Bumper to Bumper

by Doug DeMuro

  Later, my friend Matt—a Johannesburg resident who I met for a drink—told me a story that perfectly summed up both South Africa’s lack of regulation and how cheap everything is. Bribery is rampant in South Africa, Matt told me—and not “Here I’ll slip you a hundred bucks and maybe I was going 40 miles per hour and not 45” kind of bribery. Although he promised me he’s never done it, Matt said it’s tremendously easy to avoid a DUI charge in South Africa by simply paying off the police officer to the tune of 100 South African rand.

  In U.S. terms … seven dollars.

  In other words: not only can you bribe someone in South Africa to look the other way on a serious offense that could garner jail time in America, but you can do it for the price of a used Cher CD.

  And so, the stage was set a few days later when I arrived at a rural tollbooth riding as a passenger in a bright turquoise 911 Targa with a fellow journalist in the driver’s seat.

  This was quite a sight in South Africa, because a turquoise 911 Targa isn’t the kind of car you usually see driving around the country’s rural areas. The kind of car you usually see in rural South Africa is a 1990s Toyota pickup with thirty-seven people riding in the back, or a 1990s Toyota van with thirty-seven people riding in the back, or a donkey pulling a handmade trailer with thirty-seven people riding in the back. At one point, we encountered a woman balancing a basket on her head—straight out of some colonial-era depiction of Africa, where everyone wears a robe and possesses a spear—who whipped around so quickly when we passed by that it seemed she thought we were driving a UFO. In rural South Africa, we might as well have been.

  So the result is that everyone was staring at us and pointing at us and generally wondering who the hell were these tourists driving a tremendously expensive, bright turquoise sports car through an area that was hoping, someday soon, to get electricity. It didn’t help that we had German license plates and a left-hand drive car in right-hand drive South Africa. This only added to the mystique. Imagine, if you will, you’re walking through Venice and you’re enjoying the canals and you’re photographing the cute gondolas and the charming little water taxis and then some guy passes by in a thirty-seven-foot pontoon boat.

  So anyway, the tollbooth. We had accidentally diverted from the original Porsche-intended route earlier in the day, which meant that we were on a large, wide highway that included two tollbooths. Since this wasn’t in the plan, we didn’t have any South African money, which is sort of a problem when you’re passing through a tollbooth, in the sense that the whole point is, you pay them money and they let you cross.

  So we reached the first tollbooth and we quickly became a little bit of a problem, because we didn’t have any money, and the guy had no interest in letting us pass in spite of the fact that a) we were clearly foreigners, and b) the total cost of the toll was an amount equivalent to—I’m serious—twenty cents.

  After a little arguing, we just asked him to give us a citation, knowing that by the time the South African justice system got around to processing it, we would be back home dealing with another blizzard, probably sometime in the winter of 2021. He refused to do this either. Then we offered him credit cards, none of which worked. (We later found out South Africa has some special tollbooth system that only accepts tollbooth credit cards. You can bribe your way out of a DUI for less than the cost of toothpaste, but they have special tollbooth credit cards.) This left us with only one option: we gave him the smallest U.S. denomination we had, which was a twenty-dollar bill. He refused to provide change. We overpaid the toll by 10,000 percent.

  When we got to the next toll, a few miles down the road, we were absolutely not going to give the guy another twenty-dollar bill just to continue along. This is primarily because we had no idea where these tolls were going to end, and we had a limited supply of twenty-dollar bills. Also, it seemed a bit ridiculous to pay more than you’d spend to bring a tour bus through the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan just to drive approximately four miles to the next tollbooth in rural South Africa, where humans were outnumbered by pronghorns.

  So we pulled up to the next tollbooth and we made the exact same arguments to the tollbooth collector: We’re foreigners. We don’t have any South African rand. Can you let us pass? No. Can you try our credit cards? Sure. But they didn’t work. Can you just write us a citation and we’ll pay it later? No. Then I’d have to bring over an administrator. Whatever that means. So what do you do, we asked, when other people show up to the toll without any money? Has this literally never happened before in the history of South African toll collection? The man laughed. Either he hadn’t understood our question, or he thought we were idiots. Possibly both.

  “What are we supposed to do?” we asked.

  He replied: “Do you have something? Anything?”

  Something? Like a non-money something? That’s all we need to get us through this tollbooth?

  My fellow journalist and I began rooting through the car to find something that this South African tollbooth attendant might feel was valuable enough to let us proceed down the road. She looked into her purse and found a pen. I looked into the glove box and found a bright orange safety vest with a Porsche logo on the packaging. We looked at one another, each holding our respective item. Then we looked back at the toll collector with our meager gifts, assuming that he would begin laughing at our continued idiocy.

  Instead, his eyes lit up.

  He happily accepted the gifts with even more excitement than the previous toll collector had accepted the twenty-dollar bill—even though what we were offering, mind you, was a pen and a road safety vest. He then immediately opened the gate and allowed us to proceed on without any further hassle or encumbrances. Although we didn’t encounter any more tollbooths, we both agreed the next item to go would’ve been the instruction manual for the navigation system. Or, if we had been pulled over for speeding, maybe something seriously valuable. Like a phone charger.

