mmarshall

For those of you who regularly read Road & Track magazine (as I do), Peter Egan, one of the magazine's editors, regularly does a "Side-Glances" monthly column that is quite interesting. It describes his experiences restoring old cars (mostly old British sports cars), his rather numerous buying/selling of daily-drivers, trips around the country for various reasons alone, with friends, and/or with his wife Barb, their life in Wisconsin, and, occasionally, what it's like to fly his Piper Cub and take to the water on boats. His column, among other things, was one of the things I looked forward to each month when the new issue came out.

Well, after many years, Pete has decided to hang the monthly column up....perhaps not surprising, as he (respectfully) is no spring chicken any more. But, in many ways, he's just as sharp as ever, and will continue to write occasionally for the magazine and help out with car reviews/comparisons.

So, for his last monthly column, he describes the purchase of something he has never owned before (a diesel-engine car)....a brand-new VW Jetta TDI Sportwagon. I fact, he rarely, if ever, actually owned a brand-new car, period.

Best Wishes, Pete.....good luck to both you and the new ride.

http://www.roadandtrack.com/voices/c...s-65-3-roa1013

That sudden blast of wind you felt blowing the curtains in your windows the other day was nothing but a collective sigh of relief from all my friends, because I finally went out and bought a Volkswagen Jetta TDI SportWagen, after talking about it for two or three years. Yes, my first diesel.

Actually, I've owned one other diesel-powered object in my life, and that was a 27-foot Com-Pac sailboat Barb and I used to keep on Green Bay. It had a 12-hp, two-cylinder Universal auxiliary engine for getting into and out of the harbor or back to shore when the doldrums left us in the middle of Lake Michigan to starve or die of thirst. Or old age.

This trusty engine used so little fuel that we almost never had to refill the boat's six-gallon tank during a summer of sailing. In fact, the unused fuel got so old I began to imagine we were breeding mushrooms or sea monsters down there. The smell of diesel fuel alone leads you to believe it might still contain ancient protozoa that could evolve into almost anything.

So I must admit that this is not my first diesel engine, nor my first Volkswagen.

When I got home from Vietnam in the fall of 1970, I bought a faded red 1962 Beetle for $900 from a VW dealer in Baraboo, Wisconsin. As so often happens, it turned out there were several reasons this car had been traded in on something newer. A misalignment between the front and rear axles caused it to dog-track and wag its tail in the snow, and it would more or less slalom down the highway, as if it had taken skiing lessons from the great Hans Tanner. Also, manipulating the big round "heater" **** between the seats had very little effect on the temperature inside the car. Using it was like participating in a blind drug study in which you've been given the placebo rather than the real thing. After you worked up a sweat turning that ****, there was no more heat to be had.

That February, I flew to Europe to bum around for three months, mostly in Paris, and left the Beetle in the care of my girlfriend and now wife, Barb. The tail-wagging dynamic got away from her in a Wisconsin blizzard and she spun it backwards into a hard wall of recently plowed snow. This pushed the two whistling tailpipes and the rear bumper upward into a menacing stinkbug stance.

When I came home from Paris, we got married and traded Barb's immaculate-but-awful 1962 Comet and my stinkbug in on a nice, beige 1968 Beetle. This was our only "real" car for the first nine years of our marriage, with a few TR3s, Bugeye Sprites, Formula Fords, and a venerable Ford Country Squire tow car on the side. Also several motorcycles. After working as a foreign-car mechanic and attempting to freelance magazine stories all through the Seventies, I finally got hired as technical editor at Cycle World in Newport Beach, California.

Interviewed just before Christmas, I was asked to start work almost immediately, on January 2, 1980. So I left Barb home to sell our little stone cottage in Madison and headed west through a series of blizzards. My buddy John Oakey volunteered to help me drive.

By this time, the '68 Beetle was pretty rusty and tired, and I saw this trip as the car's sacrificial last effort on our behalf. The front fenders had rusted away from the body and tended to flare outward in the wind, like the headgear of a French nun, so I'd pop-riveted small pieces of aluminum between body and fenders to hold them on. Ditto for the holes in the rusty heater channels under the running boards. Near Flagstaff, Arizona, we broke an exhaust header and burned a valve, so we came limping into California on three chugging cylinders, pulling up at the coast just in time to watch the red sun sink into the Pacific Ocean at Newport Beach.

