Twelve Cars In A Year!

Pretty fair assesment there  75 diesel is a BMW engine i think, my mate had one and its actually a good car! and can be tuned to give decent grunt and is smooth... the x-type imo is a bit more of an 'everday' jag, not as luxury maybe.. my fols ran one for years as a commuter and its great for that, more of a jag/modeo perhaps! (i love my old mondeo so not an insult imb!) loving the thread btw mate, really is entertaining and interesting to follow!

Deck the halls with boughs of holly, Fa la la la la, la la la la. Tis the season to be SITTING IN FREAKIN' TRAFFIC JAMS AND STOOD IN RIDICULOUSLY LONG QUES IN EVERY SHOP IN THE LAND!



Sorry to come across all Bah HUMBUG, but i genuinely don't get it? Why, when Christmas comes around does everyone who owns a car decide to go out and drive it? I had some errands to run today, starting with a 1 mile dash across town to collect some wheels from my Brother, who had picked them up for me on his way home from work the other night. I often walk to my Brothers house from mine and as a rule it takes me about 22 minutes which i'll admit is some way off the four minute mile first achieved in 1954 by Roger Bannister who actually did it in 3:59... Show off! Still for a fat middle aged fella i think i'm averaging about 3 mph, thats getting on for 120 calories burned off!! Anyway today, as i had four wheels with tyres to collect i elected to take the car, what a foolish fella i am, as everyone else who has a car had also decided to go out and drive (and i'm using that term losely, as there was not much driving to be done!) their car! So, the time i took me to get 1 mile across town in my S-type today? 1 hour 27 minutes!! That is 0.7 miles per hour!! This will do the economy figures of the Jag no end of harm come the final write up at the end of the month! This is a crazy length of time to get across the town. The problem appeared to be from the car parks being full, and instead of people just carrying on to the next one, they seemed to prefer to just sit in a line and wait for a space top open up, blocking the whole one way system up in the process... Geniuses, the lot of em!! Still, it did give me time to appreciate what a comfortable and nice place the S-type is to be. In the whole time i was sitting in the traffic, playing 'I Spy' with the Pistonpoppets i was completely comfortable, and didn't even feel the need to adjust my seat once! The CD player happily played through the requests of the Pistonpoppets as it tried it hardest to work out which of the six CDs loaded into the boot the Pistonpoppets actually wanted to hear. Once they had settled on a CD, after chopping and changing CDs on the head unit over and over again we finally settled on Green Days fabulous album American Idiot. Of course the CD player wasn't allowed to play the tracks in the order that Green Day decided they should appear on their album, oh no. Instead the Pistonpoppets little fingers jabbed at the head unit flitting from track to track, and repeated several of them over and over again! I am fairly sure that i know know the lyrics to 'I Walk Alone' word perfect now, and infact the tune has become an ear worm in my head now that has been stuck pretty much all day! I guess i should be thankful for small mercys as many of my friends tend to hum 'The Wheels On The Bus' and various other nursery rhymes that get stuck in their head from the countless times they hear their kids nursery rhymes in the car! I feel no sympathy for them, they could adopt the strict no nursery rhymes in the car rule that i have always employed, but they don't, so more fool them lol! Anyway, believe it or not, Green Day does get a bit tedious after an hour and a half, but by then i was at my Brothers house, picking up the wheels! Luckily for my Brother he has an estate car, and the 14" wheels fitted very well in the back of his car. I also have an estate car, but i wasn't in that, i was in the S-type. Now it has to be said that when they were designing the S-type they probably gave little thought to some idiot trying to fit four wheels with tyres into the boot, cavernous as it is! After about ten minutes of my Brother laughing at my efforts and telling me that i would need to do another trip... I got them all in! And i was off back to Pistonpopper Towers, well, not really, my secret hideout instead! I elected not to go back through the town, and instead take the scenic route, which is about a seven mile round trip around the outskirts of the town, taking in the Motorway for a little bit. This went fairly well, until i tried to leave the motorway, where guess what? I joined a twenty minute que towards the city center. Luckily i only needed to join it for about 1/4 mile before i turned off!