  If there’s a lesson to be learned in the story I’ve just told you, it’s this: no matter where you are in the world, make sure you have some local money with you, just in case you find yourself stuck at a tollbooth. And if you can’t scrounge up a single measly cent, then at least make sure you have alternate forms of currency. You know—like a pen. And a road safety vest.

  The Difficult Experience of Buying My Aston Martin

  I walked into the Aston Martin dealer with a check from my bank. The dealer had the exact Aston Martin I wanted, at the exact price we had agreed on. This should’ve been an easy, simple transaction. Instead, I think I could’ve had an easier time buying black market elephant tusks.

  Allow me to start from the beginning. As many of you know, I’ve recently purchased an Aston Martin to write about for a year, after taking thousands of suggestions from my readers. This makes me almost exactly like James Bond, except that James Bond doesn’t accidentally get salad dressing on his pants when he’s having dinner.

  A couple of days after the suggestions rolled in, I had already decided on an Aston Martin. And a couple of days after that, I had found the one I wanted: a 41,000-mile stick shift coupe at an Aston Martin dealer on the east coast. So I called them, and I negotiated the price, and we decided to split the cost of a new clutch, and we agreed I would pick up the car shortly thereafter. So far, this was an easy situation—like buying a bottle of water, assuming the bottle of water had been hand-built in a factory where the vending machines contain two choices: tea and beer.

  And then I arrived to pick up the car. That’s when things became slightly troublesome, in the same way that watching televised golf is slightly uninteresting.

  The problems started the minute I arrived, when an Aston Martin factory rep, who happened to be there that day, recognized me and asked my salesperson: Is that Doug DeMuro?

  For me, this is a huge problem, because there are generally two possible outcomes if a car dealership discovers who I am. Number one, they might refuse to sell me a car altogether. If I were Aston Martin, I wouldn’
t have wanted to sell Doug DeMuro a ten-year-old Aston Martin with an unlimited mileage warranty. This would be like owning an all-you-can-eat buffet and hosting a luncheon for sumo wrestlers. There is no way you can win. The best you can hope for is that a raging fire destroys everything in the first half-hour.

  Fortunately, this didn’t happen: the dealer found out so late in the process that they didn’t bother to contact Aston’s corporate headquarters, and the sale went through.

  But there’s another possibility, and that is that the dealer might start treating me differently. This happens sometimes: the dealer finds out who I am, they find out about my job, and what I do, and they suddenly get a lottttttt nicer, sort of like when you’re going eighty-three miles per hour in a 55 zone and you realize you’re about to pass an unmarked police car, and suddenly you’re totally content driving the same speed as an airport baggage carousel.

  Having a dealer discover who I am and change their behavior accordingly is something I seriously try to avoid, because writing about a car’s actual, realistic ownership experience is crucial to what I do. If I started writing about how they gave me free donuts, and sold me the car at cost, and hired a dance troupe to sing me Aston Martin-related folk songs, suddenly the experience would become a lot less relatable for the reader who’s thinking that maybe he’s going to buy a used Aston, too.

  But it didn’t matter, because this didn’t happen either. In fact, the dealer didn’t seem to care about who I was, or what I did. They only seemed to care about getting me out of there like they were the Oscars-acceptance-speech-music people, and I was going into my fourth minute of tearfully thanking my mother after winning Best Use of Lettuce in a Silent Film.

  After the Aston Martin rep recognized me, we got down to the business of buying the car. I informed the dealer that I needed a few things before we could go forward, namely service records from the previous owner (“no problem”), navigation discs (“we can give you a set, sure”), and a copy of the full warranty contract (“not an issue”). Then I sat down inside the car with my salesman and he started to go over all the buttons and switches.

  Eventually, we reached the aftermarket iPod connection, which was located in the glove box. Does this work? I asked the salesman. He cheerfully told me that it did, so we plugged in my iPod in an attempt to listen to the soft, soothing sounds of Jimmy Eat World. Twenty minutes later, we were still attempting. Nobody could figure it out. The salesman had no idea. The sales manager had no idea. The dealership’s office manager came out and scrolled through my iPod. The technicians came out of the shop and started pushing buttons. And I was sitting there, certain that I was going to spend the next year being the last remaining human person to buy CDs.

  After fumbling around with the iPod for a while, the salesperson decided the whole system was in fact impossible to figure out, so he assured me they would look into it later. No problem, I told them. I was eager to get in my new Aston Martin and get on the open road, my interior full of wind, my heart full of excitement, my CD changer full of whatever they happened to be selling at Starbucks.

  But before I left, the sales manager pointed out a flaw he had noticed: the rear hatch strut had failed, and he wanted to replace it for me.

  “Here’s what you do,” he said, speaking in the way that virtually all sales managers speak, namely that he may, at any moment, attempt to sell me an extended warranty. “You take the car home today. You enjoy it for a couple months. When it gets really snowy and cold, and you can’t drive it, we’ll pick the car up and we’ll replace the strut. No problem.”

