Bumper to Bumper

by Doug DeMuro

  That’s right: my Aston Martin has already broken down. And not only did it break down, but it left me stranded at 5th and Market Streets in Philadelphia—one block from Independence Hall, where our founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, freeing Americans from the overbearing tentacles of the British.

  Maybe those guys had the right idea.

  But before we get into the latest problem—namely, that my car sounded like a tropical bird in distress—let’s go back and cover the issues I was having last week: water leaking into the passenger side floor mat and a check engine light. As it turned out, the water was a simple fix that merely required un-clogging an air conditioning channel. But the check engine light alerted my dealership to a failed thermostat. A seven-hundred and thirty-eight dollar failed thermostat. The result is that my warranty had already paid for 20 percent of itself in the first week.

  And that brings us to week two.

  On Saturday afternoon, my friend Mark came over to check out the car and have lunch. This should’ve been a simple occurrence: first, we would drive the car. Then, we would eat pizza. My stomach was excited all morning.

  An hour later, I was sitting in the passenger seat of his BMW Z4, driving behind a Triple-A tow truck over the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge into New Jersey. There would be no checking out the car. There wouldn’t even be pizza.

  A few seconds after we left my garage, it became immediately clear something was very wrong. The car was making an almost unbelievable noise: a combination of metal-on-metal clanging and a high-pitched squealing noise in a vocal range traditionally reserved for dying animals and people on American Idol who cry when they aren’t chosen.

  You can hear the sound if you watch my video on this topic, because I recorded a clip before the car went on the flatbed. Unfortunately, I was unable to record the sound at higher speeds, when it was really loud, although I have provided a sufficient re-enactment in the video. You’re welcome.

  Interestingly, the sound seemed to be happening regardless of the car’s speed or direction of travel. It happened when I slowed down. SCREEEEEEECH. It happened when I sped up. SCREEEEECH. It happened when I went backwards, or forwards, or even just turned the steering wheel. And it was clearly coming from the wheel on the front passenger side. SCREEEEEECH. SCREEEEEECH. SCREEEEEEECH.

  At first, Mark and I assumed it was a rock that had somehow gotten stuck in the brakes—so I drove the car for a few seconds to try and jar it loose. SCREEEEEECH. Sometimes, the sound would go away, only to come back moments later. SCREEEEEEEEECH. Eventually, it was so deafening that I retreated into an alley, parked the car, and called for a tow truck. The noise was so loud that it sounded like the front axle had been entirely removed, and the car had become a wheelbarrow someone was attempting to push without first picking it up.

  Believe it or not, I wasn’t too disappointed that we had to flatbed the car to the dealership, because the screeching sound wasn’t the car’s only issue. You see, I picked up the car on Wednesday, January 6, after they fixed the problem causing the last check engine light. By Thursday, January 7, a new check engine light had already appeared, and I made a new appointment to bring it in a few days later. I just wasn’t expecting to be back at the dealer so soon … especially in the passenger seat of a BMW Z4.

  After only a short wait, the tow truck came. The driver backed up his truck to the front of the Aston and got out. We introduced ourselves, we shook hands, and then he asked me a very surprising question:

  “Don’t you have a Skyline?”

  Apparently, the tow truck driver had seen my videos. And as I was standing there, looking at my broken new car—now on its second dealer visit in two weeks—all I could think was: I WISH I still had my Skyline. My reliable, trouble-free Skyline that never once sounded like it was trying to birth an alien through its front brake caliper.

  Although the dealer has not yet solved the car’s latest issues, I’ve already drawn a little conclusion based on my experiences so far. As of today, I have now been home in Philadelphia fourteen total days since I bought my Aston Martin. Of those days, the car has been in my garage a mere five of them. Perhaps this is the strategy with Aston’s “unlimited mileage” warranty: the miles are indeed unlimited. But the days you get to actually drive your car … that’s where they get you.

