What do you do when you realise you weren’t quite finished with that car you sold? E-mail the current owner and ask if you can buy it back of course 😀 Onwards to the needlessly complex rationale behind this latest (re)purchase!
This all started thanks to the JDMny’s emissions hiccup, though it being an inanimate object and me a car-obsessed human I must admittedly shoulder most of the blame. Despite a recent wobble where I was worried I might be growing out of the little Suzuki (I’m really not, this idiot eventually realised) after close to 5 years of almost daily use it’s probably unsurprising to read that I’m rather attached to it. The MOT failure brought home to me how much I want to keep hold of this car – not even the new Jimny can pull me away, if you can believe that (though being a good deal short of the £18,500 needed to acquire one might also have a bearing on that decision!) – but at almost 20 years old and with over 200,000km on the clock that inevitably means plenty of work to keep it on the road long term.
Rust, which was usefully delayed by the JDMny’s first 10 years in Japan, is a big concern and one I’d like to try and tackle sooner rather than later. The plan is to get rid of the worst of it, treat the rest, and protect everything with a good underseal, but to do so I’ll have to take the car off the road over the summer… and that’s where the Wagon All-the-Rs comes in.
However familiar that might sound the big difference this time is that I won’t be using the Wagon for a few months and then moving it on again – if nothing else it deserves some stability after hopping between owners these last few years! I genuinely felt really sad when it went off to its new home so I’m super-excited it’s back and can’t wait to get stuck in to driving it again.
The long term plan is to split my daily driving duties between the JDMny and the Wagon, running the battle-hardened 4×4 through the winters and the shiny urban runabout during the summers. I’ve done this before with my Smart Roadster Coupé and my UK Jimny and really enjoyed it, and it will help take some of the pressure off the stalwart Jim as well as halving the financial burden of running two imports at the same time. Well, unless you’re running a third kei car for… Carrying.
And there’s the rub. As I’ve said before a three car garage isn’t something I can sustain forever – my wife is very forgiving (she likes cars too, luckily!) but she’s right to point out that five cars between two people is fairly ridiculous – but owning a Carry was a long-held dream so it won’t be going anywhere just yet. Ultimately while it’s super-practical for some things – tip runs, visits to IKEA, picking up furniture for the house – it’s also wildly impractical for others – taking two people and a dog on holiday, hitting the dual carriageway on the commute to work – but as long as there’s some of that super-practical work to be done (and some fun stuff too) it’ll be hanging around.