California trip report: Alfas, buying a car, smogging it, etc...

[Julyan Cartwright <julyan@domain.elided>]

Some of you may remember that about three weeks ago I was asking about buying
cars in the San Francisco area of the US. Well, I've just got back from ten
days in California, and I thought that as in past some of you from the US had
related your trips to Europe, someone might be interested in my European
perspective on Alfa and general car-related experiences in America. The
background is that my girlfriend has just moved to Livermore, a town on the
eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay Area, where she'll be based for the next
couple of years. I went over to help her sort out moving into her new flat and
to help her buy a car. In addition I took advantage of the trip to visit
people I know in the University of California (I'm a physicist), both in San
Francisco and in San Diego. 

I spent two days in San Diego and nearby La Jolla, and the rest of the time in 
the Bay Area. First impressions were that there are few Alfas and many
Japanese cars, ah and pickups, many pickups. Around La Jolla I noticed a
number of early Porsche 911s and 912s that would be considered rather
desirable cars in Europe, but from their condition appeared to be
considered merely old cars by their owners. I don't remember seeing any
Alfas there. I noted some Alfas around Livermore - one morning there was a
rather nice 164 in front of us as we drove towards the Lab where Ana
works. I also spotted some 105 spiders when driving around the Bay Area,
mostly from the late 70s and 80s. On my last day, driving to San Francisco
airport, we passed a very nice Giulia saloon. After hearing so much on
this list about the famous Alfa Parts Exchange, and being so near, I had
to go. Those you live near the place are very lucky to have an exclusively
Alfa breaker - it really is a mecca. I bought a handful of bits and bobs
for my 77 spider that I hadn't managed to obtain anywhere in Europe. 
(These parts caused some head scratching for the X-ray people at San Francisco 
airport on the way back. I don't think I could have built a bomb out of an
Alfa bonnet stay, door winder knob, throttle cable joint, and washer bottle
top, but they weren't taking any chances!)

There were a few things that struck me as really different, as someone
accustomed to the European car scene. First, as I said at the start, so
many pickups! Especially strange is what I might call the muscle-pickup,
which seems to come direct from the factory with a tweaked engine, lowered
suspension, wide wheels, etc. In Europe the manufacturers do this to
small and medium sized cars to create so-called hot-hatches. I would
have thought that a pickup modified in this way is neither very
proficient as a sports car nor as a work vehicle. Certainly the ones I saw
had spotlessly clean load beds that looked that they'd never carried
anything in their lives! Next, four-wheel drive vehicles with jacked up
suspensions - there were lots of these too. Why, I can't fathom out,
because you take something that's already less inherently stable than a
car (higher centre of gravity), and raise its centre of gravity even
more; I bet these things topple over a lot, both off-road and on the road.
I saw plenty of them being driven along the interstates at 65mph as if
they were normal commuting vehicles. Finally, and I know it's been
discussed here recently, but ... car bras. I just can't understand them.

My mission in the Bay Area was to buy Ana a cheap secondhand car to use at
weekends and on the days she doesn't feel like cycling to the lab. I had
to be mobile to go and look at cars so I hired one. National Car Rental in 
Livermore could only provide me with an automatic - an Oldsmobile something 
or other. Definitely very different to the cars I drive ever day - my Spider,
or my Karmann Ghia, or my Fiat 850. You see, they don't beep at me when I 
put the key in the ignition, or turn the engine on before buckling my
seatbelt, or open the door with the engine running. If it were my car I
would have strangled the loudspeaker!

What large annual mileages people in California do! I saw so many cars 
advertised with over 200 000 miles on them. And so much junk! I hadn't 
realized until I got there that in California they have strict emissions 
testing, but absolutely no mechanical roadworthiness test. I don't understand 
the logic of that, but the effect is that people have to keep the engine in 
good shape to pass emissions, but with everything else, anything goes - brakes,
suspension, tyres etc can all be completely worn out, and the car is still
in use on the roads. I find it a rather frightening thought.
I also arrived in California with the preconception many people (I think)
have in Europe that the streets there are paved with cheap used, and 
especially classic, cars. It just isn't true; in the Bay Area at least, used 
cars are relatively expensive. We had toyed with the idea of a
Spider, or a Karmann Ghia, or a Fiat 124 Spider - something like that - for
Ana. But the prices for comparable cars are similar to here in Europe. 
We wanted something really cheap - less that $2000 - that would be
reliable, would pass the emissions test, and had brakes, shock absorbers,
etc, intact. It had to be manual, and not too expensive to fix if
something breaks. Unlike in Europe, engine size is not a major preoccupation, 
because petrol costs per gallon about what it costs per litre here...
We preferred something European; this may just be European chauvinism, 
but in general I prefer European models to Japanese, except for specific 
Japanese cars, eg, Datsun 240Z, Toyota MR2, Mazda MX5 (Miata there)..., all 
of which were out of the price range. We also thought that if we could get a 
convertible it would be a bonus. 

It was rather difficult to find a cheap car in useable condition. We
eventually settled on a VW Golf Cabrio, an '85 model with 160 000
miles on it, which I bought for $1300 on the understanding that if it
didn't pass the emissions test I'd take it back. The car is not perfect by
any means, but was the best thing I could find at the price in the time
available. With it I had my first experience of California's emissions test -
so-called smogging. I asked the place I took it to to do a pretest, which
turned out to be a wise decision, because it failed... on the petrol cap!
California is a only place I know of that tests petrol caps. It seems like
a crazy thing to test until you think about it and realize how much raw
fuel must be lost to the atmosphere through leaking petrol caps. Anyway, I
went and bought a new cap, and the car sailed through the other tests,
which are very extensive - my girlfriend, who's a research chemist, was
rather impressed with the gas analysers they use to detect a whole
range of chemicals in the exhaust. They also test not just at idle, but
also at 3000 rpm. The guy testing told us that a significant proportion of
cars fail, which I can easily imagine, and what's more, the results are fed 
electronically into a central register, so there's little possibility of 
falsifying the test. 

So now Ana is mobile, and I shall be back in Livermore next year, in March 
or April. I'll consider whether to bring some bigger bits back with me
next time from Alfa Parts Exchange - it would be nice to have a spare
alloy wheel, for example. And does anyone know of a similar source for 
Karmann Ghia bits in the SF Bay Area?

Julyan


 Julyan Cartwright
Laboratorio de Estudios Cristalograficos,   
Instituto Andaluz de Ciencias de la Tierra (IACT), CSIC-Universidad de Granada,
Facultad de Ciencias, Campus Fuentenueva, E-18071 Granada, Spain.
tel    +34 958 243360,    fax +34 958 243384
e-mail julyan@domain.elided, WWW http://formentor.uib.es/~julyan/

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