In the city of San Francisco, street parking is notoriously difficult. Depending on where you are, it can be a fight with cones and street-cleaning musical chairs. What did you expect to happen when seemingly each house has multiple cars? Never mind the fact the actual garages are never used for vehicle storage.
For the car enthusiast lacking in a house and a garage, we are at the mercy of the parking gods. You think twice about taking the car out for a drive, because when you come back from that leisurely blast in the mountains, the next available parking spot might be the next street over. The ardent enthusiast would be highly stressed knowing their beloved machine is parked blocks away, opened to all sorts of unseen treachery.
It only takes one careless commuter to parallel park using the braille technique for your car’s bumper to be ruined forever.
This constant worry about the well-being of our cars is the curse of our enthusiasm. The general public would not waste brain cells on finding the perfect parking spot away from everybody else at a Costco. Spaces that would otherwise fit your car just fine are eliminated from contention because the vehicle adjacent gives off bad vibes (calling all Nissan Altima and Dodge Charger owners). A particularly gusty day will have you worried about the neighbor’s garbage bins being blown into your precious metal.
The solution to all of this stress is to have a garage. You absolutely know your pride-and-joy is safe, short of the ceiling collapsing. Lacking the income to afford a house here in San Francisco, the peasant-class car enthusiast (that’s me) can rent a garage space for about $300 per month. My brother does exactly this, because he can’t bear to have his Lotus Elise be exposed to the elements, natural or human.
I think that crosses into the threshold of the things you own end up owning you. The must-spend portion of car ownership – payment, insurance, gas – is only ever getting more expensive. To voluntarily add on top of those costs a few hundred dollars (to rent a garage) a month simply for peace of mind? That’s a tricky proposition to consider. There’s only so many hours in an adult week to dedicate to this car hobby. Those of us in the peasant class ought to seriously calculate the return on the money we spend on car ownership. The proportion to our disposable income is already high enough!
Partly why I sold the GT3 is because the thousands in spend to keep it around every month was no longer worth the mere hours of fun I get to enjoy every week.
I am lucky with the M2 in that I rent in an area where street parking is not competitive at all. Even when my preferred spot is taken by someone, there’s more parking literally feet away. The paucity of street-parked cars in our neighborhood is a huge contributor to the M2 still having pristine bumpers after nearly five years of ownership. Of course, I’ve just jinxed it.
It definitely gets less stressful the further I am way from the initial purchase date. Even non enthusiasts have suffered from caring way too much about their new cars. It makes sense: after the second largest purchase in a person’s life, you naturally want to preserve that perfection for as long as possible. That first touch of curb on a wheel is quite the dagger. My cousin was overly stressing when a tire shop scratched one of the wheels on his brand-new Subaru Outback. A year from now, he would not even remember or care.
I wish I can say I don’t care about the condition of my five-year old M2. There are enough (tiny) blemishes on the car for me to not fret about the next one. But for one problem: the value of this model of M2 Competition remains stubbornly high. In the five years and 21,000 or so miles I’ve put on the BMW, it’s only lost about 15% of its initial purchase price in value.
This is both good news and bad news. The obvious positive is that if I choose to sell the (paid off) M2, I get a healthy chunk of money back to me. There’s a subset of car buyers for whom low depreciation is important. I never understood it because depreciation only matters if and when you sell a car. (Much like appreciation on a house is only salient if and when you sell.) Who cares about the car’s value if the plan is to own it until the mechanicals fail?
I’ve a friend who on paper has lost a metric ton of money on his early Tesla Model S Plaid purchase. But that matters nil because he has no plans to sell it. Depreciation only matters for the person who serially swaps car every few years, or treat vehicles as a store of money. (I guess most car enthusiasts would fall into that category.)
Because my M2 remains highly worth something (on paper), it creates a nagging nanny at the back of my mind. Every action with the car has to keep in focus of maintaining its value. The aforementioned pristine bumpers must remain so. Better stake out the parking situation before deciding to go somewhere!
This would of course be moot if I simply decide to keep the M2 forever. But at this very moment, I cannot make that commitment.
The negative to the BMW keeping its value is that insurance costs remain high. I can’t forgo collision insurance because the replacement value remains way higher than what I can afford to self-insure. The bill came due in April for the next six months renewal, and it was hefty indeed. Even considering the recent inflation of everything, it feels like I am still paying teenage male insurance prices, though I am merely years away from the other side of 40.
The M2 did very little miles during the month April, principally because I was out of the country on vacation for two weeks. I have to say that in these uncertain times with tariffs happening and un-happening at the whim of the American President, the best position to be right now is to have a paid-off car that needs very little in maintenance. Outside of petrol and insurance, I don’t have to worry about additional costs for the M2 until September of next year. Peace of mind, indeed.
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Date acquired: October 2020
Total mileage: 21,381
Mileage this month: 76
Costs this month: $1,419 (insurance renewal)
MPG this month: 19