Why I Sold My Dream Car

The 2021 Galvanic Gold BMW i3 Rex is the perfect version of what I considered the perfect car for me. As soon as I saw the vehicle for sale, I bought it for full price and shipped it cross-country, no questions asked. This was my Holy Grail of Holy Grails, a car I planned to keep for eternity. But recently, I sold it. Here’s why.

As a general rule, I like to learn from my mistakes, but when it comes to cars, I’ve made the same one four times now. That mistake is: When I find a car I really love, I buy the very best version of it, only to realize that, as strong as my love for the car is, it pales in comparison to my sentimentality and cheapness.

The first time this happened, the vehicle was a 1996 Jeep Cherokee XJ 5-speed. It was rust free, reasonably low-mileage, and it was the very first manual Jeep I had ever owned:

I bought it because it was cheap at $2,400 and, since I’d so loved my first Jeep — a 1992 Jeep Cherokee Laredo — I figured buying a “better” version would be smart. The issue was that I wasn’t able to let go of my first Jeep. It was the vehicle that had started it all, and I decided being able to hold onto my first vehicle outweighed the benefit of the rust-free rocker panels and 5-speed. Plus, someone offered me good money, which at the time was $3,750. So the 1996 XJ left, and my 1992 OG remains in the fleet.

Not much later, I managed to snag the true holy grail of XJs — a 1991 Jeep Cherokee Laredo 5-speed. Aside from a bad fender and a tweaked front axle, this Jeep was mint. It was basically a much cleaner, black version of my first Jeep, but with a 5-speed manual instead of a 4-speed automatic. It was the grail.

And yet, in the end, I once again couldn’t let go of my first car, and when the black XJ’s original owner offered me $7,000, I let the black beauty go.

Not long after buying that manual XJ, I bought a hyper-rare 5-speed 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee ZJ. I flew to Colorado with my buddy Brandon, we fixed the vehicle’s clutch, and then we drove all the way back to Detroit. I loved that Jeep so much that, when a reader emailed me about their low-mileage, minty-fresh manual Jeep ZJ for sale for a low $3000 figure, I couldn’t resist. I bought the ZJ, my colleague Brad drove it all thew way up from Reno, NV, and the Jeep was just fantastic.

But then I received two junk ZJs for about $1000 for the pair. They were both on their way to the scrapper — one due to rust and the other due to the previous owner having yanked out the manual transmission. I decided that, instead of keeping the minty ZJ, I’d turn the two junkers into one running ZJ, thereby helping keep one of these rare Holy Grails from the scrapyard. A $9,500 offer for the minty ZJ made this a no-brainer. (As shown in the image above, this owner has taken great care of it).

You would think that, after three examples of me deciding I preferred soul+cash over a minty fresh, Holy Grail version of a car I love, I would learn my lesson. But I’m afraid I did not.

In 2023, I moved to California and decided I wanted to drive an electric car. The only vehicle I was remotely interested in was the BMW i3, after Autopian contributor Thomas showed me its engineering geekery. I found the cheapest dealership-sold i3 in the country — a 2014 with 135,000 miles on the clock — and snagged it for $10,500. I received a free new high-voltage battery and compressor under warranty, and for a few years, I was absolutely in love with that gray, first-model-year i3.

I loved that gray i3 so much that…yep, you guessed it — I decided to look for the mintiest, ultimate version of the car. And I found it:

But this time was going to be different, I convinced myself. I was now a business owner and a married man with a serious daily commute in LA. I needed something reliable and efficient, and the i3 was perfect for the job. I made my affinity for this car clear many, many times to the point where I’m sure some of you, dear readers, were tired of hearing about Goldilocks:

Why, then, would I sell it?

Not too long after taking delivery of that amazing Galvanic Gold i3, my wife Elise (not her real name) and I were blessed to learn we’d be welcoming a baby into this world. At that moment, something in my brain changed. Especially with my wife’s company being absorbed and laying off much of its workforce, I began to feel an overwhelming responsibility for the wellbeing of this growing family. “Am I doing everything to ensure a great future for this family?” is a question that began cycling through my mind nonstop.

I put the i3 up for sale.

I’d just bought the vehicle for $30 grand and shipped it for $2000 and paid taxes and fees; I was probably in it for $36 big-ones or so. But the market at the time yielded a top offer of $28,000, which I — anxious about my incoming new baby — planned to accept. Then, at the last moment, and at the urging of Elise, I decided to keep the car, but only because I was somehow able to find the exact same car — likely the only other one in the world — mere miles away from the prospective buyer in San Francisco. (He bought it and is very happy).Whew. Talk about luck!

Six months later my ’21 BMW i3S, which gets about 5mi/kWh in the city and 3.5 on the highway, remains one of the best cars I’ve EVER driven.

Why? Because of how beautifully it fulfills its intended function (be the ultimate city car) without being boring.

