She’s a beaut, mate, but she’s sending me to the poor house

OK, who wants to buy a 1986 Mer­cedes Benz 300SEL?

I got this car in 2002 for a real bar­gain by Sin­ga­pore stan­dards — $28K for 5 years left on the COE (for non-Singaporeans — Cer­tifi­cate of Enti­tle­ment — yes, you need a cer­tifi­cate to show you are enti­tled to own a car). It seemed a real bar­gain then. For $28K you can only put a deposit on another decent car. This baby (mon­ster) was so well-kept by her pre­vi­ous own­ers that I felt guilty tak­ing her off their hands. I’m renowned for trash­ing cars. My last car in Syd­ney was known as the Sports Car, because of all man­ner of sport­ing appa­ra­tus I kept in the trunk, the back seat, the front pas­sen­ger seat and the roof rack.

I’ve grown accus­tomed to her face, her large, cum­ber­some frame and her reluc­tant purr in the morn­ings, when her trans­mis­sion doesn’t want to wake up yet. She is low-maintenance with the TLC stuff, but her drink­ing habit’s leav­ing me skint.

In the past fort­night, I had been com­plain­ing to all who would care to lis­ten (and because I had run out of con­ver­sa­tion top­ics), that the fuel prices were killing me. $1.45 a litre or some­thing. Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Now, buy­ing, sell­ing and own­ing a car in Sin­ga­pore is like rocket sci­ence or nuclear physics. Most guys here seem to under­stand it, but I don’t. There’s the afore­men­tioned COE, then there’s the OMV, PARF, the ARF and the BOWWOWWOW or some­thing. And when you’re done with the bark­ing, you might want to let out an ERP.…

…So my friends were try­ing to explain the above acronym soup to me while my eyes were slowly glaz­ing over. All I knew was that I was spend­ing close to $400 a month on fuel, $4K a year on road tax, $800 a year on insur­ance and many sundry dol­lars pass­ing under ERP gantries by mis­take and park­ing for too long in car parks across the island.

Good thing she’s a hardy girl, and sel­dom has to visit the mechanic’s aside from her rou­tine check ups and occa­sional replace­ment of the Mer­cedes star that van­dals like to snap off for keep­sakes. She’s tem­pera­men­tal and quirky too. Creak­ing in the morn­ings, but not in the after­noons. Over­heat­ing in jams and not chang­ing gears in colder weather (here, that means any­thing under 30 degrees cel­cius). She dri­ves like a boat, and park­ing is like berthing a tug­boat, only harder. She usu­ally needs one and a half park­ing lots. And she’s longer than most MPVs (Many Peo­ple Vehicle).

Com­mon sense (and my knowl­edge­able friends) dic­tate I should sell the car (because the shell is worth money, they say), and put a deposit down on a smaller car, and pay instal­ments for the rest of my nat­ural life, so I can cut down my fuel bill and road tax. Plus I used to dis­like Mercs with a pas­sion. The image of the Chi­nese Bid­nis­man and his big Merc irked me no end. And it doesn’t help that some friends address me as Uncle still on account of the car.

But like I say, I’ve grown accus­tomed to her. How her dash lights ran­domly switch on and off depend­ing on how you start her up. How she needs at least two cranks to start up. How only one of four auto win­dows work. How the fuel gauge reads 1/4 but is really very empty. And she’s a grand old dame. She’s a Merc.

I’ll only leave her if some­one gets me one of these. (Bas­tard huh?)