5. It's way cheaper than you think.

We all understand depreciation. It's the free market's way of telling you that the shiny thing that everyone wanted yesterday is now worthless because a new shiny thing that blows it out of the water just dropped this morning, and you're a big fat nothing if you don't drop everything and get it NOW. This makes things very interesting in the used car market. The values most affected are those of luxury cars due to low demand, high production numbers, and a clientele more fragile than the skin-like membrane wrapped around the indestructible exoskeleton of Kim Kardashian's offspring.

4. Cheap stuff is oddly expensive.

Although the car was cheap in the long run, things that were supposed to be cheap in any other car suddenly became made of some rare isotope of unobtainium. I wanted to get a set of keys made for the car, since I only had one. I went to the local locksmith with a used key from a previous ignition that I wanted re-coded for my car, and they acted as if I just ordered them to predict winning lottery numbers at gunpoint. My keys were laser cut and one-time dealer encoded, meaning that no one else could ever re-encode them, so it meant my spare key was now as good as the rocks the store so eloquently told me to kick. After reaching out to the Mercedes dealership, a factory-cut key would be $400. That's only 10 times what a regular transponder key would've cost. That's a steep price to pay for something that will literally sit in a drawer and collect dust until the batteries die.


3. It's surprisingly easy to repair.

Although this car had over 200 patents filed for its various features before its initial release, mechanically it's no more complex than a medium-sized birdhouse. All of the interior is held on with either clips or small torx screws, and exterior panels all have cleary visible bolts with lots of clearance for tools. The engine is a big, lazy single overhead cam V8 with two spark plugs per cylinder and an air filter and ducting assembly that requires no tools to remove. There aren't any expensive timing belt services to do and no expensive turbos or superchargers to blow expensive and hard-to-reach seals. The air suspension consists of 3 bolts at the top with an air line connection and one bolt on the bottom. I priced out the labor a local shop would charge to replace a rear air shock assembly, and instead of giving me a price that resembled my phone number, they told me $70, and it was done in a few hours.

2. You're going to be a jerk to some people, no matter what.

To outline this point, I'll illustrate a few actual scenarios that have happened to me:

I parked my car near the post office on a busy street, got out and proceeded to retrieve my packages from the backseat. An SUV with more primer than paint, chrome rims from the wrong end of 2001, and altezza taillights rolled up. A guy resembling a halfway point between a loan shark and an actual shark rolled down the window and said the following:

"Hey man! Hey....listen, my wife is in the hospital and I need some cash to get her out. I got my kids here, you think you could give me a little something to keep me going?" He then proceeded to roll down the window and showed me what looked to be either scared biological children or relatively well-behaved hostages. I told him I didn't have any cash on me, which I didn't, and he promptly rolled his eyes, told me to "have a nice fucking day" and drove away, nearly running a red light in the process.

Let me reiterate: This was a populated street, in which he could've asked anyone and didn't need to stop at my rejection. But here I was, with a shiny German luxury car in a sea of dented Accords and used Mazdas, and as the luck of the draw would have it, I got randomly selected by this guy to fund his wife's medical bills. How serendipitous.


1. What you're driving is still better than most of the cars on the road today.

There are lots of things technology can account for and improve on as time goes on, but there are still things that are clearly better when you buy a car with a high standard of luxury and an emphasis on build quality - things that a luxury car maker can afford to do that another cost-cutting company wouldn't. For instance, my 14-year old Mercedes has double-paned glass for sound insulation with a layer of air in between so the windows don't fog up. There are rear vanity mirrors, and as many air vents for the backseats as there are for the front seats, with a independently-controlled zone for each corner. The rear headrests are air-powered and automatically extend when a person in that seat buckles their seatbelt. The audio system detects the noise inside the cabin and adjusts the volume automatically. It even has a strip of fabric that prevents things from falling in between the console and the seat.

The car will do 0-60 in about 6 seconds, and the cabin is quiet enough to whisper to the passengers in the backseat during a full-beans launch, but your efforts will have been in vain, for the air-powered lumbar support and reclining seats have all but guaranteed that they'd be fast asleep before you hit the go pedal. This is the kind of car that's available to anyone for half the price of a used economy car, and not only will everyone think you're rich, you'll be so refreshed and ambitious at the end of your journey that you'll act the part.