by Doug DeMuro
Bumper to Bumper
By
Doug DeMuro
Copyright © Doug DeMuro, 2016
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The New Stories
1. The Time I Got a Ticket for Going 34 MPH over the Speed Limit in a Construction Zone
2. The Ferrari Smoke Incident
3. The Real Story of the Chrysler PT Cruiser I Crushed
4. How the Carfax App Changed My Voting Behavior
5. Porsche 911 Turbo: The Worst Car Purchase of My Life
6. Automotive Press Launches
7. The Most Bizarre Mechanical Delay Ever
8. The Porsche 911 GT3, the YouTube Video, and the $2,800 Repair Bill
9. The Ferrari and the Steepest Driveway in Philadelphia
10. Driving on the Bonneville Salt Flats
11. Driving in Foreign Countries
12. The Time I Crashed My Porsche 911 into a Tree
13. Here’s How I Learned to Drive Stick Shift on a Ferrari
14. Justice for My Porsche
15. Here’s What Happens When You Have License Plate Number 2
16. The Angry Woman at the Saturn Dealer
17. That Time My Old G-Wagen Killed Those People
18. The Joys of Alternate Side Parking
19. Here’s Why I Don’t Help People Buy Cars Anymore
20. The Time I Bribed a South African Government Official
21. The Difficult Experience of Buying My Aston Martin
22. The Amazing Tale of the Stolen Ferrari F50
23. Attention Waze: Please Stop Giving Me So Much Information
24. The Tire Blowout and the Rented Peugeot
25. My Experience with Aston Martin Corporate
26. The Land Cruiser and CarMax
27. So You Want to Be an Automotive Journalist
28. Behind the Scenes
The Jalopnik Stories
29. Here’s Why the 996 Turbo Is the Best Porsche 911 You Can Buy
30. Here’s How I Once Bought a Rare Mercedes for Half Its Value
31. Here’s Why the Audi S4 V8 Is an Awful Used Car
32. Acura Botched Every Single Aspect of the NSX Launch
33. The Air Conditioning in a Used Car Never “Just Needs a Charge”
34. My Air Suspension Failed (Again): Another CarMax Warranty Update
35. Here’s How I Crushed a Chrysler PT Cruiser with a Hummer
36. I Drove the FIAT 500L and Hated Every Second
37. My Neighbor Left an Angry Anonymous Note on My Hummer
38. Here’s Why the Ferrari F355 Is a Horrible Used Car
39. I Raced My Hummer on an Actual Racetrack
40. Here’s What Happened When I Hypermiled My Hummer
41. The Maserati Ghibli Is a Luxury Sedan Joke
42. I Spent a Day with the Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet
43. I Got Pulled Over Twice in One Night Driving My Nissan Skyline GT-R
44. The Volkswagen Golf Isn’t Selling as Well as Volkswagen Says
45. I Took My Nissan Skyline GT-R to a Dyno to Find Out How Much Power It Has
46. I Raced My Hummer at a Quarter-Mile Drag Strip
47. My Aston Martin Already Broke Down
48. The Scariest Thing about the Hellcat Is the Third Owner
49. My Aston Martin Warranty Has Already Paid For Itself
50. I Drove My Aston Martin on a Frozen Lake in Vermont
51. Can You Daily Drive the Alfa Romeo 4C?
Dedication
This book is dedicated to everyone who has helped me realize that being a professional car enthusiast might actually be a realistic career choice.
That’s the Top Gear guys (and specifically the episode with the Toyota Hilux destruction), Jo and Joe, Nick and Calvin at Porsche, Bertel Schmitt and Matt Hardigree, Peri Cleez, Filippo, Melissa the groomsman, Matt Boyer, Jordan Solomon, Sean Winograd, Tara and Brian, Faris Nijim, Dave “Macanamera” Mohebbi, Sam Cates, and—after much convincing—my parents.
It’s also for anyone who has ever had an extra SD card on hand when I forgot mine, brought me and my Aston Martin out on a frozen lake, remained calm when I almost crashed your Hellcat, helped me find a junkyard suitable for crushing a PT Cruiser, let me film your Land Rover Defender even though it was for sale, allowed me to store my Ferrari in your garage, followed slowly behind my Hummer for two-and-a-half hours so we could go off-roading and stop every five minutes to shoot video, accompanied me to the drag strip and allowed my friends to film my car from your passenger seat, explained in meticulous detail the process of importing a Nissan Skyline GT-R, found me a Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet on RelayRides, held my camera to shoot a video, met up with me for a meal to talk about cars, said hello on the street, asked for a selfie at cars and coffee, or even simply watched a video or read a column and shared it with a friend. Thank you.
And it’s for anyone who shelled out some hard-earned money to buy this book instead of, for example, a Sharpie four-pack.
But mostly, it’s for Scott, who picked up a magazine in an airport and changed my life forever.
