THE
SHITHOLE
GARAGE

a book of arbitrage


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My first childhood memory of my aunts and uncles in New York is of a family party at my uncle Matt's house, and specifically of a conversation with my uncle Charlie, who was Vice President of Georgetown University at the time. I was perhaps three years old, and eating a slice of watermelon. Watermelons still had seeds at the time, and I had not yet learned to spit out the seeds instead of just eating them along with the rest of the watermelon. Charlie spent a surprising amount of time with me explaining precisely how to spit out the watermelon seeds, something that involved a level of kinesthetic awareness that I did not yet have at that age, and even jokingly told his daughter that she could not go out to play in the backyard until I learned to spit out watermelon seeds. It seemed like an unreasonable contingency to me at the time: I just wanted to eat watermelon. But it today it makes me laugh. There is definitely a lot of subtle awareness - of sound, and feel - that goes into being a good mechanic.

My expertise as a mechanic is specifically in dealing with complex problems on cars with first-generation telematics - primarily the German luxury cars of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Those cars are legendary but have their foibles, and to really work on them effectively, one needs to be not just a good mechanic, but to have a considerable working knowledge of chemistry, physics, and computer programming to be able to understand fully what is going on. Believe it or not, you get quite a lot of computer for your forty or fifty thousand dollar car.

The truth of the matter is that the generation of BMWs I first cut my teeth on superseded a very different philosophy of auto-making at BMW. I particularly like to contrast the E30 3-series to the later E-series cars. The E30 was a cute yuppie-mobile, one of relatively few rear-wheel-drive Euro sports cars available in the American market at the time, and despite not being anywhere as fast as a Porsche 911 from the same time period, it would go ass-end-out every bit as easily around a corner or in the rain as the 911 would. Perhaps even more easily. I often joke that BMW's design philosophy for that car - the E30 - was simple: "Do you have enough money to buy a 5-series? No? Well, we may as well kill you then."

But people love the E30, for reasons that are never clear to me. The Soviet KGB answer to cloning the E30, and they did, was to take the engine and transmission, couple it to a front-wheel-drive setup and put it it in a clone of a four-door Chrysler hatchback body. I owned one in Russia for a short time - a Moskvich 2141. I liked that car; it was a bit rough around the edges but always made total sense to me. One particularly amusing memory I have from the days of my high school parking lot involves the owner of a decrepit old white E30, at a time when I was driving a new silver W203 Mercedes coupé: the E30 owner and I were getting into our cars at the same time as a reasonably attractive blonde was walking by. Ignoring me entirely, she began a conversation with the E30 owner, with exclamations about what a nice and cool car it was. It made me laugh, because not only is the E30 garbage, on purpose - at that time, if you were really going to buy and drive a German car in south Florida, you needed a Mercedes unless you wanted to be beaten to death with maintenance costs and breakdowns in the long run. The old BMWs just weren't engineered to keep up that level of performance in that heat and humidity. They overheat; they blow head gaskets; they run like shit.

The later cars are very different. By the end of the E36 production run, BMW had arrived at a point where a stock American-market E36 328i with a manual transmission could outrun a Porsche Boxster with only minimal modifications to the air intake setup and ECU. By the end of the E46 production, a top-line 330d or M3 with relatively minimal modifications could outrun not just most normally-aspirated Porsche 911 models from the same time period, but those of today as well. And indeed I have outrun drivers of new Porsches on some of the most storied roads of Europe in my old heavily-tuned 330d wagon in impromptu races. It's no joke. It infuriates people, actually. And the funny thing about that car - the E46 3-series - was that the wagon is the version with the best handling. It's perfectly balanced. The sedan, and to a lesser extent, the coupe and convertible, all oversteer, even in the all wheel drive versions. But the wagon, ah, the wagon...

Sadly, you can't drive those cars in Europe any longer for the most part. Emissions restrictions, remote sabotage via telematics, and government inspections keep them off the roads. You can still drive them in the Americas, and indeed people do. But most are now in the sort of condition where owners are wondering what the next step is, and when I lived on Long Island, I used to buy people's problem cars, drive them into the ground, and then scrap them. It gave me great experience as a mechanic, it helped the local BMW community, and at the same time, it fed a very profitable business as a delivery courier, IT consultant, and paralegal for me during the early days of the COVID pandemic.

In essence, this is all about spitting out the watermelon seeds. Cars wear out - and they don't just rust and corrode; the metal itself, and even more so the fasteners between components, weaken from constant torsional stress, the bending and flexing that occurs unavoidably during use. No car with 150000 miles or more on the odometer, no matter how well kept, is the same car it was on the showroom floor in terms of its driving characteristics. Mechanics will replace parts for as long as you're willing to pay them, and idiots will sit around and haggle with you about selling your car to part it out or do God knows whatever else. But a lot of times, the right answer is to spit out the watermelon seeds: you probably ate the fruit already. So, at The Shithole Garage (thanks, Donald Trump) you can plug a cheap, generic OBD2 cable into your USB port anywhere on the planet, connect to a remote machine that I host, and you'll have access to factory diagnostic tools that will help to provide more context for the problem. Then, you get a call with me to discuss what's wrong with your car and what to do next.

If your car isn't worth saving, you get to decide: do you want some dumb gangster trying to ride around in your car a bit longer, or do you want to scrap it? I recommend the latter: it's good for the environment. And we can help get your car to a trusted vehicle recycling partner who will give you the best possible price, as well as the assurance that your vehicle will be securely destroyed and never put back on the road. Availability of recycled metals in the marketplace keeps manufacturing costs low and reduces the need for mining, and taking older, less fuel-efficient, and higher-polluting vehicles off the road slows climate change. Keep the gangsters on the bus and let your old car make the world a better place at The Shithole Garage.


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