[MRM]

The E-Type also inadvertently lead me to my 911. Back in the late 90s I was finally at the point where my wife and I felt comfortable getting a sports car. I've always thought the E-Type is one of the most beautiful cars in the world (who doesn't?) so it was definitely high on the list. One day when I was traveling I drove past a Series II version in pretty good shape with a note on the window advertising it for about $20,000, which was a solid but not spectacular price at the time for a solid but not spectacular car.

I was immediately smitten and went home to my AOL dial-up link to dream over E-Types. Back in the early days of the internet there really were some nice enthusiast sites with good information written by people who wanted nothing more than to share their passion. So I found and bookmarked every E-Type site I could find. Everyone said the same thing: E-Types get a bad rap for reliability because people who drive them don't know how to maintain them. They just need a little more attention and they'll be fine. I was totally falling for that line when I found an article written by a Jag enthusiast trying to make the point about E-Type maintenance = E-Type reliability. He wrote up a little maintenance manual of things you needed to do yearly, a couple of times a year, monthly, weekly, and then he got down to things you needed to do every time you drove it. At that point I decided that the Jag enthusiasts weren't describing maintenance, they were completing ongoing repairs.

So after a bit of research on reliable sports cars, I returned to my other first love and bought my 911 where maintenance and reliability mean the same in German and American English. British English appears to use the same words in a different way.