What's shiny and new today is tomorrow's rust. Nothing lasts forever, of course, but in the land of rust it lasts considerably less than that.
Road salt accelerates the process, but rust is the inevitable product of air and water meeting steel.
People often talk about rust the same way they talk about cancer. For a car, at least, a diagnosis is the beginning of the end, the start of a one-way trip to that big junkyard in the sky. But comparing the death of a machine with that of a person is too dramatic. Cars aren't intelligent, at least not yet, so let's save the cancer metaphor for 2040.
Instead, think of rust as planned obsolesence, courtesy of Mother Nature. In the same way Apple keeps updating its software to make old iPhones grind to an infuriating halt, air and water constantly whittle steel into rust.
There have been some famously rusty cars: the Hyundai Pony, for one; most Italian machinery of a certain age, but especially the 1972 Lancia Beta, which was a shame because the coupe was beautiful.
In an informal poll of Globe readers asked to pick their 10 worst cars, rust comes up a lot. Lada had "non-existent rust proofing." A Chevy Vega owner reviewed the car simply: "Rust galore!" The Ford Mustang II, wrote Peter Cheney, was a "rust bucket." Not even Rolls-Royce is immune, with the 1975 Camargue making the list for "problems that included rusting sills and strangely placed fuel-filler."
The solution is to not worry about rust, to keep a cool indifferent detachment to your car at all times. This comes naturally for some, the same people who drive 20,000 kilometres before an oil change, I imagine. But it doesn't come easily for others. For the record, I am not one of those weirdos (sorry!) who names their cars as though it's a pet. I feel about my car like people feel about their childhood home: It's not the bricks and mortar you're attached to, but the history and memories in them, and, then, inevitably, you become attached by association to the bricks and mortar, too.
All this is to justify why I'm buying a used car from the southern United States at a time when our low loonie makes finding a good deal impossible.
This car has no rust, you see. It's never seen rust. It doesn't even know what rust looks like. It won't last forever – I'm not that stupid – but it might survive a little longer than its rust-belt peers.
In a year of searching, I couldn't find a clean 2001 BMW M5 with the colour and options I wanted. So I went shopping in the land without rust and quickly found what I was looking for.
Can we start a petition to ban road salt in Ontario? Let's use dirt, or sand, or anything else. Please?
Thanks to the wonderful rule that lets Canadians import nearly any car 15 years or older, the import process should be relatively painless. Of course, that doesn't mean it's fast. So far, getting the paperwork together to export the car from the United States is proving to be the most arduous part. Bringing it into Canada is mostly a matter of paying lots of tax.
If anyone has any experience buying and importing cars from America, we're curious to hear your horror stories and hard-won wisdom.
The M5 isn't here yet. A professional is handling the shipping and importation. The wait is excruciating. Until it's parked outside my place, it isn't real. Many things could still go wrong. It could even have some undisclosed patch of rust. Oh, God.
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