Cars

Given I now have a place to live, a few actually, I was once again in the market for an automobile.

I have kept an automobile in storage with my sister, to the delight of her husband. It is a high performance sports car in the $250k range. I may have driven it a few hundred miles in the last few years. My brother in law might have driven it a few thousand miles. It was a good deal for him. They do not charge me storage fees.

I have had a new model on order. It arrives later this month. It will be my 4th car of that Italian brand, so I suppose I should say that I like the car. There was a nice set of factory-sponsored events in different cities worldwide where they debuted the car. Jenny and I attended one. It was grand in a horrible way, and utterly boring to boot. But the cars were lovely and the wine was great.

I have had the usual assortment of high end cars back when I had a garage sufficient to the task: over the last decade I've entertained a brace of Porsches and Ferraris, a Lamborghini, a couple of Mercedes, and a few very special cars. None were very practical especially after I left the country. The depreciation was also, for the most part, pretty horrible, and I do not have the preservationist interests of a collector.

The problem is that Jenny and I will be living in large cities, which are not the best places for a high performance sports car, even the most practical member of that class, the Porsche Turbo or GT3. Although in Asia I have seen Ferraris in the cities, it looks like a real pain to drive them around at the off and on ten KPH maximum speed you see in traffic, while inhaling the pungent, unfiltered exhaust of hundreds of high pollution cars, most of which have their tailpipes at the level of your nose.

So I thought of a sedan. Something that could be amenable to a chauffer or self-driving. These days there are very fast saloons available for purchase. The merely fast saloons include the typical names: Aston Martin, Jaguar, Mercedes, BMW, Ferrari, Bentley and so on. Then there are the insanely fast saloons, of which I feel the Mercedes S65 AMG is the defining example given the constraints.

Meanwhile Jenny has her heart set on a Porsche Cayenne Turbo S, which we test drove last year. It's a ridiculous car, but she enjoys the high driving position, especially as more and more SUVs dominate the roads. Apparently outside of the US and Europe, the Cayenne is the brand leader for Porsche. And there is a new model now...

Choices, choices...