On the Road or In the Hole
Why I Splurged for a City Car
Why I Splurged for a City Car
My one bedroom apartment in Manhattan is in the quaint yet convenient West Village neighborhood downtown. My home is also the size of my mom’s kitchen in the suburbs, but that’s another story. I live two blocks from a local subway station, six blocks from an express station, and near three bike share docking stations. I have Lyft, Juno and Via ready to go, but I mostly use Curb which lets me pay for yellow cabs. I work from home, live by myself, and do most of my socializing in my walkable downtown neighborhood. Between work, the gym and a local bar, I usually don’t make it more than half a mile from home. My building has no driveway or garage. Available street parking is always jammed, so not really available. The closest parking garages start at $700 a month, which is more than a monthly payment on a luxury car . Everything I want to buy can be delivered to my door via internet magic, or I can pick it up on foot — and since my apartment is smaller than a suburban kitchen, I don’t own much beyond some furniture, a few garments and food. I enjoy a minimalist lifestyle supplemented by relatively cheap public transportation and my legs. The smart thing to do here is get a car.
OK no. For the past 20 years since I moved to Manhattan I haven’t owned a car despite loving all things automotive. There’s a new Mustang GT performance pack 2 with over 450 horsepower? That sounds like fun I’ll never have. BMW is now going back to soft top convertibles? Seems perfect, but, to me, a fantasy. You see the logic: it’s crazy expensive to park in the city, you don’t need a car to get where you want to go, when you do travel long distances you take a plane, train or bus, and who the hell knows where to have your car serviced? I know exactly where to buy a classic martini mixed by a guy who looks like he’s stepped through a wormhole from 1925. Seriously. Employees Only makes a nifty cocktail, but where do you find replacement wiper blades in Manhattan? Is there a boutique for them in Soho?
So I said no to car ownership. But time exerts its own gravity. While Manhattan is endlessly sleeplessly fun, working from home by yourself in a small island 2 miles wide by 12 miles long can feel like a gilded jail — albeit with high end cocktails. A man with blood in his veins needs fresh country air and the fear of speeding tickets to feel alive.
But aren’t we living in the millennial future where we share our workspaces, share our lawn mowers (if that ever happened), share our most personal data with oligarchs in Palo Alto? Why not share a car? Unfortunately New York State doesn’t allow Turo, the Airbnb of cars. I tried it once in neighboring New Jersey, it involved taking a creaking PATH train to and from Jersey City, waiting on a street corner for a guy to show up in a detuned BMW 328i with no GPS that cost me $340 for a one night trip upstate. Not doing that again.
SilverCar, ZipCar and Maven start at $150 a day for their least fun cars, but when I drive I want it to be an event. I want it to be awesome. It’s like taking in a Broadway show. You go rarely, it’s expensive, you want to laugh and cry and wish you did it more often.
Recently I rented a Mustang Ecoboost from Avis for another day trip upstate. Even with the smaller V6 non-performance pack engine, the Mustang has pep on country roads. Yet it set me back over $260 for 12 hours. It also included a fee for using their E-Zpass. Then I had to wake up early and drive the car back to the midtown garage the next morning, in a rainstorm.
While the sharing economy is nice when it comes to bikes and sardine-like office space with craft beer, I prefer the On Demand model for car ownership. It’s crazy expensive to keep a car in Manhattan, but if you use it two or three weekends a month it beats renting. And you never, ever have to pay a fee for paying tolls, which is a maddening meta fee that makes me want to go all Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on whomever it is who runs Avis. (I looked it up. Ronald L. Nelson is the Avis Budget Group CEO who works not far from me in Parsippany, New Jersey. He’s been on the job a whopping 12 years, so either he’s doing something right or it’s time to go. Ron, if you can hear me, please drop the fee for using E-ZPass. How many yachts do you really need in Parsippany? I’m saying none since it’s landlocked.)
Instead of Ron’s gouging you each time you see a transponder, with car ownership you get the pleasure of being nickel and dimed by the great City of New York. There are registration costs, sales taxes, parking tickets, moving violations and garage taxes, as God intended it. I did the math and made the decision that instead of renting, I’d buy a car.
Here’s the problem. If you don’t own a car it’s hard to buy a car. You can’t drive to dealerships in a suburban lot where a person in a suit will get you in a car. You can’t drive to someone’s house who’s selling their car on Craigslist, you probably can’t even do a test drive in the few dealerships in town that are near subways. I didn’t try because I don’t want a new car. New cars are a crazy waste of money. (The “that’s too expensive” hypocrisy now commences.)
