Is It Finally Time to Sell the Clown Shoe? (This Time I Mean It!)

Get automotive news, DIY tips, market trends, in-depth car profiles, and more right in your email inbox. Within the past year, I've dropped the number of cars I own down from the nosebleed-inducing 14 to the only slightly less insane-sounding 11. This action came largely from the revelation last year that I basically wasn't driving the five cars in storage in the rented warehouse space in Monson, Massachusetts, which is an hour and 20 minutes west of me. First the Bavaria went, then the 1979 Euro 635CSi, and then early this spring, Bertha, the ratty-looking hot-rod 2002. All three buyers sent me updates and pics of them at events ranging from cars and coffees to multi-thousand-mile road trips, so all three cars seem to be out living their best lives. Everyone's happy, including the cars themselves. But, miraculously, I still had five cars in the Monson warehouse. This odd bit of automotive spatial allocation occurred because I never really had the storage space for 14 cars to begin with. There were two that sat outside all winter that really shouldn't have, and one that was fortunate enough to find space in my hundred-year-old neighbor Jeanette's garage. While the spaces in Monson cost me only $70 a month for each car, if you do the math, that's a not-cheap $4200 a year. I pay for the spaces in three-month increments, and I vowed that before the next bill came due, I'd whittle the five spaces down to three. So a few weeks ago, Maire Anne drove me and my friend Bob out to Monson, and we brought back the FrankenThirty (my E30 325is salvage car) and my 1999 BMW M Coupe (aka 'The Clown Shoe'). My logic here was that I kind of like the FrankenThirty's consummate rattyness and functionality. It's the perfect usable knock-around classic BMW, and I like having it at the house. It's got working air conditioning. I can drive it and park it anywhere and not worry about it. And it can sit outside in my driveway all summer. It only wound up in Monson because I drove it out there last fall to swap it for the 635CSi and bring it back for sale. The Clown Shoe, though, likely has a different future. The FrankenThirty and the Clown Shoe leave the Monson warehouse, one of them likely for the last time. Rob Siegel I've owned the M Coupe for nearly 20 years, which is absolutely unheard of for me. That longevity is exceeded only by the 40 years I've owned the 3.0CSi, the car that they'll either bury me in, or the creditors will pry out of my hands, whichever comes first. The explanation for why I've had the M Coupe for this long is an odd one. But maybe that's appropriate, because it is an odd car. The M Coupe was essentially skunk-worked when Dr. Burkhard Goschel, BMW's director of special vehicles, and his team took the recently introduced Z3 roadster and grafted on a roof and a hatchback. Cars are usually designed the opposite way—the sedan or coupe comes first, then the roof is removed, causing the chassis to lose its torsional rigidity and become a limp, twisty version of its former self. However, in this case, because the Z3 was designed as a roadster, a lot of work went into making it stiff, so adding the roof reportedly made it the stiffest BMW built to date. Further, because the Z3, for cost reasons, still had the old-style, trailing-arm rear suspension from the E30 3 Series, dropping in the 240-horse S52 engine from the E36 M3 produced a car that was direct and a little tail-happy, without the more forgiving capability of the multilink rear end from its E36 predecessor and E46 contemporaries. BMW built 2180 of the S52-equipped cars for the North American market's 1999 and 2000 model years. For 2001, though, BMW gave the M Coupe the significantly more powerful 315-horsepower engine from the new E46 M3. Only 678 M Coupes with that S54 engine were built for the North American market during 2000 and 2001. So in total, there were only 2858 North-American M Coupes. And, fun fact—like the Z3, all of these were built in North America—in BMW's plant in Greer, South Carolina. (Note that there's another variant—the non-M Z3 Coupe, of which 2071 NA cars were built. They look basically the same, but lack the deeply-dished staggered wheels.) Oh, that rear quarter view. Rob Siegel Most enthusiasts regard the M Coupe as a unique, aggressively styled modern classic and salivate over its fat 'planted' rear end, but when the car was released, its design was anything but universally loved, with many journalists and laypeople thinking that, not unlike my Lotus Europa, it looked like two different cars from the front and rear. I wasn't hard into one camp or the other, but when an M Coupe came up for sale in the winter of 2007 within striking distance of me in southeastern Massachusetts, I had to check it out. It was a silver 1999 S52 car with four bent wheels and in need of shocks and struts. I test-drove it, hit the highway, mashed the throttle, shifted from second to third gear, and found myself going 90. I was instantly in love. I still owned my 1982 Porsche 911SC and had just built the three-car garage, so I wasn't exactly flush with cash, and actually took out a loan to buy the M Coupe, which was unheard of. I paid more than I've paid for any other car, but by current standards it was a steal. When the M Coupe was released in 1999, the polite term the press used was 'polarizing.' Rob Siegel In 2011, funding at my longtime engineering job began to wobble, and to maintain financial stability, I needed to sell either the 911SC or the M Coupe. At the time, value-wise, they were worth about the same, which in both cases was about what I paid for them. I made what seemed to be the rational choice to sell the 911SC. After all, I'd owned it for a decade; it had 140,000 miles on it, the rebuild history of its engine was unknown, and it was beginning to leak oil past the seals on several of the oil return tubes that couldn't be replaced without pulling the heater boxes. And the studs and nuts holding them on had corroded with age and heat to the diameter of pencil lead, promising me evenings of agony if they broke. Plus, although I adored the SC, it felt very much like an old car of the same generation as my 3.0CSi and my 2002tii. In contrast, the M Coupe was like nothing else I owned, and felt three generations newer. Plus, the M Coupe was rare, whereas 911SCs were commodities—small-bumpered, long-hood 911s may have been