Back at my secret lair i extracted the wheels from the Jag, and just slung them into the Carlton until i get time to deal with them and get the tyres removed. It was then time for my favourite pastime... Shopping! Mrs Pistonpopper was at work, and had requested that i get a small number of groceries if we wanted to eat tonight, I checked with the Pistonpoppets who confirmed that they did indeed want to eat tonight, and that we should go to the Supermarket. Although it was a very small amount of groceries i was asked to collect there was no way i was up for another crawl through the town i elected to go to the ASDA in Havant, 22.7 twisty country road type miles away!



Bliss... Unlike in the summer when there seemed to be every Tom, Dick, and Harry out on the twisty roads on their motorsickles the roads were empty, and to be honest there wasn't much traffic of any sort on the twisty country back roads! Even though the track erm, road was mildly moist the big Jaguar wafted around the corners effortlessly, and although to be fair i wasn't exactly going for it i never felt like the jag was grappling for grip, infact i believe that it would've been fine even if i was pressing on a bit. For such a big luxury car it is pretty well balanced and does inspire confidence as you drive it. It has to be said that through the corners it feel like a much smaller, and more agile car than it actually is, i'm not sure that you would get bored of driving this thing very easily, it really is rather good.



Pretty soon we were trying to find a parking space away from the other ten million people who had decided to come to Asda this afternoon, and we were off to do battle um, the shopping. Inside i gathered my groceries in a basket and got shunted from pillar to post by it has to be said, some very rude people. The girls were trying to find themselves some cool HotWheels cars, and while they were rooting through the big basket of cars they were quite rudely shoved out of the way by some woman who litterally pushed them out of the way. Being stood a few feet away from them to keep out of the way of the jostling crowd i saw this, calmly came and knelt down beside the woman as if looking for cars myself. I then gently eased her to one side so that my kids could finish looking for what they wanted. When she said to me what did i think i was doing, i told her that i was doing exactly what i had just watched her do to my kids, and that there would be plenty of time for her to have a look after my girls had finished. To which she replied that she was in a hurry! I said, yep, well you don't push people around, especially not little kids, and definately not my little kids! She then looked at her husband! Oh curse word, i didn't see him! She said to him that they were in a hurry, and he just looked at her and said you shouldn't have tried to push in!! Phew, well done fella, i thought it was all about to go pear shaped, but he told her that she needed to be patient, and wait until there was space for her to get in! I'll bet that poor fella got his ears chewed off on the way home lol!

Before long i had gathered my little basket of groceries, and it was time to que... and que... Aaaaaaaaaand que. . . I really don't understand this, why is it, when it comes to Christmas people start buying massive amounts of food, and acting like the supermarkets will never open again? They're closed for TWO DAYS PEOPLE!! Stop acting like it's the last shopping day on Earth! This time last year i was lucky enough to be in Germany, in Köln which as some of you may know is a fairly big city, but it wasn't busy like it gets here in the UK. There wasn't the rudeness either! I genuinely wonder if this (almost) panic buying state of mind is something that is just done uniquely by the British (and possibly the Americans)? But whats the point of it all? Madness!



Groceries loaded (told you it wasn't much, but any excuse to drive the S-type! lol) and as the sky began to grow dark it was off for a lovely, gentle, wafty, and quite frankly relaxing cruise back along the empty, windy country roads to home. By now Green Day was also beginning to fade from my memory as Tom Pettys voice filled the car, and I'm passing sleeping cities fading by degrees not believing all I see to be so. I'm flyin' over backyards country homes and ranches watching life between the branches below...

The trouble with this time of year is that the days are so short, and by the time i arrived back at Pistonpopper Towers it was well and truly dark. Dammit, i wanted to wash the car today, i only washed it last week, and to look at it you'd say it hasn't been washed in months! This is another of the problems of this time of year, the roads are damp and dirty... Especially the twsty country ones.

Deffo agree on the panic buying bit. My local Tesco has been heaving since Dec 1st and yesterday we went there to fill up the Wife's daily. As Tescos unleaded is now only 99p litre, people were filling up cans, generators and anything they possibly could! It's open again TODAY people!

Funnily enough i saw it myself this evening, even stopped for a chat, the new guy seems very pleased with it, and why not, its a cool car, and a pretty good one too if i do say so myself! I don't miss it though, i thought i would, but i'm enjoying the Jaguar a lot... Probably too much if i'm honest! But not only that, i'm enjoying the mk1 Carlton i've been lucky enough to get my hands on as well.