After spending an embarrassing amount of time searching for the perfect ride on Autotrader.com, Cars.com and CarGurus.com, including wasting car buying advisor Tom McParland’s valuable phone time by indulging my fantasy of sourcing a used 911 — wait, I need special car insurance and I can’t park it without paying exotic car garage fees? Do these people think I’m made of money? I quickly narrowed my options to buying on Carvana.com — they deliver the car to you — or taking over someone’s lease they can’t afford via Swapalease.com. That narrowed things down a bit. And now to narrow it down further: the car has to be a manual. Driving is for crying and laughing, remember?
If you want a manual this means you’re buying a muscle car on Carvana. I have a soft spot for Challengers and Mustangs because they’re awesome. But in Manhattan streets they’re unwieldy for parallel parking. I’m also a 45-year-old self-described woke male who reads actual books. Can I really own a Challenger? Am I a Challenger? And do I even want to commit to owning a car when the last time I had one Bill Clinton was in the White House?
That narrowed it further down to Swapalease.com, where people who want to dump their leases peddle their cars online. They pay to list and it costs $60 for shoppers like me to contact them. I balked at the join fees, but the next day a friendly saleswoman named Laurie emailed me and offered me a registration for $45. Deal. It didn’t take long to browse the few manuals listed — lots of Minis and a few Japanese sedans, which always seem beige despite their color. I found a BMW 340i Xdrive with 12 months left on the lease. Perfect for an extended test drive. The current leaseholder was in Boulder, Colorado. He seemed to keep it in great condition — he better, it’s BMW’s car not his — and it had the critical phallic appendage I must have in my hands at all times. Two if you count the emergency brake.
He offered one month payment as an incentive, which basically meant I’d have payments of under $500 and can drive 1,000 miles a month. For a lightly used manual BMW 340i AWD, and a sparkling clean vehicle inspection by a local dealership whom I talked to, twice, it was game on. I was going to get a great deal and the car I wanted — without the commitment.
I pulled the trigger. Three weeks of back and forth emailing, texts and phone calls later, and after lots and lots of unexpected fees, I now have a car sitting in a garage that I rarely visit. For some reason Swapalease doesn’t mention the following fees I wound up paying, perhaps they asked Ron from Avis for business advice. Let me break it down for you.
BMW lease application and credit check fee: $537.50, which I split with the lease holder so that’s $268.75 for me
First month lease: $447.48, but the lease holder gave me a prorated credit as an incentive (much of that time was eaten up with transport) of $245.42, so, that knocks me down to $202.06
New York State lease sales tax: $489.10
Shipping the car from Boulder to my uncle’s driveway in suburban New York, which I then had to take a commuter train to get to: $860.00
Registering the car in New York State: $219.00
Removing window tinting I never noticed in order to get NY State inspection stickers: $125, including a free 80 minute wait by the side of a strip mall. In the rain. It always rains when I deal with cars.
Geico insurance: $161.50/month
New York Safe Drivers Course: $24 and six hours of my life I’ll never get back, for a measly $76 reduction on six months of insurance. Never do this unless you have points to knock down.
$410 for the cheapest monthly parking I can find within walking distance of home. If you’re a Manhattan resident, you can apply online for a small reduction in monthly taxes.
One month: it took so much back and forth with the seller, the inspection, BMW financial services, shipping, and more that by the time I got the car, only 11 months remained on the lease.
Subtotal to have the car in possession: $2,760
When I learned I could reduce my garage taxes from 19% to 10%, I decided to park on the street for a few weeks while waiting for the New York City paperwork. This tax reduction would save me roughly $30 a month on parking, that’s $330! I immediately got a ticket for $65 after not seeing a parking sign on a dark street. That means I definitely couldn’t park in a garage until I got the tax waiver, because that $65 would really be $95 if you do the math. This is how my brain works. It hurts often.
So for nearly three grand I get a luxury car for 11 months that costs me roughly $1,000 a month for lease, insurance and parking. But c’mon people, I have a car! So far I’ve impressed my brother’s 7- and 4-year-old kids who liked the radio. Then I had the pleasure of driving home in holiday traffic to eat in my mom’s kitchen, which I can technically live in without visiting the rest of house. Worth every penny.
— Zachary Thacher