[V8] car pondering before our next blizzard

[Roger M. Woodbury]

We're getting mega snow tonight, perhaps two feet.  It was minus 24 this 
morning according to my weather station, and I am pondering changing our 
aging Audis to something else.  Again....as you know, I do this often, 
especially when I am cooped up in the winter.

Anyway, we could easily go to only one car in the household. My wife 
really prefers to NOT drive, so I do most of the driving and errand 
running.  Our car travel is fairly limited and we don't drive a lot of 
places unless we are going somewhere over night, or for a long day trip, 
which doesn't happen often.  The station wagon is long in the tooth, but 
runs exceptionally well. It needs to be cosmetically restored, which is 
a couple of grand, arguably more than the car is really worth in the 
market. The V8 Quattro is resting in the garage and I am debating 
whether to put it back on the road at all.

Soooo.  We could do very well with some sort of four door coupe that 
would replace the V8 and the '94 100 CS Avant.  So I have been looking 
at the options.  let me say at the outset that I will NOT buy a SUV 
because they do not offer enough room over a station wagon to justify 
the bulk and besides, they're uniformly ugly.

There are very few station wagons even being built now.  But there are 
more and more four door coupe styled cars that are a bit interesting. I 
spent some time on Youtube this morning watching some of the reviews of 
those cars.  The Audi A7, the Mercedes CLS, the BMW S6, etc.

Nope. They don't work for me at all.  The reason all of those things 
don't work for me, is they are absolutely LOADED with all sorts of 
electronic gizzies and "techi stuff" that I have zero need for and 100% 
certainty that they will cease to work at around fifty-thousand miles.  
And that stuff is VERY expensive.  Stangely enough the one car that does 
seem to have some attaction for me, is something I have never actually 
seen "in the flesh" and is not even being built any more.

I am speaking of the Acura ZDX. That car is a sort of odd 
duck....interesting looking and different from the rest. Mixed to 
hostile reviews based on the simple fact that it was not a SUV. That 
complaint seems strange, because that simple fact should have been 
obvious.  Yes, some limitations, chiefly related to rear visibility, but 
since I use my outside mirrors to back with all the time anyway, I fail 
to see the problem.  At some point I need to go on a road trip to find 
one of those things to actually look at in person.  I should also do 
that with the Audi A7, which is the one four door coupe that seems to 
actually work pretty well, although I am still sure that all that 
electronic gizzie stuff in a German car is worthless.  At least in a 
Japanese car, the electronic stuff might actually work for a while!

Then naturally, is the other alternative.  That is just sprucing up the 
station wagon we've got and using it as the "beater" car, driving it 
when the weather is bad or when we need to go to Sam's. And keeping the 
V8 for those nice day or longer road trips.  No particular electronics 
in either of those two cars to fail and when something does fail, it's 
possible to have it repaired without a cardiac machine hooked up to it 
and purchase of a seven thousand dollar "module" to make the radio work 
or transmission to shift.

But I'm still curious about the ZDX and am watching the prices come down.

Roger

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