  I decided I wouldn’t bother getting this promise in writing because it seemed so patently ridiculous there was no way they’d ever follow through on it. They would drive to Philadelphia, several hours away, during the snowiest, coldest part of winter, pick up my car on a flatbed, replace my hatch strut for free, and then bring it back? I pictured a full-size, heavy-duty pickup towing an enclosed trailer through a blizzard, being led by highly capable snow dogs whose previous experience involved carrying mail to towns where people have named the local icebergs.

  So with the sale completed, I was done. I shook hands with my salesperson, and then the sales manager, and then, somehow, the subject of government came up. This was an enormous mistake, on the level of when you’re a child and you try to eat a dish towel because you want to know how it tastes.

  “You know what happens when the government shuts down?” asked the sales manager. “Nothing. The government shuts down and everything just continues normally. We don’t need those people.” I quickly surmised that this man probably uses the word “Obummer” in casual conversation. So I chuckled, and I feigned agreement, and then I got the hell out of there about as quickly as one can leave a large, major metropolitan area on the East Coast, which is to say at approximately the same speed as a riding lawn tractor.

  It would be an hour before I realized I had forgotten the service records, the navigation discs, and the copy of the full warranty contract.

  It would be two hours before I realized the car was leaking water into the passenger side footwell.

  So the next morning, I woke up and I sent over a quick e-mail to the dealer. I loved the car and the drive home was great, I told them, but I had forgotten to get all the items they had promised, and also there was water leaking into the passenger side footwell. Maybe, I suggested, you could come pick up the car, fix the water, replace the strut, and then we’re all good?

  To his credit, the sales manager logged off the NObama Web Forums long enough to call me back that afternoon. His suggestion was to take the car to my local dealer, and then my local dealer would fix the issues and bill him for it. What happened to the whole ‘we’ll come pick up the car’ thing? I wondered. It’s better this way, he assured me. And by “better,” he meant: a lot cheaper for him. What about the service records and the navigation discs? I asked. Oh, yeah, he said. I’ll send those right over.

  A week went by. My local dealer fixed the water issue, tracing it back to a simple clogged drain channel when the air conditioning was running. As for the hatch strut, my dealer said they’d need to take the car to a body shop about an hour’s drive away. I declined the repair at the time and said the selling dealer was going to take care of it.

  So the repairs were done—but I still hadn’t received the service records. Or the warranty information. Or the navigation discs. I sent e-mails. I made phone calls. I contacted the sales manager, and got in touch with the finance and insurance manager. Eventually, one service record came, then another, sort of like plane crash debris washing up weeks later on the shore of a remote island. Later, the warranty contract materialized, too. But the navigation discs were still missing, and the original dealer wasn’t exactly beating down my door to come “pick up” the car to fix the hatch strut for free, as they had promised a few weeks earlier.

  Mind you, I had owned the car for about a month now. I still didn’t have all the accompanying information promised by the dealership, and the tailgate still closed directly on your neck whenever you went to retrieve a bag, or a jacket, or my handy Aston Martin umbrella, which the selling dealer had graciously provided me when they sold me the car, apparently in lieu of service records.

  Although I wouldn’t have cared much about any of this stuff if I had been on the purchasing end of a 1997 Hyundai Elantra with a temporary tire, bought from Big Jim’s Guns ‘n’ Wheels, this situation was especially frustrating because this was an Aston Martin! Purchased from an Aston Martin dealer! With an Aston Martin warranty! And I was on e-mail number six asking for ten-year-old navigation discs, which they undoubtedly had no reason to hoard aside from playing Frisbee darts with a giant photo of President Obama up in the break room.

  To the credit of my local dealer, they eventually handled the rear hatch strut, though they remained coy about exactly who paid for it. By the time we fixed it, Aston Martin’s corporate office knew all about me and my car, and I’m not entirely sure if the original
selling dealer ate that cost like they had promised. With that said, it didn’t matter: I could now open the hatch without it crashing down on me like one of those twelve-story apartment buildings in China they constructed in three hours on a Wednesday morning.

  The navigation discs, however, are another story. As I sit here writing this five months after buying the car, I am still without the discs. Admittedly, this shouldn’t be a big issue because the car uses a ten-year-old navigation system that looks like it was designed by the guy who did Ski Free. But I like the navigation system. While I use my phone for actual navigating, like all human beings aside from my parents (who still print out MapQuest directions), I like to have an electronic map on the dashboard in front of me, in case I’m in an unfamiliar area and I want to know what roads are nearby. And now, any time I leave the comfy confines of my northeast navigation disc, I don’t have that capability.

  I also won’t be able to play my iPod, because the selling dealer never did “look into it”—and they never did provide me with any more information on how I might go about using the hookup in the glove box. And so, when I take my Aston on road trips, I will have to drive around aimlessly, lost and scared, comforted only by the same Jimmy Eat World album playing repeatedly in the CD player.