Introduction
Hello, human beings, and welcome to Bumper to Bumper, which is the finest book ever written —an accolade it shares with my last book, Plays With Cars.
Many people will disagree with this assessment. Literary scholars. English professors. Virtually anyone who has ever read any other type of writing, including glossy tourism pamphlets. But these people are wrong, because their favorite written work probably does not include the phrase: this is an insane, ridiculous society, full of insane, ridiculous people, and to be completely honest a cantaloupe sounds pretty good right about now. This one does.
Here’s how this book works: it is comprised of about two-thirds new, brilliant content, which comes first, and then about one-third old, brilliant content, pilfered from Jalopnik. Some of you have read the old, brilliant content already. That’s OK. Read it again. Even if it’s old, it’s still brilliant, sort of like the Constitution. Plus: what the hell else are you going to do on your flight? Or in the bathroom? Hum to yourself? Give me a break.
Now, start reading. Enjoy. And for God’s sake, if you have a complaint, keep it to yourself.
The Time I Got a Ticket for Going 34 MPH Over the Speed Limit in a Construction Zone
Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Doug DeMuro
Who was coming back from a Jimmy Eat World concert
I recently came in contact with a veteran member of the Maryland State Police who is especially known for accuracy, precision, and unbiased fairness in the interest of justice. It was a powerful camera located in the back of a Ford Windstar.
But before I get into the details of my encounter—namely that they caught me going so fast that a normal police officer would’ve skipped the usual “Do you know why I stopped you?” and moved right along to “Are you a complete jackass?”—please allow me to explain my actions. I am not doing this to justify my illegal behavior, but rather so that you won’t think of me as some lawbreaking monster. Instead, I’d prefer you to think of me as a lawbreaking basset hound, or possibly a lawbreaking baby dolphin.
The night was October 15, 2014, and legendary rock band Jimmy Eat World—known for creating some of the finest hits ever to come out of suburban Phoenix—was in the middle of the Futures anniversary tour. This was especially important to me, because Futures came out when I was in high school, and I have very fond memories of it: sitting in my used Volvo and loudly belting out the words to “23” through my broken sunroof. Sometimes I look back on those days with such excitement, and happiness, and glee, and I think to myself: I wonder why I didn’t have a girlfriend.
So anyway, I was very excited t
o reunite with these memories, right up until the moment that Jimmy released the tour schedule. The band was going on a fifteen-city tour that spanned the entire country, but they weren’t coming to my city, Philadelphia. And Philadelphia wasn’t the only big city they were skipping: also omitted were Seattle, Chicago, New York, Boston, and Miami. Despite this, they had decided to play tiny towns such as the bustling metropolis of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, home to the world-renowned Pocono Record (motto: The best place in all of greater Stroudsburg to sell your unwanted ferret puppies!), and, presumably, at least one relative of a Jimmy Eat World band member. (“Tommy, if you and your little band come up to Stroudsburg, I’ll make that nice casserole you like!”)
The closest tour city to me was Washington, D.C., which is about 150 miles from my home as the crow flies, presuming it is flying along Interstate 95. So I booked tickets for the D.C. show, and I grumbled a bit, and then I forgot about the whole thing for a few months.
As the concert drew nearer, I started to realize there would be a problem. Namely, the show was on a Wednesday night at 10 p.m., and Washington, D.C. is approximately two and a half hours from my home. This meant that even if Jimmy went on exactly at 10 p.m. (this has never happened before in the history of music) and they played for only one hour (this often happens at Creed shows) I still wouldn’t make it home until 1:30 a.m. This is a rather late hour when you are a human being who works, as I sometimes do.
To remedy this, I made a decision: on the way down there, I would drive normally, following all the rules of the road as decreed by the fair, equal, and just governments of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. And on the way back, I would speed like a Japanese bullet train.
You can probably see where this is going.
So the day of the concert came, and I arrived around 9 p.m., which gave me ample time to have dinner and walk around for a little bit. At around 10:30, thirty minutes past the planned start time, I walked over to the concert venue, only to discover the opening band was just getting started.
It was at this moment when I realized I probably would not be putting on pants for the entirety of the next day.
I will not bore you with the details of the concert, except to say that Jimmy Eat World are true gods among mortals, legendary minds that will some day be mentioned in the same breath as Mozart, Edison, Copernicus, and whoever invented the television remote. What I will say is that they went on stage at 11:15 and played a two-hour set, which meant that it was 1:30 in the morning when I finally found myself getting back into my car to make the long drive home.
Now you can definitely see where this is going.
There are a few things I remember about this drive. For instance: I remember belting out “23” to my sunroof, just like the old days, and thinking Dammit, I should be a member of Jimmy Eat World, because these vocal cords could probably sell out Stroudsburg. I remember passing only about six total vehicles, even though I was driving about the same speed as a California police chase headed for the border. And I remember using the Waze app.
