When I was little, my mom worked at a Mercedes-Benz dealership. I’m not sure whether this was the chicken or the egg in what would become my affinity for cars, but she used to bring home lots of press and marketing materials from the store. This goes beyond the usual brochures you might expect; this was in the early 1990s when Mercedes had money and wasn’t afraid to spend it.
I’m talking about hour-long video cassette brochures detailing the development, design, and details of a particular model, hard-cover coffee table books packed with stunning photography, and more. Lots more. On my birthday, she’d bring home whatever was the new hotness on the lot — a stark contrast to the peasant-spec Fords I was used to — and we’d spend the weekend tooling around in these glamorous machines. I treasure those memories with all my heart.
Naturally, when I was 18 and ready to move past my Ford LTD, I graduated into my first ancient German hooptie. But rather than a Mercedes, I scraped together a couple thousand dollars and bought a BMW. I’m genuinely not sure how that happened.
Being a shameless Benz fanboy, I never liked BMWs that much. But when I started driving, I started thinking about cars that might actually make some sense for me to drive. Those same BMWs started making more and more sense. This was before they spiked up in value, before they were sought-after cars, before they got bounced around to cynical flippers on Bring a Trailer. They allegedly weren’t as simple as my LTD, and allegedly not as nice as a Mercedes. They were just old and janky.
But old BMWs had a reputation. They were fun. They were all rear-wheel-drive, had a well-balanced chassis, usually a very sweet straight-six engine, and a good chunk of the Canadian-market cars had a limited-slip differential. Plus, nearly all could be found with a DIY transmission, unlike the Benzes I was considering in my local classifieds. They had all the core tenets of a proper driver’s car, for peanuts.
And then, on top of all that, they were, you know, BMWs. If they were sorted, they were the farthest thing from janky. They were nice cars in their day, and If you found a decent one, they were usually (and still are) nice cars. They were built to be Autobahn athletes, exported across the Atlantic as executive status symbols. They were comfortable, practical, reasonably efficient, and adorned with the build quality you can only find on something stamped Made in West Germany.
To say I learned a lot from that first BMW — a black 1987 535i, or E28 in Bimmer parlance — would be the understatement of the century. They may have been well-built cars, but it was still an old, high-mile car that had been put through the ringer long before I got to it, and proceeded to use it even harder. So much of what I know now about how cars work and how to fix them is from having that car break over and over again.
To this day, I refuse to leave the house without a multitool on me, in case I have to trim and refit an exploded radiator hose at the side of the road, or drop the lower dash panel and replace a brake light switch on the way home from work. Limping home with failing clutch hydraulics or delicately driving around a dying transmission taught me mechanical sympathy, and when it was all working, it taught me the finer points of driving, like heel-toe downshifting or controlling a sweet skid. I only started to get right after spinning out in the rain, and finessed the ability in the snow.
In the nascent days of internet forums, you’d find guys all over the world who’d swear by these cars, touting their brilliant fundamentals and bombproof powertrains, even if they had their own idiosyncrasies to stay on top of. A lot of these guys only had old BMWs. That was their whole world. To drive anything else was inconceivable. It was part of their identity.
It became my identity.
In the years since, I’ve become rather sensitive about that, having something as simple as a car making up your identity. I’ve been trying to reject that, and even now after having owned a pile of these cars, I’ll still insist I’m not a “BMW guy” even though the cars they build just happen to align with what I think a car should be. I don’t even like being branded as a “car guy” at all, but that’s a separate discussion. I don’t want to be an easy-to-write-off, one-dimensional character, and I tend to call out others who made their car their identity in that same, shallow way that I did. It’s not who I am, and it shouldn’t be who you are, either.
But now, I find myself in a position where it would make a lot of sense to sell my old BMW — another black E28 — yet I’m really struggling with it specifically because it’s part of my identity. I’ve pretty much always had at least one of these cars. It’s my version of the default car, the standard by which all others are judged. Who am I without this car? I’ve heard more than once over the years “that car is so you,” and I don’t think it’s insane to want to express, you know, being me. I don’t think I’m coming that far out of left field saying it’s satisfying to have part of myself reflected and manifested in something tangible. As much as really try to downplay it, it helps that it’s kind of rad. Who will I be without that part of me?
I’ll probably just come back around to another one. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll change my identity, realize that my stupid BMWs have gotten me into a lot of trouble over the years, stop rationalizing an unhealthy addiction, and choose something different. Maybe I’ll buy something else, like a nice old Mercedes, and enjoy role-playing as someone better in something more respectable for a little while before eventually caving in to my base urges and buying yet another one of these damn things. That’s exactly what happened with my current E28.
I think there’s merit to them, obviously. The Ultimate Driving Machine wasn’t just a slogan, it was a statement of intent. They’re some of the best-driving cars ever built, and they were built well. Old BMWs may have their foibles, but they’re fundamentally tough cars. They have to be, in order to be driven they were meant to be driven, day after day, for decades. They’re not impractical, either; you can actually treat old BMWs as normal cars. Except normal cars that just have an extra something about them.
Old BMWs do a lot of things well. More than that, they’re a beacon of expression, even if I have conflicting opinions about the validity of that expression. They brought out parts of my personality I’m proud of, certain parts I’m less proud of, and acted as something of a mechanical manifestation of personality.
Maybe that’s it; maybe it’s the validation via machinery. Maybe it’s their distinct style, maybe it’s the sheer joy of driving them, maybe it’s a blend of all those things in a car that you can use. I can’t put my finger on it, but I’m not the only one. Lots of people have been infected by the intangible charm of old BMWs. A lot of discussions among like-minded wayward souls are almost like support group meetings … except we’re supporting each other in keeping the flame burning.
Despite all this waxing and wondering, I’ll say that If by some bizarre curse I had to drive only one car for the rest of my life, it’d without a doubt be an old BMW. Getting into an E28 after a years-long hiatus felt like coming home; like a warm handshake from an old friend. Even after driving almost everything under the sun — magnificent, monotonous, and everything in between — an old BMW just feels right.
