Option Two: A Surprisingly Affordable Porsche.

“Porsches are driven exclusively by wankers.” It’s a common refrain, and one I tend to agree with. I know every time I see a Porsche in traffic and I catch a look at the driver, I sneer and think to myself: “what a wanker!”

But, see, my motivation – aside from the fact that the guy always, without fail, looks like a wanker – is mostly jealousy. I don’t imagine there’s anyone on the planet who I would not label a wanker, if seen behind the wheel of a Porsche. They may be fine, upstanding pillars of the community; the guy with the expensive sunglasses and an ill-concealed smug look on his mug may well be a loving family man, a contributor to charities, an owner of fluffy puppies and adorable kittens, etc etc. Put him in a Porsche: he’s a wanker.

I wish I could be a wanker.

Porsches are highly regarded and waxed-lyrically for a reason: they are awesome. Their seminal model, the 911 Carrera, is a million times better than it really ought to be. Its engine hangs way out back, almost entirely behind the rear axle line, and by rights it ought to be pure evil to drive – and the older ones were exactly that. With little weight up front and everything hanging over the driven rear wheels, it would turn into corners like magic and put its grunt down in miraculous fashion, egging you on, making you feel like a hero, not believing but absolutely revelling in the sheer speed and unadulterated joy of driving on offer… right up to the point where you decided you were going a bit too fast in that corner and it was time to lift off the power, whereupon physics would take over, the rear end of the car would overtake the front end, and that great heavy engine in the back of your Porker would drag you backwards off the road and, more often than not, to your fiery agonising death.

That was back in the day, when real men drove Porsches and poseurs crashed Porsches. Now, after forty years of building Carreras with all their weight hanging beyond their bum, they’ve somehow managed to train the thing to do all the magic stuff – grip, turn in, power out and talk to the driver like nothing else – and NOT kill you if you forgot where the engine was mid-corner. An awesome achievement, and rightly deserving of every plaudit Porsche have received.

All of this is well and good, but doesn’t seem to have much bearing on our discussion here. Blog topic: what car should I buy. My price point is around $20k, remember? I’d be surprised if there’s any 911 Carrera out there, of any age, available for anything approaching $20k – at least, none with four wheels and an engine. There’s plenty of old, dragged-their-drivers-arse-first-to-oblivion wrecks that can be had for, say, the price of a small Hyundai. But they hold limited appeal to yours truly, who’s looking for something to drive, not rebuild from a pile of burnt ashes.

Porsche did build other cars aside from the rear-engined 911. There were a variety of front-engined 924s and 928s from the seventies and eighties that ranged from marginally woeful to surprisingly good, which may now be had for plebeian money. But I’ve no interest in them.

Those cars grew up into something called a 968, or something like that, which were built up until the mid-nineties and, well, there’s not much appeal in them. A quick search of carsales.com.au suggests the majority have been converted into club racers, which is not what I’m looking for – if some humpty’s been racing it, chances are that humpty crashed it, or skimped on its maintenance, or otherwise bounced it mercilessly around and between racetracks with a total lack of mechanical sympathy. If it’s got drill holes in the roof and floor, it used to have a roll cage, and that’s where I walk away.

Then, in 1997, Porsche came out with the Boxster. Much like they probably did with the 92-model Porsches, many purists derided the Boxster as “not a real Porsche”. Perhaps with the 92-cars they had a point – apparently they were based on a platform shared with Volkswagen, and the 924 even came with the same watery VW inline-four-cylinder engine (Sacrilege! Heretics! and so forth). And for a long time I turned my nose up at the Boxster too; with the original model’s skinny tyres, diminutive pinched hips and me-too fried-egg headlights that mirrored the 911 of the time, I dismissed it as a mere “hairdresser’s car”, a Porsche bought by a poor man who could not afford a 911.

Some years later, in fact only a week or two ago, it finally occurred to me: as a matter of fact, I am a poor man who cannot afford a 911… and good old carsales.com.au reveals the oldest Boxsters are starting at a very appealing $19k. How about that?

The Boxster isn’t actually all that bad. In fact, it’s rather good. The original 1997 “986” series came with a real Porsche-like engine: a flat-six (also referred to as a “boxer” engine, as two rows of three cylinders are laid flat such that the cylinders fire towards each other, as though they were “boxing”) of a not-inconsequential 2.5L displacement, putting out a highly respectable 150kW and 260Nm in a little bitty body weighing only 1250kg. With your average new-model Ford Focus pushing the scales towards 1400kg, that’s quite good – and our Boxster makes a fair fist of things, with quoted acceleration from rest to a hundred clicks of 6.9 seconds. So far’s I’m concerned, if a car can do the standard metric sprint in less than seven seconds, then it’s plenty quick.