The Waze app, for those of you who don’t know, is this little application on your phone like a flashlight, except instead of annoying movie theater patrons it alerts you to road hazards. I use Waze to inform me about police presence, so I have it set to alert me only when there is a serious issue that needs my immediate attention. This means it vibrates every eleven seconds to announce that there’s a vehicle stopped on the shoulder ahead.
So anyway, with Waze’s continued assurance that a) I didn’t have to worry about the police, and b) there were dozens of vehicles stopped on shoulder ahead, I made it home that night in approximately an hour and forty-five minutes, which means that I averaged something like eighty-five miles per hour. This was a tremendous speed, and I was immensely proud of myself for the next several weeks, until I received an official-looking letter from the Maryland State Police. The letter said:
Dear Doug,
Are you a complete jackass?
No, I’m just kidding. What the letter said was, one of their mobile speed cameras caught me doing 89 miles per hour in a 55-mph construction zone, and they had incontrovertible evidence of my guilt: a bunch of full-color images of my car speeding along with construction cones next to it. This is the automotive equivalent to being caught outside Walmart with a 24-inch LCD television under your jacket.
Now, at this point I started to freak out, because 89 in a 55 is thirty-four miles per hour over the speed limit, and by God they think I was going that fast in a construction zone. For those of you who don’t have much experience in American construction zones, I should say that speeding in them is considered a moral travesty. They have cones. They have lighted barriers. They have signs up that say “My mommy works here,” written in a child’s handwriting to maximize your guilt. They always have a patrol car nearby. And if you get caught speeding in one, the officer pulls you over, and walks up to your car, and says: “Sir, how many puppies have you kicked this week?”
Only, there’s a problem: this wasn’t really a construction zone. It was three o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday, and there wasn’t a single construction worker, or construction vehicle, or construction orange vest anywhere to be found. If this thing was an active construction zone, then so is Stonehenge.
But the state of Maryland didn’t see it that way. I logged on to their website, and it was very clear: a construction zone is a construction zone regardless of the time of day, or the location, or the weather, or the total number of people with orange vests standing around discussing college football while one single orange-vested person uses a jackhammer.
So my mind started racing. I was caught speeding. Thirty-four miles per hour over the limit. In a construction zone. On camera. I need to get a lawyer. I need to get a team of lawyers. I’m going to be arrested, sent to jail, stripped of my dignity, FORCED TO LIVE AMONGST MODERN CRIMINALS AND MURDERERS AND PUPPY KICKERS.
And what about Waze?! Those bastards were supposed to protect me from this! The only thing I remember from that night was a constant warning: Vehicle stopped on shoulder ahead. Vehicle stopped on shoulder ahead. Yeah? Vehicle stopped on shoulder ahead? WELL, WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME ABOUT “CAMERA VAN STOPPED ON SHOULDER AHEAD?” MAYBE THAT WOULD’VE BEEN A LITTLE MORE HELPFUL THAN LETTING ME KNOW WHEN I WAS GOING TO ENCOUNTER SOME GUY’S ABANDONED 1994 GRAND AM???
So I turned over the ticket to learn my fate.
Do you know what the great state of Maryland charges you if they catch you on camera going 34 miles per hour over the speed limit in a construction zone?
Do you know what the great state of Maryland charges you for excessively speeding through an area where defenseless, helpless construction workers might be assembling our roads for the improvement of society?
Do you know what the great state of Maryland charges you for openly disobeying its laws, and rules, and regulations, and flouting its societal conventions by speeding at a rate that’s 60 percent in excess of the speed limit?
Forty bucks. They charge you forty bucks. I paid it online like I was buying a USB cable.
A few days later, I sent out a tweet about my photo radar experience, and I got dozens of angry replies back from my readers, each of them angry about the mere existence of photo radar cameras in the United States. “What ever happened to confronting your accuser?” one wrote. “Challenge that ticket,” said another. “It’s illegal and it should be outlawed.” A third replied: “Those things are unconstitutional and you should sue them.” A few people cursed at the very idea of photo radar.
Me, I was pretty happy with the whole thing: I paid forty bucks to shave forty-five minutes off my usual drive home from D.C. In fact, given the traffic that normally fills this route, I wish I could pay forty bucks to shave forty-five minutes off this drive every time I make it. Unfortunately, the great state of Maryland has not yet reached the enlightened era of letting people pay to speed. Until that day comes, it’ll be just me and my trusty Waze app, cruising down I-95
, going as fast as we can until we reach some major hazard, like a police officer, or an accident, or a vehicle stopped on shoulder ahead.
The Ferrari Smoke Incident
As I look back on the ownership of my Ferrari 360 Modena about a year after I sold it, I think I can finally say that I’ve pinpointed the major reasons why I didn’t like it.
I covered a few of these reasons in depth when I owned the car. There was, for example, the fact that I couldn’t park it anywhere without the fear of damage, or vandalism, or unwanted attention. And there was the fact that I couldn’t drive it anywhere without the fear of mechanical issues, or potholes, or value-diminishing accidents.