  The Scariest Thing about the Hellcat Is the Third Owner

  Originally published on Jalopnik—December 1, 2015

  I have decided today to address one of the most serious issues currently threatening our great nation. I am not talking about murder. I am also not talking about gun violence, or terrorism, or even people who board airplanes with nothing to read. No, no: I am referring to the third owner of the Dodge Hellcat.

  For those of you who don’t know what the Hellcat is, please allow me to provide the following background: it is a 700-horsepower rental car. Do you know that Dodge Charger you rented a few months ago? When you landed in Dallas? And they were out of midsize sedans? And you couldn’t figure out why it smelled so bad? And the interior was made out of the same quality plastic they use for a Parmesan cheese container? Well, imagine that thing with more power than a Ferrari Enzo. That’s a Hellcat.

  At the moment, they sell the Hellcat in two varieties. There is the Dodge Challenger Hellcat, which is a rather large two-door vehicle. And there is a Dodge Charger Hellcat, which is a rather large four-door vehicle. Reportedly they will soon be making a Hellcat version of the Jeep Grand Cherokee, which will serve as the primary example for at least the next decade when people in other countries discuss American excess.

  Now, if you’re interested in cars, all of this probably seems pretty cool. Classic Dodge design. Rear-wheel drive. Seven hundred tire-smokin’ horsepower. So how could this possibly be a problem?!

  Well, I’ll tell you why it’s a problem: because of the third owner.

  You see, the first owner of the Hellcat is going to be a pretty careful, cautious, reasonable guy. The car’s price tag ensures that: most Hellcats cost somewhere in the $70,000-plus range, which is right in the heart of “careful, cautious, reasonable guy” territory. If you’re spending seventy grand on a car, you’ve probably been around enough attorneys in your life to know that the guy with the 700-horsepower car is the first person to get sued after an accident, even if the accident involved an industrial forklift and the 700-horsepower car was parked four blocks away. So you’re careful.

  But I suspect most first owners won’t keep their Hellcats very long. This is due to the time-honored societal law that states, in no uncertain terms: Rich people get bored quickly. The Hellcat is the hot car your average rich car enthusiast wants right now, but next year he’ll want something else, then something else, and eventually he’ll get a divorce because his wife caught him cheating with a woman whose skin has the same orange hue as Donald Trump’s hair.

  For proof of this theory, think about other “hot” cars over the last few years: the 2004 Lamborghini Gallardo. The 2008 Audi R8. The 2009 Nissan GT-R. How many of those are still with their first owners? The answer is none: they’ve all gone through at least one eBay auction where the seller has used more exclamation points than a Hallelujah-filled gospel song.

  And so, the responsibility of Hellcat preservation falls on the second owner. The second owner is different from the first owner in the sense that he didn’t buy the Hellcat because it was the latest and greatest thing. He bought it because he lusted after it from the moment it came out—he just couldn’t afford it right away. So he buys the thing when it’s one or two years old, somewhere in the fifty or sixty grand range, and he cherishes it. I mean he cherishes it. To the point where he creates one of those little plaques that he places next to his car when he brings it to cars and coffee.

  But after eight or nine years, the second owner is ready to move on. And that’s when he unleashes the terror of the Hellcat on our society: he sells it to the third owner.

  The third owner will buy a Hellcat ten years from now.
He will be under thirty years old. He’ll look for one with high miles, or a rebuilt title. And he’ll drive the thing like a cocaine fiend playing Mario Kart.

  The problem with the Hellcat’s third owner is that he won’t be as cautious as the first owner, and he won’t be as obsessed with preservation as the second owner. He’ll just want cheap speed, and the Hellcat will provide it.

  Now, if you’re the parent of a young child, this could be a serious problem when your kid grows up. Consider it: when I was twenty, the fastest thing anybody could reasonably afford was a first-generation Cadillac CTS-V, which had 400 horsepower and a gear lever that felt like you were stirring butter with a rope. But if your kid is eight or nine years old right now, he will reach twenty at a time when the 700-horsepower Hellcat is something his friends might be driving. As a parent, this changes your duties: you will have to educate your child about crossing the street, and talking to strangers, and finances, and sex, and friends with Hellcats.

