Three cars, 1.7 million miles, one shooter: How the high-mileage issue of Hemmings Sports and Exotics came to be

Steve Stachowski’s 788,000-mile 1984 VW Rabbit GTI. Photos by author.

It started, as is often the case, with a recommendation. I am always telling owners of nice cars that I shoot that I’m looking for more. Usually I don’t hear back, or their recommendations are in a place that I am not traveling to anytime this decade. Occasionally I get lucky, and the new issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car is one of those times. In mid-2013, the owner of a couple of nice Oldsmobiles that were featured in Hemmings Classic Car shot me an email:

I ran into a friend at [a car] show and we were talking about you [Hemmings] folks.  He is the original owner of an original (including engine and transmission) 1984 VW Rabbit “GTI” with 782,000 miles on it! Told him I would mention it to you.

Editor LaChance approved, and suggested scaring up some more high-mileage cars for an issue theme. It wasn’t a front-burner suggestion, but from there, things fell (slowly) into my lap. A trip to LA earlier this year nabbed both the GTI in question and a lead on another high-mileage car in my neighborhood. On the cusp of summer, I caught up with it: an Acura Legend that has long since gone past half a million miles. It’s a ’94 coupe with a 6-speed, and though some may pooh-pooh it as being too new, it’s still a manually-shifted coupe–a vehicle that (unless it’s a Mustang or Camaro) is far too rare on our roads these days. That it is pushing 600K now, I suspect, would make it a vehicle of interest regardless of year, body type and country of origin. (Editor’s Note: look for Mark McCourt’s in-depth piece on the Acura in tomorrow’s Hemmings Blog.)

In between, a chance email with someone else netted me a 220,000-mile Citroen SM–a car that, with that perfect blend of Italian technology and French build quality, is not the sort of car you’d think would be approaching a quarter-million miles. It lives in the Pacific Northwest–not a place I get to frequently, but by coincidence, I would be nearby visiting family this past spring; I captured the SM, running quite happily, then.

Tyson Hugie’s 530,000-mile 1994 Acura Legend Coupe.

But the GTI was the trigger for the piece, and the most brightly colored; thus, it had the greatest cover potential of the three. So of course the GTI was the one that was shot in the rain. No precipitation in California for months, and my trip ends up smack-dab in the middle of it. My hope (and contention) is that, beyond giving a different look and mood to the shoot, shooting in the rain would somehow help convey the idea that this is a go-anywhere-at-any-time kind of car, one that is cared for but not so babied that it can’t stand a speck of moisture. (Action shots in the rain would also have conveyed this, but for reasons too dreary to get into, that didn’t happen either.) When the November issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car lands in your mailbox, you can be the judge.

But the sad truth is this: this rainy morning was the only opportunity I had to shoot that particular GTI … the rest of my week was booked up with shoots. One of my cameras stopped working mid-shoot, despite draping a plastic bag over the body. (Mercifully, it later dried out with no ill effects.) Hilariously, it rained for exactly as long as it took me to take those photos; when the sun came out, it was too high in the sky to make things look decent. My hotel had a covered veranda, and we shot interior and engine shots there. The rain had stopped by then, of course. I almost didn’t get a head cold afterwards. (The Legend was shot at sunset in a nearby park and was incident-free, save for some mountain-biking knuckleheads who wanted in on my shots; the SM was similarly placid, but the annoyingly variable cloud cover at our Pacific NW location made things seem far more sullen than they actually were on the day.)

Douglas Breithaupt’s 227,043 mile 1972 Citroën SM.

Color me surprised when I managed to get cars of different countries, photographed in different states, painted very different hues, within a couple of months of each other despite being nowhere near each other. In retrospect, all offer front-wheel-drive, a single passenger door on each side of the body and a manual shift, but that, and their owners’ careful attention to maintenance details, are about all that these three have in common. Sometimes, you just get lucky.