Is it a decent steer? Or is it a murderous little slice of evil, forever plotting your untimely demise a la the early-model Carrera? Well sir, the Boxster is a mid-engined car, meaning the weight of the engine is contained entirely between the two axles – the format preferred by Ferrari, McLaren, Lamborghini, and other esteemed makers of wickedly fast cars. And if I wrack my brain, I remember reading in Wheels magazine way back in 1997 when a well-respected Aussie motoring journo, name of Peter Robinson, test-drove a Boxster for the first time and came away declaring it to be the finest handling piece of automotive machinery he had ever had the pleasure to steer. Not exactly faint praise, there.

Imagine it: all the clarity and purity of steering feel, turn-in and car placement as offered by the Carrera. But instead of several hundred kilos of steel and fluids sitting well astern of the rear axle, forever trying to give car and driver a pine tree enema, it’s sited right behind the driver and applying its inertial forces more or less equally to all four tyres. Add its lesser overall weight, the typical tactile delights of a Porsche clutch and gearbox, and that unique sound of a flat six at full song… I’ve never driven one, but I tell you: I can’t wait to try.

Misgivings about purchasing a fourteen-year-old European sports car? All the usual misgivings over the thought of purchasing a fourteen-year-old car – who owned it, how did they treat it, what’s let go over the years, what’s about to let go, etc. Plus the usual misgivings over purchasing a European car: quality control never as assured as a Japanese car, hideously large costs for even the most mundane servicing items, etc etc. Plus the usual misgivings over purchasing a sports car: further heightening of service costs and replacement of consumables, the likelihood of the thing having been thrashed or crashed by a former owner, the increased importance of a decent service history linked to the increased scale of catastrophe should even one service have been delayed or missed, etc etc etc. Add on to all of this, the fact that the Boxster doesn’t actually have a removable engine cover: save for some oil and fluid access ports in the back of the car, the only way you can actually get at the engine for even a routine service activity is to jack the car up and drop the engine down on a sling. So I’ve read somewhere. I find that incredible, to be honest, but stranger things have happened in this world.

So then: if the positives may be judged to outweigh the risks, perhaps it might be a twenty thousand dollar Porsche for sir. Whodathunkit? Certainly not me, at least, not until a couple weeks ago. That’s the best thing about life – stick around for long enough, the surprises just keep getting better.

Tres profound, no?

Option One: A Big Bad Ute.

Okay, first up: “option one” really, seriously does not mean it’s top of my list. I don’t know what’s top of my list. I’m truly so paralysed by the proliferation of possibilities, I could not quote my most likely purchase even at the point of a gun.

Secondly: I am sure there are people out there groaning and thinking, “not a ute!” A bogan’s chariot, did I hear you say? Surely this guy isn’t one of those knuckle-dragging, B&S-attending, straw-chewing country bumpkins who think a fast ute is the be-all and end-all of automotive couture?

No I am not, is the reply. And yet…

I don’t know what it is, or why it is. Perhaps it’s because I’m a young(ish) Aussie male. Perhaps there’s something in my cultural DNA – something in all of us – that is pre-programmed to desire a big bad ute. I’m not proud of it; in fact, I have fought the urge, I have denied it and derided it and sought to overcome it.

I remember when Holden released the VU-model ute back in, um, 1999 or some similar. I was a savvy and cynical teen back then; I thought myself cultured and discerning, not a snob but better than a philistine, at least.

So Holden comes out with a TV ad campaign, where a young farmer-type lad with a grim set to his face runs the dust of a dead paddock through his fingers. Then he turns to look at his shiny new Holden ute, and a smile forms… shortly thereafter he’s doing doughies, V8 on-song, Acca Dacca belting out “THUNDERSTRUCK” in the background as he whips the elements into a fury, creates a tornado via the very violence of his circle-work, which in turn pulls great fat rain drops out of the sky and brings nourishment and sustenance back to the land. (And the tornado leaves his farm unmolested, probably heading off down the road to molest some unsuspecting Ford-owner’s cattle run. Or at least we’re left to presume as much, they only had thirty seconds and the ultimate fate of the tornado was not the crux of the issue.)

First time I saw that ad, with my sophisticated, Wheels-mag reading, Cointreau-quaffing, letter-to-the-editor, Khachaturian-appreciating hipster underground ways, I thought “bah! Stuff and humbug! What sort of degenerate bogan creature are they trying to appeal to? I am offended to the utmost. As if you’d want a ute…”

Weeks go by. I see the ad again, and again. The lilting peels of Angus Young’s famous riff, the snarl of the V8, the glint of the tornado-filtered sunlight on the tiger-orange mica of the feminine, voluptuous, near-sexy curves of the VU model ute… it all soaked into my mind, sat and stewed and fomented until suddenly and unexpectedly, something in my brain went SNAP and I heard myself say “bugger. I want a ute!”

And I still do. And I can’t explain it any better than that.

