Bumper to Bumper

by Doug DeMuro

  Not only that, but according to this article, South Korea has the highest percentage of non-colored cars in the entire world. In fact, it was considered such an unusual decision to purchase a non-gray/silver/black/white car that the article had an interview with a Korean guy who the journalist selected just because he owned a car that was red. I am completely serious about this.

  So would I say South Korea is a bit conformist? Well, yes, maybe. Unless this could get me in trouble with the Ministry of Rule Following, and sentenced to a year of making sure you legibly wrote the return address before depositing your letter in a mailbox.

  The Time I Crashed My Porsche 911 into a Tree

  You always remember all the major moments in your life. Like, for instance, your wedding day. And the birth of your children. And the time you crashed your four-day-old Porsche 911 into a tree.

  Actually, I’m not entirely sure if you always remember your wedding day or the birth of your children, because those things haven’t happened to me. But I do remember the time I crashed my four-day-old Porsche 911 into a tree. There was a branch in the passenger seat.

  I’ve mentioned my 911 crash before in the occasional offhand comment on a Jalopnik column, and I even wrote a few paragraphs about it in my last book. But I’ve decided that today is the day I will finally share my full, uncensored, start-to-finish, 911-into-a-tree story for you, largely because nobody at Porsche who might sue me works there anymore.

  Speaking of Porsche, that’s a good place to start this whole thing, because at the time I was employed by Porsche Cars North America, the brand’s United States arm. This sounds cool, but it isn’t as exciting as you think. I say this because people are always asking me WHAT IS IT LIKE TO WORK FOR PORSCHE, and I always respond in the same way: take your normal, boring desk job where you look forward to lunch like an elementary-schooler looks forward to summer, and put a 1:43 scale model of a Panamera on your desk. That’s what it’s like to work for Porsche.

  To clarify:

  What you think I did at Porsche: I start the day by hopping in a Cayman GT4 and speeding around a racetrack, pedal to the floor, to identify the intricacies of the steering and handling systems so I can tell the German engineers what must be changed in order to reach pure driving perfection.

  At the end of the day, I jump into my Porsche company car and drive home at lightning speed, where I hob-nob with the beautiful people and eat expensive dinners that contain unusual animals, such as okapi burgers.

  What I actually did at Porsche: I used Excel a lot. Sometimes I got to create a Mail Merge. Occasionally I would go downstairs to the first floor and get a Snickers bar.

  At the end of the day, I would jump in my Porsche company car and drive home at approximately nine miles per hour, because Atlanta traffic is sort of like the highway version of driving around a shopping mall parking lot on the Saturday before Christmas.

  Now that we’ve covered that, there are three other things you need to know about this whole situation before I can get into the real meat of this crashed-my-911-into-a-tree story, or—if you prefer—the roots.

  Number one: at the time, Porsche employed this mercurial executive named Philip, who was my boss’s boss’s boss, and he would often fraternize with younger employees like myself. And I don’t mean he would fraternize in a “Hey what did you do this weekend?” sort of way. What I mean is, he would run through the cubicles screaming at the top of his lungs that he needed some report in an hour, and you would drop everything and do the report, even if you were in the process of doing something tremendously important, such as consuming your Snickers bar from the first floor. Then you scramble to get it done, and you would deliver it to him just in time, and he would say: What report?

  Because he was the boss, people did not complain about this. They just referred to it as his “unique management style,” sort of how you might refer to Ted Bundy’s serial killings as his “unique dating style.”

  Anyway, thing number two: we switched out company cars every six months. This was the main perk of the job, because you basically got to drive around in a new Porsche for six months, and then you’d swap into another new Porsche, and then you’d continuously repeat the process, over and over, until you realized you had been working there for nineteen years and you had thrown away $147,000 in lease payments, which you could’ve used to purchase both your own Porsche and a large supply of okapi burgers.

  And number three: at the time, I was very busy, because I was already launching my career as a freelance writer. So what I would do is, I would wake up at 8 a.m., I would work all day at Porsche, then I would come home and write for several hours. Then I would go to bed, sometimes as late as 1 or 2 a.m., and I would wake up and do it all again. So I didn’t have very much time to devote to anything, unless of course Philip needed a report done in eleven minutes.

  The 911 crash happened in June 2011. As I recall, I switched out company cars on a Monday. I was very excited because I was dropping off my old blue 911, which I didn’t really get to order myself, and I was picking up a red 911, which I ordered exactly how I wanted it. It had the right wheels. The right options. The right interior. It even had a fuzzy little Alcantara steering wheel, like a 911 GT3. I was so excited.

  So I went down to the dealer during my lunch break on Monday, and I dropped off my old car and picked up my new one. This was a great moment: after a year with the company, I was finally driving a brand-new 911 with every option exactly as I wanted it. The car was perfect. It was beautiful. It was mine.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to drive it.

