Cars – and cars I will never own

Saturday, 15 February 2025

▲ My 1959 Cadillac on Route 66

I’ll probably never buy another car – unless it’s for doing something, over the years I’ve bought a 1959 Cadillac (to drive across the USA west-east and later east-west 1994).

▲ A 1989 Mitsubishi Lancer to drive from Plymouth (in England) to Banjul (in Gambia) on the Plymouth-Banjul Challenge in 2007.

▲ And a 1974 MGB-GT to drive from Bangkok to London along the Silk Road in 2017. Every time with those cars it was buy the car for the trip, sell it afterwards.

▲ On the other hand I bought my Lotus Europa S in 2008, used it regularly and sold it 14 years later, there it is driving away in South Yarra, Melbourne, and out of my life, on 19 November 2022.

▲ My Jaguar XE on the road up to the Victorian ski resort of Falls Creek in the Australian Alps.

Which leaves me with a 2016 Jaguar XE, it’s just had its 9th birthday and has remarkably few km (26,000 so less than 3000km a year) because I really don’t drive very much. Maureen has a Mini Cooper S, her third example of the model.

But I’ve seen a lot of Jaguars recently because I’ve been watching on Netflix all 16 episodes of the hit Korean series Crash Landing on You. For those not familiar with this fascinating insight into the South Korea-North Korea story ultra-wealthy South Korean businesswoman and chaebol heiress Yoon Se-ri is blown off course by a sudden storm when she’s flying her paraglider, gets swept over the DMZ into North Korea and crash lands on top of handsome North Korean army officer Ri Jeong-hyeok. It’s going to take 20 hours of TV drama to get her safely back to Seoul.

▲ Along the way an awful lot of Jaguars and Range Rovers motor across the screen, the series has clearly had big money sponsorship from Jaguar Land-Rover because every member of Se-ri’s Queens Group family drives something from the car manufacturer. Se-ri has a bright red Range Rover Evoque. Anybody important will be in a Jaguar or Range Rover, in North Korea as well as in South Korea. I doubt that in real life there are any Range Rovers in North Korea unless the British ambassador has one? There are plenty in South Korea.

▲ Car nerds can have fun identifying less important vehicles in the series, in Episode 6 when Se-ri is nearly killed by the renegade North Korean army truck she’s in a UAZ Hunter, a jeep-like Russian 4WD. On my one visit to North Korea, admittedly a long time ago in 2002, all the regular cars in North Korea were Japanese. Today they’d probably be Chinese, but there weren’t many Chinese cars around in those days and you certainly were not going to find yourself in a South Korean Hyundai or Kia. So if you got in a Pyongyang taxi back then it would probably be a Toyota.

▲ Tony in Zurich with a Tesla Roadster

Even though I don’t expect to buy another car there are certainly assorted cars I would not consider buying, starting with Teslas. I did have three days driving around Switzerland in a Tesla Roadster in 2011. That was when Teslas still came off the Lotus assembly line in England, before the Tesla Model S appeared in 2012. I nearly bought a Model S in 2016, but it simply didn’t fit comfortably in my garage, so I ended up with the Jaguar. If the smaller Tesla Model 3 was on sale then (it didn’t arrive in Australia until 2019) I probably would have bought one. Today, however, I wouldn’t want to touch anything Elon Musk has been near! One of my Tesla-owning friends is currently selling his Model S for the same reason.

Nor am I ever going to own a Mercedes Benz, travelling in Africa has put me off Mercedes for life, in East Africa if you’re a corrupt government official you’re a member of the Wabenzi and I never want to be associated with them. In recent years Mercedes in Australia (and other countries) have also become associated with appalling road behaviour. A recent article by Australian journalist Tony Wright in the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald recounted being nearly run off the road on his motorcycle by a road-raging driver in a black Mercedes: ‘why is it always a black Mercedes, by the way?’ Wright commented. They’re likely to be noisy as well as raging, if you hear something absurdly noisy on the road in Australia it’s usually either a Harley-Davidson motorcycle or a Mercedes Benz car. Teslas used to have a ‘Ludicrous Speed’ button which you pressed to activate ‘launch control.’ These days Mercedes seem to come with a ‘Ludicrous Noise’ button.

I’m also never going to consider a Chinese car even though BYD, Haval, MG and other Chinese brands are currently flooding the roads of Australia (and England, but definitely not MAGA USA). I put money into Wikipedia every year and it’s banned in China, so why on earth would I want to buy a Chinese car? Absolutely not.