So then: an analysis of the sub-set that defines a big bad ute. Holden had it nice to themselves for a while via the VU and VX SS-model utes, I never liked the look of Ford’s unloved AU, much less the goggle-eyed XR8s -- I simply couldn’t bring myself to look upon one of those every day. Except with twenty-large to spend sometime in 2012 or 2013, those models will be a bit long in the tooth, so we’ll strike them off.

VY or VZ Commodore? I was appalled at the time when Holden grafted hard, rectangular headlights onto their curvy and buxom Commodore, and I’m still not much a fan. Though when the VZ 2006 model came out, they had to retire the old 5.7 litre Gen-III engine due to emission regulations, installing the 6.0 litre Gen-IV into the relatively light confines of the same VZ body.

By all accounts, any VZ with the Gen-IV mill was an absolute rip-snorter of a drive. The bottom-end torquelessness of the Gen-III was banished forever, creating a car that could shame many an HSV only two or three years older. This apparent awesomeness is enough for me to forgive the shortcomings of the square-edged botch-job that is the headlights, which rests easier on the flat-decked Ute than the otherwise curvaceous sedan anyway, so I’d be plenty happy to own such a car. A quick search of Carpoint reveals this model can be had today for between $21k and $23k, suggesting it will fall nicely into my $20k bracket in a couple years’ time.

A happy alternative: Ford’s Falcon Ute, XR6 Turbo please. The XR8 was heavier, slower and thirstier, and I am hardly a “V8 or death!” kind of guy. Thing about this car, it looked little different from going on sale in 2002 as a BA model through to its final iteration as a BF Series II in 2008; that, plus there being little done to its driveline besides an upgrade to a six-speed manual with the BA Series 2 in 2005, means that the choices are many. Finding one at my price point will be a cinch.

Comparing the two? Both have gloriously powerful motors, and both can freely be had with three pedals and a six-speed gearbox; each are so close in that regards that I’d be happy either way. The major difference for me, however, is the rear suspension. Holden put independent rear suspension into their ute, which makes for a significantly improved ride-handling setup than the Falcon’s old-as-the-hills cart-spring design. While the Falcon is known, especially in my own experience, to have sweeter steering than any Commodore, the combination of a leaf-sprung rear end with prodigious turbo-charged power makes it less appealing. It could certainly be lived with – my previous work car was a Falcon Forte AU II with LPG, and I grew up in an ex-police Commodore VS Executive, both of which were leaf-suspended at the rear yet here I am, alive to tell the tale. But when it comes to choosing a car with performance aspirations, well, IRS would be nice.

It’s not all plain-sailing for the independently-sprung Holden, though. They cribbed their suspension design from a 1978 Opel, which was never intended to support 1800-odd kilos and control 300-odd horsepower. I know the original VU ute had the two-link design, same as the VT sedan and wagon; and while I know the VX Series II sedan received the three-link update which dramatically improved rear-end control and grip, and mostly wiped out the weird-Harold tyre wearing patterns of the earlier twin-linked Commos, I don’t think the Ute was ever upgraded to a three-link design, nor the wagon or the Statey of the time. Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong. I’d be very happy if I’m wrong in this regard – if the VX II-onwards SS ute has three links in its suspension, I’ll do backflips of joy.

Meanwhile, the cart-sprung design that Ford persists with, even to this day in their Ute (and the current-model Mustang!), has its advantages. It’s a lot lighter to begin with, and its design is such that it limits toe- and camber-change under load and power; that’s why all your Hilux-type work utes are leaf-sprung, and also why the Ford Mustang (and Chevy’s Corvette, would you believe?) are leaf-sprung as well. Don’t be fooled into thinking the Falcon’s a better load-lugger though; by dint of being lowered and sporty, the XR6’s payload capacity is in fact a little bit worse than the SS ute. I can’t quote the numbers off the top of my head, because I care not a fig for payload statistics – I intend to haul nothing heavier than arse, should I go ahead and get a ute.

So there are arguments either way, some in favour of SS, some in favour of XR6 Turbo. Only one way I can think of to resolve the issue: best to grab a prime example of each, find a good twisty byway, and let them loose. Who was it that said, there’s no better judge than the seat of thine own pants? Liberace, probably. Now there’s a man who appreciated a good set of cart-springs.

Introduction: What car should I buy?

“What car should I buy next?”

That, right there, is the question that occupies about 99% of my idle time.

It’s perhaps not the most crucial question in the world. Probably not worthy of too much cognitive energy. People out there must surely have more pressing, more essential concerns: “Where is my next meal coming from?” or “How am I going to keep a roof over my family’s heads?” or “Why is this tiger chasing me, and what can I do to make it go away?”