  What happened was, I drove back to work after I picked it up, and then that evening I drove home. And I was so busy that week that I didn’t have time to do anything other than commute in it: I’d drive home from work, then I’d write, then I’d go to sleep. Then I’d drive it to work, then I’d work all day, then I’d drive home, then I’d write, then I’d go to sleep. That week, the most fun I had in my brand-new, ultra-awesome, super-exciting custom Porsche was the curve on the interstate on-ramp.

  Until Thursday.

  Late Thursday evening I had finished all of my writing for the week, and I decided to take my new 911 out for its first drive through the “Buckhead Forest,” which is a collection of roads in the northern part of Atlanta that are laid out sort of like a residential version of the Nürburgring. Really, it’s insane. They’re well paved, they’re devoid of traffic, and they include an enormous amount of twists and turns even though they were laid out when the area was farmland, so they could’ve made them all completely straight.

  Now, it had been raining that night, but I didn’t think anything of it, because rain is a constant presence in Atlanta. People think of Atlanta as hot and humid and sweaty, but the truth is that it’s rainy and rainy and rainy. Atlanta gets more rain than Seattle. More rain than Portland. More rain than places so wet that tiny lizard colonies live inside your house and watch your DVDs. Living in Atlanta is like enduring a college football Gatorade shower every five minutes of your life, even when you’re sleeping. In Atlanta, several people have drowned on rainwater while walking to work. The Signs aliens wouldn’t attack Atlanta because they would melt before they even got off the ship. There is so much rain that there’s actually a rain colony of rain people who eat rain and play rain instruments. (EDITOR’S NOTE: I think we’ve lost him.)

  So anyway, I entered the forest in my brand-new 911, eager to try out all of its brand-newness, and that’s when it happened—on the first road, on the first night, with just seventy-nine miles on the odometer. I came around the third corner, and BAM! Tree in the road.

  Now, I don’t know about you, but my first reaction, when I see a tree in the road, is to stop. You might feel differently, especially if you are a woodland creature, such as a squirrel. If you are a squirrel, then maybe you want to climb on the tree and bring your hands up to your mouth like you’re orchestrating some sort of nut-related world takeover. But me, my first reaction was to
stop.

  Or at least, that’s what I tried to do. The tree had fallen because the rain had softened the ground, and that same rain had made the road so slick that I had trouble stopping. So I jammed on my brakes and I brought the car to a halt about fifteen feet into the branches and maybe three feet short of the tree’s trunk. The windshield was broken. The radiator had been punctured. There were dimples in the front bumper and both front fenders. And by God, there was a branch in my passenger seat. I wish I still had that branch, but unfortunately it was taken by the rain people.

  Now, after this, I did what any reasonable person would do: I drove to work early the next morning, I parked the car on a floor of the garage so high up that even the security people don’t go up there to nap, and I quietly told the company car administrator what happened. It was a summer Friday, I was exhausted from the previous week of day-and-night work, and now I was facing our company’s $1,500 insurance deductible. I was about as excited to be at work that day as Volkswagen’s chief executive when it came out that his cars were polluting like wartime Pittsburgh.

  Fortunately, that morning, everything was going just fine. Or at least, everything was going just fine until another employee, Amber, caught wind of the situation.

  Now, I don’t want to disparage Amber too much here, but I think it’s important to describe people accurately in these stories so you have a good idea of exactly what was going on. So what I will say about Amber is that she was possibly the most annoying human being in the history of corporate America. You know the guy in your office who clips his toenails at his desk? If you fired him and got Amber instead, you’d be calling him back within a week and offering him the job of National Director of Toenail Clipping, with four weeks’ paid vacation and an office the size of Jamaica.

  Although there are many things I could say about Amber, I’ll start with the obvious: she was about to get married, which meant that she spent every moment of her time in the office when she wasn’t working, and many moments when she should’ve been working, planning her wedding. She was also a gossip to the point where I think she knew peoples’ pant sizes.

  So what happened next was, Amber told Philip about my car accident.

  Now, I’m not sure exactly how the events progressed that day, but I do remember that Philip was yelling. He was screaming. He was about as pissed off as the T-Rex in that second Jurassic Park movie, where Jeff Goldblum is driving all over San Diego with the baby dinosaur in his convertible and the mother is eating people at Blockbuster.

  Eventually, he called me into his office and gave me a long, stern lecture about how I was an entitled millennial, and I was driving too fast, and by God I shouldn’t be crashing cars into trees, and maybe I should be removed from the company car program.

  “But Philip,” I protested, thinking that he would calm down after he heard the story. “The tree had fallen in the road.”

  He was undeterred. He didn’t care. He insisted that I was going too fast, that I should’ve predicted the tree, that you should always be planning for on-the-road foliage. And it got worse: apparently, he was so bored that day that he had called the dealer where I dropped off my previous company car and discovered that I hadn’t washed it before I dropped it off. Once again, I tried to protest: the company had an archaic rule about how nobody except the employee could drive our company cars, which meant I had to wash it myself—and it had rained several times that week, so I didn’t have the chance. Once again, he was undeterred. The stern lecture continued. Mind you, this is a top executive of a major automobile manufacturer … yelling at me about a car wash.