worth a lot in 2011, but 911SCs and Carreras were still trading for used Accord money. The front-quarter view isn't quite as captivating as the rear quarter. Rob Siegel Oh boy, did I make the wrong choice. Six months after I sold it, everything air-cooled went nuts. To this date, selling the 911SC remains the worst automotive decision I've ever made. I mention this because ever since then, I've been terrified that the same thing will happen with the M Coupe—that I'll sell it, and the value of all of them, regardless of color and condition, will skyrocket as air-cooled 911s did. The exterior of the M Coupe gets a lot of press, but the cabin, with its retro hot-rod, chrome-ringed gauges, is very cool, too. Bryan Gerould I daily-drove the M Coupe frequently in nice weather, but as I did with the 911SC, I eventually put it on my Hagerty policy to lower the insurance cost. That meant no longer daily-driving it, so its use went down quite a bit. Other than running it back and forth between my house and storage in Fitchburg and then Monson, and keeping it exercised and inspected, the car has barely been used these past five years. Looking at the mileage on my title, I've only added 14,000 miles in the 20 years I've owned it. As much as I love the M Coupe—I definitely do the park it, walk away from it, look back at it, and say to myself, ' Damn, that's a cool car'—from an ownership standpoint, it's never really gotten into my bones the way some of the others have, and that's odd (there's that word again). It's fast, it handles fabulously, it's been rock-solid reliable, but its suspension is pretty stiff, and the heavily-bolstered seats are very stiff. This combination makes it not particularly comfortable for me to drive. Road trips are the big bonding experiences we have with cars, and the one thing resembling a road trip I ever took in the M Coupe was for a work-related event in New Jersey. After a few hours behind the wheel, my back was in agony. This ruled out any multi-day drives to Clown-Shoe-specific events. Over the years, with my worsening back issues, the detonation time for back pain has only become shorter—driving it back and forth to storage in central Massachusetts is about my limit. And while I can put pillows under my butt and behind my back, the seats are so narrow that it's a little awkward. And since, like many modern cars, the seat belt tensioners are integrated into the seat itself, it's not easy to simply replace the seats with comfy vintage Recaros, as I've done with many of my other cars. I don't think of it as a tiny car, but it is. Rob Siegel The cars that rocket up in value are generally those with a unique shape, a unique vibe, and were either made in small numbers or enough time has elapsed that most of them have turned to rust. The M Coupe certainly seems to qualify on those first three points. Not surprisingly, the ones that bring all the money are the rarer, faster S54 cars, particularly low-mileage examples in zingy colors with two-tone interiors. A titanium silver S52 car with a solid black interior like mine is the most common color combination, and seems to be worth about $25,000 depending on condition and mileage, and that number hasn't moved in years. It's unlikely to impact the value, but the car and I were part of a Hagerty-sponsored video with Magnus Walker five years ago, and that may be a compelling bit of history to the right buyer. Of course, what a car is really worth is determined by what someone is willing to pay for it, within an advertising time frame that's acceptable to you. A few years ago, a friend of mine said he wanted the car. I floated the $25K number; he seemed to be agreeable. I shot videos and walked right up to the water's edge of selling it to him… and then backed away. I just wasn't ready to do it. But I told him that he'd have dibs on it, so with my desire to simplify my automotive life a bit and pare down expenses, I contacted him again. 'Sure, let's do it,' he said. 'Great. Let me put together an updated description and send you the videos I shot last time.' 'You don't need to do that.' 'Yes I do. You should know what you're buying. It is a driver-quality car with a few small needs.' I sent him everything. Five minutes later, the phone rang. 'Yeah… about your asking price…' He named a ballpark price that wasn't unreasonable, but also said that he'd need to sell two cars to make it work on his end. So much for it being easy. As I wrote about in crushing detail here and here, it's a lot of work to sell a car. You need to address things that you'd be wiser to fix rather than apologize for (in my case, a driver's side window that occasionally loses its upper-limit stop, and a supplemental restraint light that's on due to a belt tensioner sensor), clean it all up, photograph it properly, write a complete and honest description so you're not wasting your time or anyone else's, decide on whether pursue a straight sale or an auction, set the thing in motion, and answer a lot of questions. For my last three sales, I had great luck with determining a fair price and then 'floating' the cars for sale on my Facebook page and enthusiast pages for the car, as well as for events I regularly attend. In all three cases, the cars quickly found homes at or near my asking price. I tried this with the M Coupe, got feedback that my asking price was on the money, but it didn't produce a potential buyer. So I put it on Facebook Marketplace, which I hate doing because you need to deal with all the 'IS IT AVAILABLE?' questions and the insulting sight-unseen offers. (Even though the first sentence of the ad said, 'SIGHT-UNSEEN OFFERS WILL BE IGNORED,' the first response simply read '$21K.' I'm not sure if the guy was trolling me or not.) We'll see what the future brings for the M Coupe. My metric is that if I have to price a car so low that if I saw it advertised somewhere for that price, I'd go look at it, then typically I'll just keep it. But I think that, as was the case with the Euro 635CSi, where it took several of those walks up to the water's edge before taking the plunge and selling it (and I laughed when I just discovered that I wrote this same article essentially three years ago), this time, it's for real. *** Rob's newly expanded book, The Best of The Hack Mechanic™: 40 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem , is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob's website, www.robsiegel.com.