Merry Christmas

Has it really been that many? I've been following and enjoying your thread, an although i've not been keeping count i knew you had been getting through a few but i didn't realise it was as many as 25! Thats pretty good going, i remember back in July i think you said you'd bought about 17 by then. If you take into account a couple of cars that i bought purely for spares, and a new van for work i've actually bought 15 cars this year, so you've nearly doubled my effort, which is pretty good going in my mind! Of course i didn't write about them because i wanted to only include cars that i would buy, drive, experience, and then sell one car a month for a year, and obviously a car that was either bought as a non running project, or purely just to use as spares would not meet my criteria. Also i wanted to actually get my name on to each of the V5c's for every car i bought, and waiting for the DVLA to send the documents back before i can list them for sale does slow down preceedings somewhat. The other thing is that i usually like to keep my cars for around 6 months so that i can fully get to know them, and fully experience them, only keeping them for about a month has really been too short an amount of time for my liking. A couple of times even when i've put the cars up for grabs, i've not really been ready to sell them at that point. Cars ike the Vauxhall Omega, i reckon i'd still be driving that thing about now if i hadn't sold it, and this current Jaguar, i am nowhere near ready to sell this thing, but as i've got no storage for it, it's got to go! So for me, if i had bought two cars a month for a year, i wouldn't have had enough time to fully appreciate and enjoy them all, and for me that would kind of defeat the object of it in my opinion. Having said that, if i had more time on my hands perhaps i would be able to get through that amount of cars without drama, but as i work a full time job, and a little part time job, and obviously want to spend time with mrs Pistonpopper and my two little Pistonpoppets i don't have enough spare time to buy any more cars really, let alone have the space to put them. Honestly sometimes, especially just lately it's been a struggle to find the time to just go out and drive the cars let alone then try to write up the account thats somewhere near interesting enough to read about what its like to drive and own. But thats all part of the challenge isn't it, and it's all part of the fun. Atleast, it is for me.

Well, i've offered him every one of my cars and i can tell you that every one had something about it that stopped him from buying it. The thing is i've had 12 (yes, ive got the last one waiting for the big reveal!) cars this year and they were all very different to each other. But for every one i showed him there was something he didn't like. The Frontera was too tall, the Rover was going to blow it's head gasket at any moment because its a Rover and apparently thats what they do, the Omega was too big, the X-type was too new, the Street Ka was too girly, the AX was too shark-toothy, the Golf was a cabriolet, the Rav4 was too ugly, the 500SEC was too thirsty, the Carlton was too low, and the current car, the S-type is a poor knock off to a proper S-type. I'm not going to tell you what he's said about car #12 but it was too...

The thing is, i've proved a point to him, i've won the bet, although he won't admit it because he says that i've not had anything that he would consider to be interesting! But that wasn't the bet, the bet was that i would own buy, drive, experience, and then sell one car which I consider to be interesting a month for twelve months, ergo 12 Car In A Year! I'm not saying it was easy, but i managed it. Another thing that he pointed out was how much it cost me to do this, and i can't argue with him about that, but as i pointed out to him, it wouldn't be like that if he was to only buy one interesting car. He also says that he needs his car to be reliable on a day to day basis as he wouldn't have another car as a stand by incase his interesting car was broken. Well, as i told him, i've used these cars every day, to the detriment of my other cars which have been sitting idly by waiting for their chance at the open road! So as i pointed that out to him, i said that they were all good for day to day stuff.

To be fair it became apparent a couple of cars ago that he wasn't going to get anything interesting in my opinion, as i reckon he just wants to dream about cool car ownership as thats a lot easier than actually owning and running something cool and interesting... I've even pointed him in the direction of this forum, and there must be something here he likes. But sadly he's always got an excuse... You can lead a horse to water, but you can't force it to drink! But as i've pointed out to him, there's enough cool, offbeat and cheap stuff out there, and a lot of fun to be had with it, the only person missing out is him!

When does #12 get revealed?

Hmm, i'll bet in Yoda's voice you read that... Yeahssssss.