Lots of you know my coupe - it's been around and owned by me since 1995 - and a daily driver for most of that time. It's currently sitting at a tad under 200,000 miles. From 2010 or so I was working with a six hundred mile daily commute, so it lived in the garage, let the diesel Bravo take the strain, and only came out to play from time to time. For most of that time, it's been getting serviced at Joe's.
But Covid came along, and I moved to Germany, and life got complicated, so the car went in to dry storage in 2020.
Where it stayed for three years, and where it still spends nine months of the year, and where it is now... but in 2023 I decided to exhume it and bring it to Germany for the summer. The insurance was a pain in the backside; the Germans wouldn't cover it if it wasn't German-registered, and I didn't want to do that, and the British didn't want to cover it if I didn't live in the UK, but eventually I found a company who were happy with things and insured it for six thousand miles a year, with a maximum of 90 days on the continent. Which was nice.
So it came to live on the drive in Potsdam, to the general amazement of the neighbours, none of whom believed its age. It spent the summer being driven, which is always good for a car. Ten kilometers to the supermarket - probably the shortest runs - and longer trips to the airfield where I fly a lot, around a hundred kilometers each way. And at the end of the summer, it went home.
This year it did the same, but also managed to drag itself around three thousand miles to Turin and back, the pretty way, before it went home. Drinking Super 5% petrol all the way at great expense, but hey... it's still happy enough to do over three hundred km in two hours, so don't knock it!
There has been some maintenance: in 2023 it got a service and MOT at Joe's, with no great issues that I can recall. But in Germany it had a fuel starvation issue which was traced to a poor seal on a pipe in the fuel pump, and a rather annoying starting issue where the starter solenoid died (and the German sourced new starter turned out to be for a 20v, and their 'we can refurbish yours' involved spraying it black and not fixing the solenoid... I found a second hand replacement and it's been starting perfectly ever since.
In 2024, it started the summer with a service and MOT - new belts etc, new catalytic converter, refurbished headlights, new battery, and rather annoyingly, a free nail in a tyre. Oh well. Thence to Potsdam and Turin, revealing no major issues but a few niggles; most serious, the alternator not fully charging. So that was replaced - it needed the pulley changing and some spacers on the mounting moving to make everything line up, and a handful of other electrical issues sorted: the mirror motors all work now, the headlight moves up and down on command, the sunroof and windows all work. Amazing - an Italian car without electrical issues!
And in all that time it has reliably returned in excess of 36mpg driving locally, and between 42 and 45mpg on the long autobahn trips, depending how enthusiastic I have been feeling (and probably more significantly, how many traffic jams!)
Neil
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