  Now, I admit that we’ve seen this happen before. BMW M3s have gotten cheaper. Porsche 911s have gotten cheaper. Corvettes, and Mustangs, and Camaros have gotten cheaper. But none of these cars offer the sheer speed the Hellcat does; the sheer I just stepped on the pedal and the next thing you know I was on my roof in the swamp performance that you can really only get with a 700-horsepower Chrysler rental car.

  Think of it this way: by 2026, a high-mileage Hellcat will be a sub-$30,000 way to get 700 horsepower; a 200-mph car that no longer requires a professional degree, or an MBA, or a long, successful career, or a profitable startup. All it will require is a promotion to assistant manager of a Pizza Hut.

  May God help us all.

  My Aston Martin Warranty Has Already Paid For Itself

  Originally published on Jalopnik—February 10, 2016

  We all knew it was going to happen. I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon. My Aston Martin warranty has already paid for itself, and the car doesn’t even have a real license plate on it yet.

  Here is the situation. A few weeks ago, I informed you that my Aston had to be towed because it was making a noise like a flock of live parrots going through a meat grinder. This turned out to be exactly what I and many others suspected: there was a small rock caught between the brake rotor and the backing plate, which my dealership removed free of charge. Sounds like no problem, right?

  Only, there was a problem. As I mentioned then, the car also went in to the dealer with its check engine light illuminated. That was the problem.

  The dealer scanned the code and diagnosed the issue as a problem with the car’s timing. Then they spent a few days trying to figure out what was causing the problem, only to reach a rather unsettling conclusion: to fix it, they would have to get into the engine, remove the timing chain, and replace the variable valve timing unit. Interestingly, the variable valve timing unit itself is a cheap part—but as you can imagine, “remove the timing chain” is Aston Martin dealer lingo for “you’re about to spend more on this repair than a Craiglist Miata.”

  When the job was done, I asked how much it would’ve cost if I didn’t have my $3,800 certified pre-owned warranty. The answer? $4,409.

  Yes, that’s right: four thousand four hundred and nine dollars. Removal of the timing chain. This is the moment you remember that your beautiful, exciting exotic sports car is, at its core, a hand-built automobile manufactured in England by two blokes who use rhyming slang to insult football players on the telly.

  For those of you keeping score at home, you can add this latest $4,409 repair bill to my first issue—$738 for a new thermostat, which failed the second time I ever drove the car—to reach a grand total of $5,147 in warranty repairs so far. Bear in mind that that I’ve only had the car for a mere 54 days, and I’ve only driven it about 900 miles. This is not a good start, considering that I plan to own it for another 300 days and drive it another 19,000 miles.

  And yet, I’m not ready to give up on the Aston yet.

  Over the last six weeks, I’ve received an enormous amount of e-mails from other V8 Vantage owners, and they’ve all said roughly the same thing: their cars are reliable. Yes, there’s an oxygen sensor here, and a thermostat failure there, but generally speaking, they don’t have dramatically more issues than they did with the Porsche they used to have, or the BMW they used to have, or the Audi they used to have. And boy oh boy, does the Aston sound better.

  My dealer echoed this sentiment. My excellent service advisor, Eric, informed me that this was only the second time he has ever seen this $4,400 variable-valve-timing repair in his several years working at the dealership. It was, Eric told me, a very unusual problem.

  So maybe my experience so far is just a fluke. Maybe my car is enduring some growing pains, owing to the fact that it’s being daily driven for the first time in its life. Maybe, just maybe, its troubles are over, and it’s going to spend the next ten months being the Volvo 240 of sports cars, requiring only a periodic oil change, the occasional tire rotation, and a convenient parking spot at the next neighborhood planning committee meeting, where they’re talking about tearing down a dilapidated historic property in favor of a Jamba Juice.

