I sold the Vanden Plas earlier today for just a smidgen more than I paid for it. I like the car and felt it was good value, but I’m going to stick to genuinely old stuff for the time being.

I’ve been doing some long-delayed work on the ’63 MGB–I’ll post a roundup of what’s been happening under that bonnet in the next day or so.

Generally speaking, I’m very pleased with the Vanden Plas. I’ve put a few thousand miles on it and it has returned a rock steady 23 MPG — overall. On the highway it gets very close to 30 MPG.

Two incidents have cropped up, one was a “check engine” light indicating (according to my scanner) that the secondary catalyst was under-performing. I cleared the code and it has not reappeared. The other is an ongoing issue which first cropped up about two weeks ago. The car developed a fairly severe misfire, running on five cylinders intermittently. Eventually it threw a code for “engine misfires out of range” or some such, with specifically “misfire on cylinder 3.” I replaced the plugs and the problem mostly went away, though it will still misfire occasionally at idle when warm. I suspect the coil pack on cylinder 3 is near the end of its life and the new plugs helped but didn’t solve the problem.

Coil packs are, sit down, $480 at the dealer (there are six on the car), but you can find them for about $190 each online. I think I will buy one and see if replacing cylinder 3′s pack completely cures the problem.

What was interesting was that the car didn’t throw a code until it was running very poorly indeed. Having a scanner and an OBD-II capable car is a different experience for me. There’s quite a bit you can learn from the port while the car’s running.

I picked this car up on Saturday with the help of my friend Jeff. Seems like a good machine so far, the usual “oh my god, what have I done” moment hasn’t yet arrived (you’ll know when it does). I even got 28 MPG on the trip back!

So far the punch list of things to take care of includes:

• The right corner of the front bumper has a good scrape in the paint, plus a broken lens on the fog light. Perhaps a coyote which is no longer of this vale, or a chunk-o-debris.
• The paint (the color seems to be “Nautilus,” which amuses me for whatever reason) is in decent condition, but could use a polish to remove a few “sure, put the grocery bags here” scratches.

• The driver’s door trim is loose as all of the snap fasteners are broken. This is common when you take interior trim off–the fasteners rarely come off in one piece. Be interesting to know why someone poked around in there…
• The clock doesn’t work, which is a common problem on these cars–the ribbon cable loses contact with the LCD. Cure is a piece of cardboard crammed behind the cable. Unfortunately, it means dismantling a few things to get the cardboard into place…

Anyway, it seems like a decent car. Drives very nicely. Considering the beat-up MGB GTs I was looking at for this price, I couldn’t be more pleased.

Consider: This car was $69,000 new in 1996 (in today’s dollars, that’s about $90,000). I’m paying almost exactly 5% of the 1996 price for this car, in 2008. That depreciation is absolutely mind-boggling; in constant dollars, the car essentially lost 97% of its value in a bit more than a decade. Much as I love Jaguars, I cannot imagine buying one new unless I had chests of gold doubloons.

This Vanden Plas is not absolutely perfect, but it is in very nice condition, with 84,000 miles. I think it’s “Kingfisher Blue,” which is a darkish blue-green, depending on the light. The inside has all the usual excess, including lambswool over-rugs and picnic tables for those carefree afternoons picnicking in wine country gorging on gut bombs at the drive-in. It’s also the long-wheelbase version, which means the rear doors are about ten feet long.