The Zombie Cars That Drive Among Us

Last week, I went into a fair amount of detail about the ins and outs of replacing the cat-back portion of the exhaust in my 2008 Nissan Armada. Although the article was all flanges and nuts and bolts and dollars and cents, there is a philosophical side to the exercise that deserves some scrutiny. So grab a chair while I light my pipe and don my Harris Tweed jacket with the suede elbow patches.

Owning a car is expensive. That goes for any car. As the old adage goes, “You can pay me now, or pay me later.” If you buy something new or barely used, you’re working on the “pay me now” side of the fence, shelling out big money up front (or every month on the loan or lease) to own something that, in theory, won’t subject you to either the inconvenience or the expense of needing repairs.

But the bloom rapidly comes off that rose, as new-car warranties typically don’t cover normal-wear-and-tear items like tires and brake pads. And if you’re taking the car to the dealer for these items (and you probably are, because you’re used to going there for the regularly-scheduled under-warranty maintenance), it’s expensive. Under the heading of “keeping your car like new,” they’ll replace any needed parts with Original Equipment (OE) items, likely charging you dealer list price for them, so even right out of the gate, the bills for these tires-and-brakes-are-the-most-trivial-of-all-repairs jobs are pretty stiff.

The next arrow many people get hit with is shocks and struts and front-end work, which may be considered normal-wear-and-tear and thus may not be covered under warranty. Shocks and struts are an area where OE parts may not be the best choice (expensive, too soft, not long-lived), yet low-cost aftermarket parts aren’t desirable, so the discerning enthusiast may opt for a specialty repair shop who will install something like Bilsteins, and that’s not cheap either. In addition to the shocks and struts, the integrity of front-end components like lower control arms and their rubber bushings is central to the feel of sports cars and sports sedans. Modern cars typically have lower and upper front control arms, each with a ball joint on one end and a bushing in the other. There are also swiveling joints on the ends of the tie rods and typically on the ends of the sway bar links. That’s a lot of things to wear out and go “clunk.” It’s not uncommon to take the car in because it has a noise somewhere in the nose, and be told you need two grand in front end work.

What I went on about last week with my Armada was the exhaust. Had the car been new, the components aft of the catalytic converters are typically part of the standard warranty, and the cats themselves get a special federally mandated eight-year/80,000-mile warranty because they’re part of the car’s emission control system. But as I detailed last week, when the car is long out of warranty, racks up the miles, and the exhaust goes, the slippery-slope nature of the repair makes it challenging to surgically replace only the bad sections, and doing everything including the cats gets pricey. If you go to the dealer, change that to “nosebleed-level pricey.” The two front cats on this truck are integrated with the exhaust manifold, and the pair of them lists for about $4400, which many owners complain about bitterly when they go, and aftermarket ones reportedly cause the system to throw codes because they don’t have the same amount of rare earth elements in them to catalyze the exhaust gases. Going to a Nissan OEM parts website and adding up all the OE exhaust components on my car, the total comes to $8,900 list, $7600 with discount. Yes, you read that right. And that’s before labor if you’re paying a shop to install them, and before shipping if you’re doing it yourself. As I said last week, this is why no one in their right mind says, “Yup, I’m going to do it once, do it all, do it right on that exhaust on my 15-year-old 200,000-mile car and fix it with OEM parts.” If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, you’d do what I did and try to fit an aftermarket exhaust and pray that you don’t damage the cats doing so. And if you did, you’d buy aftermarket cats and risk them throwing codes, or try to find good used ones on the shady private market.

When I paid $3250 to buy the Armada 15 months ago, in addition to the exhaust, there were any number of other needed repairs. These included the two broken front springs, the non-functional self-leveling rear suspension, the broken lower and upper actuators in the heater box that I haven’t fixed yet, the air conditioning with a mystery sensor that triggers the compressor to shut off when the interior temperature gets too high (just what you want, right?), the leaky steering rack whose seal can’t be replaced without removing the rack (which can’t be done without removing the front differential), and that’s not to mention the fact that the truck is a lifelong New England vehicle with underbody corrosion that’s transitioning into rust, and has rust-through in the outer body in a place that’s hidden as long as the right rear door is closed.

So, where am I going with all this?

It got me thinking about how, eventually, most vehicles become like the Armada. They enter a period where they’re just sojourning on the way to the junkyard. They’re like zombies, driving around not realizing that they’re dead and their real life is over. The combination of their low value, burgeoning needs, and the high price of parts and labor (particularly at the dealer) creates the inescapable fate where one day the owner takes the car in for a repair, is quoted an amount far in excess of what it’s worth, and bails. Maybe they trade it in for whatever the dealer is willing to give them, and the car gets wholesaled. Maybe they try selling it online and bear the slings and arrows of outrageous numbers of questions and no-shows before accepting the first offer that’s in the ballpark. Maybe they take the price-it-really-low-first-person-gets-it tack. Or maybe they donate it to their local public television station. But they’re done. From there, if the car’s value is low, and if its repair needs are severe enough that it no longer runs or has rust bad enough that it’s no longer inspectable, the path to the junkyard is a short and ineluctable one.