  Yes, this could happen. But let’s just say I won’t be throwing away my warranty paperwork anytime soon.

  I Drove My Aston Martin on a Frozen Lake in Vermont

  Originally published on Jalopnik—February 24, 2016

  For a brief moment there, I felt like James Bond: drifting my Aston Martin with studded tires across a frozen lake. Then I remembered I wasn’t out there chasing down an evil villain or solving a serious crime that put the whole world in danger. I was following a part-time driving instructor named Paul, who was in a ’98 Corolla that had 190,000 miles and dents the size of a desk lamp.

  More importantly, I didn’t have James Bond’s suave, self-assured attitude. Instead, I was convinced that I was going to fall through the ice, and I was going to die, and they wouldn’t find me until the spring, when Bill and Bob’s Vermont Towing would show up at the lake and casually muse about how “Gosh darnit, we haven’t pulled out an Aston Martin before” as they extracted my fish-eaten body from the lake bed.

  Allow me to back up. You may remember last week, when I told you I was going on an 800-mile road trip from Philadelphia to Vermont and back in order to test out my new Nokian Hakkapeliitta 8 tires, which were generously provided to me by the folks at Nokian so I could see how my Aston Martin performed in winter weather.

  So I did that. I drove up to Vermont—350 miles one way—and I met with the excellent team at Nokian’s U.S. headquarters, near Burlington. They were very nice, and they took me on a tour of their facility, and they taught me all about winter tires, and they gave me yummy pastries.

  Then it was off to drive the Aston in the snow. But there was only one problem: there is no snow. And I don’t mean there’s only a little snow, like maybe an inch here or there. I mean that Vermont, Snowy Kingdom of the North, home of polar bears and igloos, land where people ski to work and invite caribous over for drinks, is currently about as dry as a scientific symposium on the hair growth patterns of adolescent tree frogs.

  I was lamenting this lack of snow to a reader named Bill, who I met for dinner after I arrived on Thursday night. “You know,” said Bill, “you ought to take the Aston out on a frozen lake.” I told Bill he was crazy. I’m not driving an automobile on a frozen lake. “No, really,” said Bill. “You should take it out on a frozen lake!” Bill, I repeated. Be reasonable. I’m not driving an Aston Martin on a frozen lake.

  The next morning, I was pulling up to the public boat ramp at Lake Iroquois in Williston, Vermont, which was frozen solid with eight inches of pure ice.

  I’ve never been so scared in my life.

  I was not, however, committing a crime. Over dinner, Bill explained to me that driving on a frozen lake is not only completely legal in Vermont, but commonly done: people do it for fun. People do it because they can. In the winter, they have ice-racing events instead o
f autocrosses. And fishermen take their trucks out on frozen lakes to go ice fishing. Plus, Bill told me, “when a lake in Vermont is frozen over, it’s a public highway.”

  I didn’t believe Bill when he told me this, so I went home and looked it up in the Vermont Driver’s Handbook. It turns out that he’s right: a frozen lake is treated as a public roadway in Vermont, with a speed limit of 50 miles per hour. Imagine getting a citation for speeding while you’re driving on a lake.

  Paul, in his ’98 Corolla, went out first. This was a good idea, because Paul actually knows with he’s doing: a driving instructor and the Sports Car Club of Vermont’s ice-racing guru, Paul had a lot of experience with driving on frozen lakes. He had also created his own studded tires by drilling 150 holes in a standard snow tire, placing bolts in the holes, and sealing them. Paul’s tires were so effective that we later did a drag race with his Corolla against my Aston Martin, and he was three car-lengths ahead before I even got moving.

  When I ambled out on to the ice, I was petrified. You can see in the video just how scared I am, and I wasn’t putting on a show for the camera. I truly and honestly thought that I was going to fall through the ice, and I was going to die of hypothermia like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, and the Chittenden County Coroner was going to put down my cause of death as “stupidity.”