Okay, you’re thinking “A third column about selling the M Coupe? Is Siegel just running on fumes these days?”
Maybe. But hey, I owned the car for 20 years. It deserves it.
Last week I mentioned that, despite my general feeling that endings should be sharp, clear, and memorable, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take the M Coupe on a final drive. In the end, I just let it sit in the garage until the buyer came to pick it up, and I was oddly fine with that, as it seemed like a fitting end to a car I’d barely driven the past five years. On Sunday morning, the new owner and his wife drove in from Albany, she headed off to visit a friend in Boston, he and I passed papers, I handed over a few spare parts and showed him a few more things about the car, we chatted a bit, he took a picture of me behind the car, and when he was on his way, I sang my traditional Long May You Run (which, for the hundredth time, if you don’t know, Neil Young wrote about his 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse).
The last pic of me with the car. That’ll have to qualify as an ending.
I spent the next few hours wondering why this wasn’t traumatic. I think I figured it out.
Roundel archeology reveals that in the April 1994 issue—we’re talking 32 1/2 years ago—my column had an introductory paragraph in which I innocently stated the following:
It is my professional opinion that a car nut with a family needs at least three cars: A van/minivan/wagon in which to haul the stuff of life; a satisfying road sedan; a pampered classic; a roadster; a driver’s school go-cart; a four-wheeler, and a project car. Like I said, seven cars. All you wackos out there can tell your spouses I said it was all right.
This came to be known as “Siegel’s Seven-Car Rule.” I returned to it over and over in my writing. I explained how one of the things to love about BMWs is how they excel at satisfying several slots, how for me the 4×4 was also a tow vehicle and a beach assault vehicle, how the seventh slot for “project car” was something of a free-spin card that I relabeled “whatever the current project car happens to be,” and how, as my count edged up to 14, I crammed eight cars into it. And yes, many of you used me as an example you could point to and insist to your spouse that this was acceptable behavior.
But over the decades, I also wrote about how cars are best when they’re for something, and how the seven slots don’t all map to actual activities (“driver’s school go-kart” is the clearest). I personally don’t consider “pampering” an actual activity; I think I can count on three fingers the number of times I’ve waxed a car. The big omission activity-wise is that there are no clear slots for the cars that you drive thousands of miles to go to events like The Vintage or MidAmerica 02Fest (for me, it alternates between the pampered E9 I’ve owned for 40 years, and whatever the current project car happens to be), nor for cars that you pull out a few times a year to go to cars and coffee (the Bavaria and the Euro 635CSi were becoming that), nor even for cars that you pleasure-drive for the simple joy of it. To me, that role is often played by the Z3, as dropping the top and letting the sun and wind hit your face is the second-best drug I know.
The point in all this is that even though I’d owned the M Coupe for four months shy of 20 years, it’s been ages since it actually was for something. The issue of the stiff seats inducing back pain after an hour showed up early, so I never road-tripped it to Schuh Syndikat events. I stopped doing driver’s schools or other track driving events almost 15 years before I bought the car so it never saw any of that under my ownership, and while I used to take it out and run interstate cloverleafs in it, that activity dropped off over a decade ago. Pleasure-driving got reduced to a 20-minute stint a few times a year when I’d run out to the Monson warehouse where it was stored and exercise it on some of the lovely back roads on the edge of the Berkshires. It was still an astonishing car in which to goose the gas (I never need to own anything faster than this), but I did that less and less often. I kept it because, as I said earlier, I owned nothing else remotely like it, and I was afraid that, if I sold it, it’d somehow cosmically trigger appreciation of all M Coupes, even a lowly driver-quality silver S52 car. And you probably noticed that in Siegel’s Seven-Car Rule, there’s not a slot for “car you don’t drive but you hold onto because it’s appreciating.” That’s collector territory, and I resolutely insist that I am not a collector.
And then came the two Lotuses—the ratty ’74 Europa Twin Cam Special that I bought in 2013 and got running in 2019, and the lovely ’69 Elan +2 I bought two years ago. I haven’t done any real road trips in these cars either, just day trips, but I discovered a slot that they are most definitely for—they’re for pleasure-driving on small twisty roads in the leafy towns just west of me where, if you’re going 42 in a 35 zone, you feel you should be arrested for the amount of fun you’re having. The 2002s do this too, but not as viscerally. The M Coupe was the opposite of that. Drive 60 in it and it feels like you’re doing 35. It yawns and says “Geez, get on me, buster!”
Did the ratty but addictive Lotus Europa spell the end of the M Coupe? In an odd way, maybe.
It’s a funny dynamic. The M Coupe—the fastest best-handling car I own, the car whose rear-quarter view exudes forward motion and sex more than perhaps any other car BMW has ever built, a modern car that starts and drives effortlessly when you reconnect the battery after five months and twist the key, a reliable car whose only real quirk was a balky driver’s side window regulator—lost its passion-relaxation spot to two 50-year-old fiberglass British buckets of bolts that thunk, clunk, buzz, and rattle enough to drive me crazy, and yet I get this insatiable grin when I drive them through dappled sunshine.
When I realized this a few hours after the buyer departed with the M Coupe, I pulled the Elan +2 out of the garage and took it for a drive. No destination. No cars and coffee. Just pleasure. Those moments when you drive a car and think “I can’t believe I get to own and drive this” often fade down to zero with the years. After two years with the Elan +2, the passion is all still there. I still got juiced looking at the M Coupe from the back, but it had been a long time since I felt that way driving it.
When I got back, I texted the buyer, reminding him that I asked him to let me know when he got home safely (also, I’d let him drive home on my plates, and I wanted to cancel them and the insurance). He immediately responded that he’d gotten home half an hour ago, and sent me two pics of the M Coupe and his 2002 on his property outside Albany, with the note “They look so good together. Such a contrast, but also meant to be friends and share a garage.” As with the sale of the Bavaria, the Euro 635CSi, and Bertha my ratty snot-rocket 2002, the view of the car in the wild, being enjoyed, immediately verified that this was a better situation than it continuing to sit unused in Monson.
Photo by Travis K.
And so, we close the M Coupe era with what I actually sang when the car left the driveway. With apologies to Neil Young for one altered line:
Long may you runLong may you runAlthough these changes have comeWith your gorgeous fat planted clown shoe ass shiningIn the sunLong may you run
—Rob Siegel
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Rob’s newly-expanded book The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 40 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies (including the new Best Of) from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com/books.