One of the potential daily-driver cars I keep my eyes open for is a BMW E91 (2004-2013) 3 Series wagon, hoping to find a rear-wheel drive six-speed sport-package car that I can afford. E91s with this unicorn-rare option package have a good deal of value. In contrast, the value of E91s that are all-wheel drive automatics (which is nearly all of them) has dropped to the point where needy early examples with the usual oil leaks and broken window regulators have become fairly common in the $2500 to $3500 range. I recently saw a very attractive black-on-black 2006 325xi wagon, AWD but six-speed and sport package with some nice performance additions that sold for $2500. What was striking was that the ad honestly listed the downsides, including “Transfer case malfunction (currently RWD), car has exhaust leak, will not pass inspection, not worth fixing.” I don’t know whether the seller meant “not worth fixing to me” or was intentionally offering the “stick a fork in it, it’s done” pronouncement, but it got me thinking.

If you think about it, the cars we love and crave usually fall into a triangle of desirability, value, and rarity where their price basically never drops below a certain number. Any big-money-collectible car with a correct VIN tag is always going to be worth big money, even if it’s just a tub without an engine or paint. I vividly recall about 15 years ago when small-bumpered long-hood Porsche 911s reached the point where a carcass sitting outside in the Montana sun sold for $50k. The fuel-injected BMW 2002tiis that I love are valuable, but they’re not 911-valuable, and probably never will be; a dead, ratty, rusty one can still be a $1500 parts car. With newer cars, concerns about complexity and reliability can drive the value of the car down until it bottoms out, then the market sometimes rediscovers it and goes “Geez, you mean I can buy one of these for that?” and they rebound. That’s what happened to the BMW 850i 12-cylinder coupe from the early 90s. Five years ago, you couldn’t give away a needy 850i. Then the look of the car with its fat planted rear end and svelte front kidneys suddenly arose from the mists like The Ghost of BMW Design Language Past, and values came back up.

But that, however, is never going to happen with my Armada. It lacks desirability, rarity, and value. I’d bet my house that the Armada bears no special design aesthetic that anyone is going to discover years into the future, like they did with the 850i. Due to the rust (which isn’t really all that serious; if this were a vintage Land Rover, you’d be bragging about how solid it is), this particular one is already marked for death. The odds of anyone “restoring” it are zero. Really, whenever I drive it, the car is going down the road as part of its own funeral procession (I have to give kudos to my wife for coming up with that one).

But here’s the point: Someone like me who can do the work on it himself (or herself, or themselves) on a shoestring budget can extend the car’s life and can give it a useful, meaningful existence that’s far better than being parted out. Even though the economics of owning it so I can occasionally use it make no sense whatsoever in comparison to renting a U-Haul truck, I like having the Armada in my driveway if I need to tow a car home, or move an engine, or help a relative snag a sofa, or run a month’s worth of cardboard boxes down to the recycling center. I may complain about working on it—laying my hands on it and then driving it doesn’t set my heart on fire like, say, working on one of the vintage Lotuses—but keeping it alive and useful makes me feel good. Even if I’m never going to pull the front diff to fix the leaky steering rack so the thing will stop leaving blotches of ATF in my driveway for the entire time I’m its caretaker.

I’ve bought and resurrected many vintage BMWs, some of which were so needy that I have no doubt that I saved them from the crusher. These days, the value of 2002s is high enough that even my ratty 2002 “Bertha” with the dinner-plate-sized rust blisters on the hood is safe. Still, whenever I sell a vintage car, I can’t help but quote Neil Young and sing “Long May You Run,” which you may or may not know isn’t about a girl but is about his 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse that blew its transmission on the downhill into Blind River (“but we missed that shift on the long decline”). I guess the epiphany for me is that this feeling that I’m giving, or gave, a car a good life isn’t only for the enthusiast cars, but extends to the use-‘em-up daily drivers as well.

I’ve had people ask me if I intentionally buy needy cars so I have something to write about. No, I don’t. I buy cars that I want (where “want” is a continuum between “crave” and the more utilitarian “think will be useful to me”), that are well-priced, and that I think my ownership can intersect with the life of the car in some meaningful way. The combination of those last two things generally results in a needy car that often yields some story to its rebirth. My recent purchase of the ’69 Lotus Elan +2 is the best example of this. The Armada is the worst. But the two aren’t all that different.

Really, neither is my daily driver 2003 BMW E39 530i shown in the cover pic. I can’t afford its big collectible brother, the 400-hp E39 M5. The model below that is the 300-hp 540i M Sport. As the third child, the 232-hp 530i is destined neither for greatness nor collectability. I constantly describe the 530i as the best daily-driver BMW I’ve ever owned, as it has exactly the right amount of power for me, and its straight six-cylinder engine doesn’t have the timing chain guide issues of the two other V-8 models I mentioned, but that Goldilocks-just-rightness isn’t rewarded in terms of the model having any real value. In addition to the cooling system, fuel pump, alternator, and coil packs that any high-mileage car needs, 20-year-old high-mileage BMWs have the usual retinue of oil and power steering leaks and thunks and clunks from worn-out suspension and steering bushings. However, a bit of attention and money thrown at the car gets me a very nice ride for very low cost.

So, love your zombie car. Keep it alive for another year or another season. You’ll know when it’s time.

Just don’t let it bite you.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.