Acura NSX — Blog — Healy Chen

Weekend drives

Well, I hope your car is properly washed now after this noisy rainstorm (greetings, readers in San Francisco!) You did move it outside, right? Even my friend with a garage knows to move his Teslas outside when it rains, just to get it wash by nature. Alas, I’ve become that lazy as well, even though I’m a card-carrying car enthusiast. Ever since I bought the M2 Competition back in October, I’ve washed it myself a grand total of once.

I am at a stage where anything that doesn’t involve actually driving the car, I’m not all that enthused about. Spending an afternoon changing the oil? Not me! I rather pay the money and take it to the dealership. Good thing about new BMW cars is that the first three year’s maintenance is free. That’s partly why I bought the car brand new, instead of saving on depreciation in a used one. It’s not about the money: it’s about saving time.

With COVID lockdowns still in effect, I didn’t really do much outside this weekend. I went to Costco for the usual groceries, and that’s about it. I took a circuitous route to get there, though, because the M2 doesn’t get driven during the week, and I wanted to give it an appropriate amount of running time to get everything mechanically warmed up. That’s the only piece of driving I’m doing these days.

It was the weekend, so I encountered a few drivers taking their weekend sports cars out for a spin. A mint first-generation Acura NSX, a really orange Honda S600, and an early-model Porsche 911. All three were driven by seemingly older fellows, which leads me to believe those are cars they’ve kept for a very long time. It makes me wish I had the (mental) ability to keep a car for similar periods. Sadly, my record thus far is only three years.

The Porsche 911 was suppose to be my “forever car”, but “adulting” got in the way. I’m not yet sure if I want to keep the M2 for a long time. BMW’s spotty history of reliability is not conducive to that once it’s outside of the warranty period. Besides, these days I’m pining for something truly JDM: going back to my roots and getting a car produced by a Japanese manufacturer. With a manual gearbox.

Let’s see what happens after I’m done paying for the lease on my dad’s Hyundai Tucson in October…

PSA: cars are meant to be driven

I don’t have much of a morning routine, other than laying on the bed for at least an hour (I work a late shift) while browsing on the phone. It begs the question: what did we do before the smartphone was invented? Go back to sleep, probably.

Amongst the places I visit during my hour of sleuthing is the daily Bring a Trailer newsletter. In it is a list of auctions that are set to expire that day, and another list that shows the latest cars put up on the block. I can easily lose many hours looking at each auction page, reading through the descriptions and comments. It’s especially fun when peculiar and interesting cars come up for sale, a great way to learn about models I wouldn’t otherwise have known existed.

Some of the cars up for auction can also be immensely frustrating. Case in point, from yesterday’s newsletter this particular gem of an Acura NSX started accepting bids:

An absolutely pristine 1994 model with only 187 miles on it. Supposedly a super-rich car collector bought it (and many, many other cars) new and stuck it in a climate-controlled warehouse forever. This particular NSX, for all intents and purposes, was never driven.

That is just the worse kind of sadness for a car enthusiast.

I noticeably groaned as soon as I opened the auction page; what a great shame such a legendary car didn’t get driven, and likely won’t ever be driven. Indeed, for those looking for the most sparkling sample of a first-generation NSX, this one is the ticket, but it’s going to be appropriately expensive due to the insanely low mileage count. The buyer of this car isn’t wont to put miles on it because the depreciation will be catastrophic. This NSX is worth so much because of the low miles, so each addition mile put on it will have exponential consequences to its value.

The auction winner will simply stuff the car in his own garage until another point in time in the future, where the car will be sold again for even more money. Car as an investment, nail on chalkboard to my ears.

Ideally, the person who buy this will not care about depreciation and simply drive it until it’s mechanically infeasible. That’s what cars are meant for, and the route I would go if I had the sufficient resources to bid on this NSX.

But then if I were looking to buy an NSX to drive, the smarter play would be to purchase a nice sample with 30K-40K miles: it’d cost significantly less money, and the car will be more mechanically sound. A 25-year old car that have sat since new – with zero service records – is going to require an enormous amount of maintenance done before its viable for the road. Think of all the perished rubber and gaskets that haven’t seen a heat-cycle in decades.

Obviously, how a man uses his cars or spend his money is none of my concern, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be disappointed in seeing cars not being use as its intended function.