The special table
10/27/2024
For many, many years I have been keeping a "book" of the cars I have bought, driven and sold. At some point, I transferred the collected values to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (file extension XLS), which I have maintained ever since. This makes it easy to analyze the key data, but even without a lot of arithmetic, you immediately notice some things that you probably wouldn't remember so easily without a list.
For example, I have owned cars with 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 12 cylinders, but none with a ten-cylinder engine and none with fewer than three cylinders. But exactly 20 years ago I drove a Wankel sports car (Mazda RX-8). Diesel engines are clearly in the minority, and statistically speaking my preference is for petrol engines (ratio about 14:1).
Although I'm a big convertible fan, only a good fifth of the cars I've owned so far have been open-tops.
I have bought a handful of vehicle types twice, namely the Fiat 850 Spider, the Mazda MX-5, the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL (R107), the Honda NSX and the Peugeot 205 GTI, in each case at different intervals and for different reasons.
With the exception of a few Japanese, a Czech, an Australian and half an American and a Frenchman, all the cars I bought came from Germany, Great Britain or Italy.
Unfortunately, unlike the mileage, I didn't meticulously note the average fuel consumption, but it is surprising that a modern two-ton class estate car with over 300 hp and four-wheel drive hardly consumes any more fuel than a Fiat Panda with 45 hp did 40 years ago.
I've covered a total of around 1.05 million kilometers in my cars so far and spent huge sums on their purchase, some of which, of course, flowed back into my account when I sold them. I was only able to sell a few vehicles at a "profit", which would have been rather unusual for the many everyday cars. And from today's perspective, it is of course surprising how cheaply some of the then still young classics were available, which I naturally sold far too early, how could it be otherwise?
I kept trying out new technologies. My cars were equipped with a wide variety of transmissions (Multitronic, Selespeed, DSG, torque converter automatic, manual gearbox). Front-wheel, rear-wheel and all-wheel drive were used, as were naturally aspirated, turbocharged and supercharged engines. An above-average number of my vehicles had plastic bodies.
Of course, there are also some open points in my vehicle history. Not only is a ten-cylinder missing, but also a genuine pre-war car. I never owned a Jaguar or a Maserati, to name just a few examples. But there's still room for a few more cars on the list ...