I sold the Beetle for $350 to a kid who was building a dune buggy, and then used borrowed test bikes from Cycle World to get around until I could afford another car. A Datsun B-210. This car was stultifyingly dull, but the fenders were attached to the body, and it ran on all four. Three years later, I took a job with Road & Track, upstairs in the same building as Cycle World (these two publications were owned by CBS at the time), and I've been contributing to both magazines ever since. Thirty-three years at CW, and 30 years at R&T.

Anyway, that loyal but rusty Beetle was the last VW product I owned, despite my having an irrational weakness (active to this day) for the Volkswagen Thing. But no more Vee-Dubs until now.

Why now?

Well, because I'd like to retire.

Not completely, mind you; I've asked editors Larry Webster and Mark Hoyer if I could continue to contribute feature stories to my two favorite magazines, but I'd like to pull back from the monthly-column routine and have more free time to wander about the country, visiting friends and family and exploring the hinterlands. Just feels like time. I also have a couple of moderately serious health problems (tainted with the usual whiff of hypochondria and sloth) and feel the need to step down onto a slightly slower treadmill.

So, as part of my scientific program to simplify life and consolidate resources, I recently decided to turn three of my older cars into a single new vehicle (with full warranty and three years of free maintenance) that would allow me to roam with impunity and get great fuel mileage, limiting my exposure to catastrophic repair bills while still having fun driving. And the diesel Jetta wagon seems like a package that promises all those things.

I've been wasting the time of my local VW salesman friend Marc Jacobson regularly for the past two years now, scamming test drives of all the turbodiesel models, and my favorites have been the Golf and Jetta TDIs. Both have nice steering, that taut-yet-compliant suspension the Germans are so good at, and (to my particular eye) nice styling. But it's the Jetta SportWagen I like best, probably just for the flowing lines and all that cargo space. It was seemingly created just for guitar cases and amplifiers, useful when our garage band, the Defenders, is invited to play at Carnegie Hall or the Rock County Snowmobile Club Fourth of July Pig Roast—with free beer and deep-fried cheese curds available only at the latter.

Also, believe it or not, I have a small but developing environmental conscience, and I hate wasting energy. General cheapness plays a large part in this piety, of course, because I also dislike refueling my van on road trips and having the pump stop at $100 when the tank is only seven-eighths full. I'm putting a small tow hitch on the Jetta so I can pull my motorcycles around on an aluminum trailer.

I picked up the Platinum Gray Metallic wagon yesterday (six-speed manual, no sunroof) and drove around Madison visiting friends and listening to my free trial satellite radio, surfing between B.B. King's Bluesville, Willie's Roadhouse, and Steve Earle on Outlaw Country.

Nice sound system, good seats, a satisfyingly back-shoving 236 lb-ft of torque. Then, I drove 22 miles south to our rural home and back into the city for dinner with some friends.

At the end of the day, I'd gone 74 miles, and the trip computer was showing 42.1 mpg in mixed driving. The fuel gauge had just begun to move off the full mark. Friends who have these cars say to expect between 49 and 51 mpg on highway trips.

Funny, the road to my job here started with a famously efficient but rusty '68 Beetle, and now it tapers off with a new Jetta TDI that gets almost twice the mileage. From rust we came and to Wolfsburg we shall return.

Hope to see you back here from time to time. The more often the better, as I may need to maintain a semblance of sanity by venting my thoughts on restoring one of the three older sports cars I'm currently looking at.

Seems a leopard never changes his spots. Nor his heart or brain, apparently. Thanks for reading these past 30 years—or even for the past few minutes, if you've only just arrived.

mmarshall

This, I thought, was probably his funniest quote:

"When I was in Vietnam, the Jeep that the Viet Cong hit with a mortar shell was the only non-English vehicle I ever drove that exploded."