenty of room for unique and interesting
modifications.
But then I started browsing prices of the earlier
model 405 diesel. The turbo diesel Pugs hold their value extraordinarily well,
the size of the prices being asked being exceeded only by the kilometres most
seemed to have travelled! A ratty 405 petrol engine car can be had for only a
few thousand dollars; a diesel version of the same car is usually well over
$10,000! (All dollars in this story are Australian.) In fact, on a budget of
less than $8,000, I couldn’t find a 405 diesel to even test drive.
I scanned the used car web pages, doing searches
based on the key words of ‘diesel’ and ‘sedan’. Interestingly, upped popped a
few grey market Japanese import Toyota turbo diesels, cars like the
late-Eighties Cressida diesel never sold new in this country. These actually
looked pretty good, and since I apparently have become a bit of a Toyota fan
(such a move was never intentional, but with a ’98 Lexus LS400, the Crown and
the Prius, it certainly looks that way) I rang the dealer who had them, only to
find that now he didn’t – they’d been sold and he was going overseas and didn’t
have any more available for a month or two.
The car crazies were biting hard – and here I was,
a week down in looking and I hadn’t even driven a car.
The Diesel Merc
Then my web ‘diesel sedan’ searches popped up a
1988 Mercedes 300D. This is the W124 model, a car that in 300E form I’d always
been a fan of. (I’d never driven one but had admired from afar their
conservative but aerodynamically very efficient shape and their in-line 135kW
3-litre six cylinder engine.) But a diesel one? I knew little about them. But
here was a car advertised locally at $8,800 and with – gulp! –
475,000
kilometres on the odometer. My partner Georgina thought I was joking
when I suggested we go look at it, but the car itself turned out to be
stunning.
First up, it looked really good. The interior was
unmarked, and the external paint had at some time been redone. There were no
stone chips and no dents. The rear glass was cracked (the dealer said he’d
replace it) and the windscreen had a couple of stone marks. As was the case with
many Mercedes models of the time, the interior equipment level was Spartan, but
to my eyes, inside it still looked elegant and simple.
But under the bonnet there was a bombshell – not
because of the condition, but in the technology. The diesel uses a very old
fashioned approach to its injection – it’s basically a fully mechanical system.
And there’s no turbo. This would make modification difficult and most of the
changes would be absolutely specific to 300D diesels. It wouldn’t be like the
Prius, where the technique used to increase fuelling was common to all cars that
always stay in closed loop; instead there would be stories about altering
Mercedes mechanical diesel fuel pumps. And while I’m all for AutoSpeed stories
on unusual mods, this was simply getting too narrow in appeal.
Still, a drive wouldn’t hurt, would it? In fact,
after the inspection I was becoming intrigued as to how bad a car with this
distance under its wheels would feel on the road. I certainly had never driven a
car with a greater odometer reading... But the amazing thing was that it drove
perfectly. The steering, ride, handling, NVH – all were fantastic. In fact, if
the odometer had shown 100,000 kilometres – not over four times that – I would
have accepted the car as having travelled only that shorter distance.
Really.
But the power....well, there wasn’t any. The long
travel throttle and the penchant for the trans to start off in second gear
unless floored gave the initial impression that the 300D was the slowest car on
the road, but even hammering the thing around at full-throttle didn’t change
that picture much. This engine was nothing like as good as a
modern turbo Peugeot diesel... not even remotely close.
I live at the top of a very steep country road
hill and I wondered if the Merc would even be able to make the climb. I
mentioned this to the car dealer and he made a great offer. “Take the car
overnight,” he said. “Try it up your hill.” That was too good to refuse so I did
just that. And yes, it could get up the hill, but it was nearly the slowest car
I’ve ever taken up there. In fact, without being revved near its maximum power
point, it was a roadblock. It wasn’t as if the 3-litre diesel liked the revs
either. When spinning this hard it completely lost its relaxed and relatively
quiet demeanour and instead sounded loud and coarse. And under these conditions
it blew a bit of smoke, too.
I loved the ride and handling, and an inch-by-inch
inspection showed few problems – except that one of the front guards had red
paint underneath, rather than the white of the rest of the car. But a car this
slow that couldn’t be modified with AutoSpeed stories of wide appeal?
Bloody hard to justify...
But then there was the price. Incredibly, I’d
bargained the dealer down to $6,000 flat, and that was with the replacement rear
window. Gawd, six thousand dollars when looking at the prices being charged for
230E, 300E and 300D models, I thought the car was worth at least $9,000. But
whatever the price, it simply couldn’t do what I needed a car to do.
However, of the cars that I was to drive over the
next week, the 300D still has the most personal, idiosyncratic appeal.
More Looking
So the Merc diesel was out and there weren’t any
other diesel sedans to try. Hmm, if I wanted really good fuel economy, what
about selecting a relatively large car that has a smallish engine, and then
turbocharging it? Say, a 2.5 litre in-line six cylinder – like a BMW 525i
perhaps? But then I remembered, the BMW sixes are canted over to the exhaust
side – and that leaves little room for a turbo. Sure, it can be done, but it’s
not easy.
By this stage I was eBaying and Autowebing and
Carpointing and Carsaling furiously. The search criteria got wider and wider
until up popped a car I’d never before considered.
A Falcon sedan.
Huh? From a Merc diesel to a BMW 525i to a 1995 EF
Falcon? WTF? I won’t bore you with the lack of logic in that sequence, but here
I was, looking over, in and under a white GLi.
The interesting things about this car were that it
was a 5-speed manual (extremely rare in Falcons, where a full 95 per cent seem
to be autos), was a two-owner car, had low kilometres for its age – and had an
eBay starting price of just $3,500. But a Falcon? Well, with 157kW, 357Nm
and a relatively light 1536kg, the car is surprisingly quick. And from a
modification point of view, there are literally hundreds of things you can do –
aftermarket and upgrade factory parts are numerous.
Best of all, it drove extremely well. The clutch
had been replaced with a heavy duty item (the owner said she used to ride the
clutch), the dampers were new and so was the exhaust. The Falc torqued along
effortlessly and if the engine was a bit breathless at high revs, well, I’ve
driven enough of the Jim Mock Motorsport Falcons to know that this can be very
effectively remedied. (Maybe that’s when the idea of a Falcon was first
implanted – before driving plenty of JMM Falcons I’d certainly never given a
Falcon six even a passing look.)
And at a $3,500 starting price...wow!
But then things started going downhill. I asked
the owner if she wanted to end the eBay auction early – say for $4,000 on the
spot. She declined (that’s fine; let the auction run its course) but then
flummoxed me by saying she would withdraw the car from auction unless it reached
$4,500. With a starting price of $3,500 and no stated reserve, remember. That’s
against all eBay rules, something she seemed blissfully unconcerned by. I drove
away, further considered the value and then rang back with a final offer:
$4,200. Again she said ‘no’.
Having by this stage convinced myself that I
didn’t want a bloody GLi Falcon anyway, I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or
disappointed.
Next week: driving a Volvo and an Audi and a
BMW – and then going back to a Falcon...
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