I remain obsessed. https://t.co/U2ap9GJQVn

— David Tracy (@davidntracy) December 9, 2024

I pulled the i3S off the market and drove it for two years, even taking my baby home from the hospital in it. I was in love. But as time trudged on, my love for the i3 changed. I found myself afraid to scratch the car while I daily drove it through LA’s treacherous streets, and I worried about Elise scratching the rims like she tends to with her Lexus RX. I also couldn’t help but ruminate on that question: “Am I doing everything to ensure a great future for this family?” Over and over again that question would pop up in my mind, scores of times a day. And though I was being responsible in many ways, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the gold i3 was serving me more than it was serving my family.

Yes, I needed a commuter vehicle, and yes, ideally it’d be one I like, but did I need the BMW i3? What was the opportunity cost associated with the car? And not just the car, in all of the decisions I was making in life; this is how I began to think once Delmar entered this world. Every decision I made bore scrutiny like never before. Before I knew it, these thoughts led me to see the i3 through a different lens. This was a car I was constantly worried about damaging, one that I wasn’t comfortable with my own wife and child borrowing, and one whose value may be too high for a cheap bastard like me to continue driving.

I feared that selling the Gold i3 would be a mistake — a decision I would regret for years to come, and so the process of letting it go took a while. I listed it for far too much money, then got some interest, was unwilling to negotiate to a reasonable price point, and ultimately denied offers for months. A couple of months ago, I finally changed my mind; I messaged the gentleman (Nathan) who had been interested in the car, accepted his reasonable offer, and boom: My dream car was gone.

It’s been a month since my i3 Holy Grail left me on its way to Colorado, and at no point have I ever felt even an ounce of regret. Why? Because, just prior to selling my beloved Gold i3S, I took the Amtrak Surfliner to San Diego…

…to purchase this:

I know, I know: It’s not Gold, it’s a 2014 and not a 2021 so its range is about half that of the gold car, and it’s got about 90,000 more miles on it. And yet, after purchasing the car I found myself driving up the 405 with a grin from ear to ear.

I adore this car, easily as much as I adored the gold car. I wasn’t expecting that.

 

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The 2014 BMW i3 is, on paper, a huge downgrade. It’s gray instead of the nice gold, it has less range, the exterior has some scratches and dings, it has much less time/mileage left on its extensive PZEV warranty, and overall it just doesn’t look as cool.

But from where I sat in the cabin, it felt exactly the same — possibly even nicer. The interior is in beautiful condition, and has brighter leather than the post-LCI i3(LCI means “mid-cycle refresh” in BMW-talk), whose brown is a bit dull. The gray i3 also has a compass in the mirror, netting at the back of the front seats, and a bunch of other nice features removed from the i3 as part of a clear cost-reduction exercise. What’s more, the 2014 feels better built, with better fitment of the panels and fewer squeaks:

Also, the ride is much less brutal than the i3S, the steering radius is tighter, and the car can go farther on a given amount of energy due to skinnier tires and efficiency-focused aerodynamics. Whereas the i3S tries to add sportiness to the i3 formula, this i3 Electronaut is as pure of a city car as it gets.

There’s still a lot more I need to do to get my new i3 up to snuff. It’s got some issues that need to be repaired (including lots of cracked rubber seals), and while I plan to address all those problems in a future story, the fact that I was able to snag this 2014 BMW i3 Electronaut Edition for $4,250 (after $1000 rebate from my power company), and still have $30,000 left over from my Goldilocks sale made this a total no-brainer.

I adore the gold i3 for its looks, range, the ability to precondition the cabin on a hot day via an app, and its minty shape, but there are so many attributes about the 2014 that I love, too. I love that each of the four wheels is unique (this means the wheels appear to be “pointing” in the same direction regardless of what side you’re looking at), I love that it’s the only model year with body-colored exterior mirrors, I love the brighter interior, I love the little niceties like the mirror-compass and behind-seat cargo netting, and I love the fact that this is the O.G. Electronaut Edition 2014 (Electronaut Edition i3s were the first i3s sold stateside, offered only to BMW owners who had driven the experimental ActiveE that BMW used to help develop the i3).

Today I got back home from work, and my wife — smile beaming across her beautiful face — told me all about how well our son had done in his ISR swimming class. These are classes that help babies as young as 6 months learn how to reach the edge of a pool or how to float on their backs in case they find themselves in water. Does my child absolutely need this? Probably not, and it is expensive. But it’s a skill, it helps Elise feel at ease, and Delmar is starting to like it more and more.

This is what I want to spend my money on: My child’s development. No, keeping the gold i3 wasn’t going to break us, but no matter what I did, I could never get around the realization that goldilocks was an unnecessary luxury that was more of a burden than it was a joy. I was overprotective of it, and I was always worried about it depreciating if I scratched it or drove it too much.

The delta in price between my i3s was $30,000. But if you factor in registration and insurance costs over the next 10 years, the Gold i3 was going to cost my family $45,000 more. To me, the benefits — extra range, a nice gold color, a longer warranty, nicer overall condition, a bit more reliability, a stiff suspension, and a preconditioning app — weren’t worth it, especially given that I plan to make some modifications to my Electronaut to make it feel less like a downgrade.

More on that soon.

Top graphic images: author