Former Drummer Knob wrote to me, enclosing a listing for a house in Plano, and mischievously asked: “It’s in your neighborhood. Would you buy it?”
I have no idea why Knob would be looking at a house in Plano (from his penthouse in Monaco), but whatever. I’ve shared the link but by the time this is posted, it will probably already have been sold — houses in the swanky Willow Bend neighborhood seldom last long on the market. Still, it provoked a train of thought in me because, unusually for a house in the $2.5 million range in that area, it had four garages (most have only two or three).
You can probably guess where this is taking us, because I’m a total slut when it comes to cars and my likes and loves change quite promiscuously depending on what I happen to be looking at.
Nevertheless, I’m currently locked on a mindset which asks the question: “If I wanted to escape the modern trend in cars of electronic everything, basically a four-wheeled laptop which has the added benefit of spying on your every move, would I be prepared to sacrifice some of the modern characteristics, e.g. reliability or handling, for that freedom?”
And the answer is, “Yes. But I’d have to have backup.”
It’s no good having a car you love and adore when it’s in the mechanic’s hands and you need to make a grocery- or liquor store run. One funny guy remarked on these very pages that if you collect vintage cars, you actually need more than one, for this precise reason. (“Two is one and one is none… actually, sometimes even three is none.”)
But a 4-car garage certainly gives you the opportunity to indulge yourself.
So here’s my current list — for some reason I’m on a British kick at the moment, so a couple may be familiar from recent posts — of three desirable beauties that would make parts of me throb every time I opened the garage door:
1966 Austin Healey Mk III
1956 Jaguar XK140
!968 Jag E-type Series 2
Alert Readers will notice some similarities: stick shift, wooden dashboard, leather seats etc.
“But Kim,” I hear, “didn’t you say you had a four-car garage available at your lottery-winning house in Plano?”
Indeed I did. But given the history of the above three when it comes to reliability, I would have to have a car that would be absolutely guaranteed to start every time I turned the key, and for that, I’m afraid I’d have to forsake British cars because
Yup, I’d have to go Japanese if I wanted a supremely-reliable sports car. And here it is:
1999 Acura (Honda) NSX
All the performance I’d ever need, matchless reliability, and as befitting its relative modernity, in crass shouty-yellow. Also with a stick shift, of course.
But I know that some people are going to laugh at my fondness for old British cars, so next week I’ll go all-European, applying the same criteria for my selections.