  I went home that night with legitimate doubts about whether I would be employed the next week.

  Fortunately, some good came out of the whole thing. For one, once the office discovered it had been Amber who told Philip about my car accident, everyone else seemed annoyed about her unnecessary gossiping. When her contract came up for renewal, they didn’t renew it.

  Number two: although Philip didn’t forcefully remove me from the company car program, I dropped out voluntarily after that—and less than a month later, I was driving across the country in my Lotus, which turned out to be one of the greatest stories of my life.

  And number three: the entire incident made me realize just how depressing corporate life can be. In fact, if it weren’t for the 911-into-a-tree episode and the subsequent dressing-down by Philip, I’m not sure I would be here today, writing this story so that you, the dear reader, can have something to do on the toilet. Instead, I would probably be sitting in my cubicle, creating a Mail Merge. Oh, nope, wait! I’d better stop. Philip urgently needs a report in an hour.

  Here’s How I Learned to Drive Stick Shift on a Ferrari

  I always tell people I learned how to drive stick shift on a Ferrari. This is only partially true, but I say it anyway, sort of like when people come up to you at a gas station and they say they need money because their car broke down a mile away, and they’re trying to get to their cousin who lives in Omaha, and they’re looking for bus fare, and they have a pet lorikeet in the car, and the lorikeet is named Bertha, and if you don’t help them, by God, Bertha might die, and then you’ll have lorikeet blood on your hands. Only part of this is true. The part where they say they need money.

  But my Ferrari stick shift story is a little truer than that, and right now I’m going to tell you all about it.

  Now, you might assume that a person whose first stick shift experience in a Ferrari had this experience because his father owned one. Well, this couldn’t be further from the truth. My father has owned a series of Toyota Camrys, until about seven years ago when he finally purchased, after an enormous amount of pleading from me, a certified pre-owned Lexus RX. This is as far as he was willing to stray from the Camry. A used SUV that has the same window switches.

  Indeed, when it comes to cars, my parents’ interest could not possibly be further from my own. Here’s a story for proof: In early 2015, my dad texted me a photograph he took on his commute home from work, along with a message. The message said: “What is this new Audi RB?” Pictured—vertically, of course—was an extremely blurry image of an Audi R8, which went on sale approximately six years earlier.

  What is this new Audi RB?

  So it wasn’t my parents who got me that first stick shift experience in a Ferrari. It was the local Ferrari dealer.

  Here’s what happened: When I came home from college after my sophomore year, during the summer of 2008, I didn’t have any sort of job or internship lined up. So I e-mailed a salesperson at my local Ferrari dealership—who I had met during my time as a high-schooler, when I would run around Denver photographing cars while sporting high socks, a huge digital camera, and absolutely no social skills—and I asked him if he knew of anything. Curiously, he responded affirmatively. They must’ve been desperate.

  So desperate, in fact, that they brought me in to interview the next day for a “lot technician” position, which would involve me driving cars around the parking lot when they were in for service and—this is the good part—delivering them to customers. I would be delivering. Exotic cars. To customers. At nineteen years old.

  I’ll never forget this interview, because it was with the service manager, and he asked me about six questions, two of which were “When can you start?”, and “Is $15 an hour OK?” At the time, $15 an hour was more than OK. I had never earned $15 an hour in my entire life, and now they were going to pay me that to drive around in exotic cars. I would’ve said yes if he had asked me if I would work for twenty-eight cents an hour, no bathroom breaks, and an occasional stale donut from the gas station mini mart down the street.

  One of his other questions was: How well can you drive a stick shift?

  My answer was: Pretty well, but I’m a little rusty.

  The truth was: I have never driven a stick shift before in my entire life.

  Here’s a tip for all of you exotic car dealer service managers interested in hiring nineteen-year-old kids to drive a
round in six-figure cars belonging to an unending list of celebrities, professional athletes, and local business leaders: Don’t ask the kid if he knows how to drive a stick shift. Make sure the kid knows how to drive a stick shift. Because if you’re telling a kid you’re going to pay him the princely sum of $15 an hour to drive around in Ferraris all day, and the only hurdle is his stick shift driving abilities, trust me when I say he will not cop to any deficiencies. If a prerequisite of this job was that I could only have eight toes, I would’ve broken out a hacksaw right there in the service department.

  So after I informed them that I knew manual “pretty well,” even though my sole previous experience with it was watching my mom drive our stick shift Isuzu Rodeo when I was about nine years old, they hired me right there on the spot. Now I was employed for the summer as an exotic car driver at the Ferrari Bentley Maserati Lotus dealership, with the only slight problem being that I was completely unable to drive the vast majority of cars that came in for service.

  So what does one do when they’ve been hired for the position of “exotic car driver,” but one does not actually know how to drive a manual transmission? One learns. One learns fast.