Sure, fine, they have real problems. Fortunately, at the moment I am unaffected by such troubles. Perhaps as a result of as much, in combination with the fact I am a hopeless car nut beyond reprieve or redemption, the title of this blog is what I mull upon, minute to minute, hour to hour, day week and month.

The purpose of this blog? To put my whirring, buzzing, overlapping and intertwining automotive musings down in some semblance of order, all the better for making some sense out of it – and possibly, to rouse some comment and discussion from other like-minded auto-tragics on my various choices, opinions and musings.

So here’s my situation. I’m late-twenties-to-early-thirties, married with three children, and the kids are all still in car-seats. We own a 2006 Holden Commodore Omega sedan, which I bought last September for $14,250 at 51,000kms – pretty good buy, even though it had just fallen out of rego, and it came in burgundy – my least-favourite colour on a car. Burgundy, people? Really?

In addition, my boss has furnished me with a 2005 Ford Falcon XT, petrol not LPG, which is getting on at around 170,000kms but is still a nice drive and – most importantly – comes with free petrol, servicing and consumables. Nothing like a free set of wheels, eh?

I was quite surprised by how nice the Falcon is. It’s nothing special compared to others of its like: standard suspension, usual tyres on steel wheels with plastics covers, nothing different under the bonnet. But the thing comes together into something quite fun: it has enough lazy bottom-end to waft it to speed quicker than is necessary, it grips like billy-o with a surprising lack of roll, it turns in and steers with deftness and confidence, and what I like best about it: it talks to me. At all times, by the feel of the controls, by the sound of the tyres and the sensations transmitted via the seat of my pants (quell your scoffing, those in the back rows), I know at all times what the car is about to do should I turn it in tighter, or goose the gas, or dab the brakes – all whether the road is wet or dry, be it day or night, whether the pace is hot or not. That’s what a good car does, and Ford have my respect for being able to serve it up in a fleet-pack baseline car. Well done, chaps.

The Commodore, meanwhile, was not what I really wanted to buy. In fact, I sold a very nice 2007 Ford Focus XR5 Turbo to get the Commodore – an awesome car, but unable to fit three baby seats plus prams and other domestic what-have-yous, which became a factor with our third child on the way. Basically I had a budget of approx. $15k and I needed a car with space, relative frugality and easy servicing, a high number of airbags and electronic stability control as standard – which really only boiled down to one possible choice, the Commodore. The Ford Falcons of that era and price range did not come with stability control, plus its back seat is unaccountably narrow in comparison to the Commodore; and the Ford Territory, which the missus was dead keen on getting, cost several thousand dollars more for even a high-mileage beater, plus its listed consumption is worse than some V8s.

I didn’t have to get a Commodore, not strictly, anyways. I had toyed with the idea of maybe getting a 2001 Calais International with a V8, big wheels and lowered suspension, but honestly: the missus drives the car 90% of the time, and 90% of that is driven round town. The advantages of owning a nice big V8 were outweighed by the gallons it would drink, and the fact that I’d rarely get to drive it; and anyway, the 2006 VE body is significantly stronger and safer than the 2001 Commodore, which itself is really a 1994 Vauxhall Omega with a badly-done stretch job. When the car’s got the loved-ones in it more often than not, a snarly V8 takes a back seat to safety, so to speak (though the image of a Commodore with its engine relocated to the back seat is quite entertaining. Mid-engined Commodore for the win!). Thus: bog-stock burgundy Dunnydoor it was.

So, yes, we’ve already got a perfectly adequate family car which will do us good for a few years to come. And, yes, I’ve already got a work car which is a plenty sweet steer and, better yet, costs me nothing. So why should I be burning so much of my precious time on thoughts of acquiring yet another set of wheels?

Well: because I want another set of wheels.

And not just any set of wheels. With a nice, safe, responsible family car and a nice, safe, responsible and cost-free work car, I am suddenly freed of many constraints.

Does it have to be big and sturdy, to fit a young and growing family? Nope.

Does it have to be rough and tough, able to withstand the rigours of my weekly commute and dirty highway-construction job site? Nope.

Can it be small, fun, light and fast – to the point of being irresponsibly and unnecessarily so? Yes, yes it can.

Or: can it be big, bad, beastly and blokey – to the point of being needlessly and recklessly so? Yes, yes it can.

Can it be all of the above? Well that would be nice…

And therein lays the rub. Constrained only by budget – which, hovering at or around $20k may seem restrictive, until we consider that I won’t be ready to buy for approximately eighteen to twenty-four months or so – the list of possibilities is long, varied, and growing. The list is obviously what forms the backbone of this blog; you’ll find links to each ‘automotive musing’ on the side of this page, presented in no particular order of preference or likeliness-to-buy. Please do check back from time to time, and forever and always: drop a comment, thought or suggestion at any and every opportunity. I am always keen for feedback, and I would love to share in the similar ponderings of a fellow auto-tragic. Surely I’m not the only one…