Started my car life with a Golf GTI MK6. It's DSG. Of course, it's a DSG because why on earth would FAW-VW make a manual. I was in my early 20s, and like everybody else who was also young, I was reckless . With all my savings in a stage 1 ECU tuning, stiffened up the suspensions with coilovers, high-performance brake pads, and AD-08R, I was all over the track. I literally was all over the place. Also did quite some mountain road driving until I had a major accident. It was expensive to fix and caused trauma to me, but the silver lining is, I gained a true friendship that is priceless.
Just when I got into my 30s, I thought I should have a mid-life crisis. So I got a 86/BRZ. Hadn't even got a chance to drift it before I relocated to the EU.
How time flies. I managed to get quite a few "exotic" cars (at least not easy to get your hands on in mainland China), like MX-5 ND soft top, M2 Competiton manual. Finally, I settled for a Cayman GTS 4.0 manual, which you also can't get in China. It's mid-engine, rear-wheel drive; it's 6-speed manual; it's 4-Liter flat-6 naturally aspirated; it's everything you could fancy about a proper sportscar. Really wanted to upgrade to an R8 RWD, but I was beaten by reality: even in the country where cars were invented, it's so densely populated that you hardly have any place or time to be able to truly enjoy the ride.
After 2018 or so, there are all kinds of bullshit like OPF and stuff like that which ruined the internal combustion engine. Cars were already getting heavier to pass regulations; now they are even taking away the sound, which is the soul of an ICE car , excuse me?
Looking back, it came to me that it's never about a particular car that interests me so much. It's all about the experience. The experience that the machines brought to me, the experience that I shared with those I loved, and the experience I wouldn 't have otherwise. I've always treasured the life we lived together, whether we were in just a base model Ford Focus or a fancy saloon. It doesn't matter. It just doesn't.
Now that I'm in my mid-30s and back in China, I've completely lost hope for cars (and life, for that matter). Ah, the good old days. It's so difficult that it nearly borders on impossible to get a real drivers' car with a proper NA and a stick shift, not to mention LSD and RWD. It makes me sad simply to think about it, but I have to say, it's the end of an era. Maybe the end was already there long ago; I just didn't have to courage to admit it.
I'm ordering a mid-sized SUV as the real mid-life crisis, perhaps as my last ICE car in this incarnation, too. It's a way to take a bow and say goodbye, to ICE cars, to my 20s, to youth . Like everything else, it has to end sometime, and unfortunately, the time is now. Just two days before I was about to pick up my goddamn SUV, I watched this movie. As a big man, I'm not ashamed to say that I cried multiple times. I'm being vulnerable here; I'm not afraid of it.
But my god, what a good way to say goodbye.
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