Nostalgia. The good old days. This past very hot weekend, I was thinking of those good old days and decided that I have it really good now and those days weren't so good, at least when it came to cars. My first BMW was purchased in 1967 and it was the initial version of the small 2-door that became the 2002 in 1968. Mine was a 1600. I have been a BMW owner continuously since that first purchase.

The 1600 didn't have air conditioning. It didn't have very good air circulation in the car either. That meant that when it got hot, the windows were rolled down. The only windows that did go down were in the doors, the rear windows were fixed. This car was also before the era of single windows in the front doors. The vent windows cranked all the way open was the way to get a lot of air in the cabin. On a hot day, you had a gale of hot air in the car. Not exactly cool, but when you're young...

Next up was an early 2500. This was the precursor of the Bavaria if you remember that classic BMW sedan. Alas, being an early car, it had an engine problem that I didn't find out about until long after I sold the car. This was the first model with the "big six" engine and BMW hadn't quite figured out how to do the castings, so there was residual sand left. That made the car very sensitive to over heating. So here we have a great driving BMW "big" sedan, but you couldn't really drive it in weather over 90 degrees. Oh, if the car was moving, it was okay, but find a hill or traffic, and you were in trouble in River City. I learned that when it was warm, I had to watch the temperature gauge very carefully. When it started moving up, I had to find a road with no traffic, or stop completely and let the engine cool off. Of course the car didn't have air conditioning, so that wasn't a problem. Turning the heater on didn't help much either. What a pain, but I stayed a BMW enthusiast.

Note that the consequence of ignoring the temperature gauge was almost certainly a head gasket failure. This is an expensive repair. If you really ignore the gauge, the head warps too and that means an even more expensive repair bill.

After the 2500, my regular driver was a 2002tii. This one had aftermarket air conditioning, supposedly "approved" by the factory. It was woefully under capacity for Southern California, but it did help some. At least it wasn't prone to overheating like the 2500, though you did have to watch the temperature gauge because in the right conditions, it, too, would overheat. It is just that the threshold was much higher than the 2500. It is about this time, however, that U.S. made cars had really good air conditioning. That made the BMW look really bad.

I never owned one of the first 5-series cars, the 530i of 1978. This was the epiphany for BMW when it comes to air conditioning for U.S. customers. These were some of the first BMWs to be imported by the BMW factory-owned import organization. Before that, BMW had a private company that imported their cars -- and BMW never (or at least rarely) listened to them. But when BMW itself was importing cars, they took the U.S. market much more seriously. Enter the 1978 530i. It was BMW's first conscious effort to market a "luxury sports sedan".

Almost all the people who bought those new 5-series cars complained about the air conditioning barely functioning. BMW explained that Germans didn't like air blowing in their face and the vent system was designed for them. Well, Americans do like air blowing in their face. How else can we tell if the air conditioning system is working? Faced with this rebellion, BMW recognized that something needed to be done. The engineers said that they already had a perfect system, so nothing was needed. The BMW employees in the U.S. said something opposite of that, probably pretty colorful.

What to do? The Americans asked that the ventilation system engineers from Germany (all three of them) come to the U.S. for an experiment. They flew them into Houston (where BMW has an import office) in the middle of the summer. In the airport parking lot, there were two cars: a black BMW 530i and a black Chevrolet Vega (with the price sticker still on it -- half the price of the BMW). They were put in the Vega first. The air conditioning blew very cold air as they drove around Houston. They returned to the airport and were put into the BMW. Oops, the electric windows weren't working. This was a very convincing demonstration!

It didn’t even take a model year change for solutions to appear. Different vents for the cars were almost immediately available, even if the cooling capacity of the system was still too small. Later running changes to that were made as well.

My next car was one of the first 320i BMWs in the U.S. This was definitely not one of BMW's best efforts, but then nobody really made good running cars in those days of the first anti-pollution equipment on cars. It did have the best air conditioning I had yet on a BMW, but it still lagged behind even U.S. economy cars. Remember that this was the model that earned BMW the acronym of Balance My Wheels. The engine was really a rather wheezy low-powered effort as well. At least the cooling system and air conditioning system was a step above the 2002tii.

I stepped up in the world with my next BMW. It was a 1979 733i, one of the first 7-series cars in the United States. It, too, had a rather awful emissions control system, but at least there was good power available, and -- surprise -- a really good air conditioning system. It did blow cold air and it did it when the Southern California weather was really hot. It wasn't without fault, however. This was in the era of 55 miles/hour on the freeway (well that's what the signs said). On a 100 degree day, you could go about 65 mi/hr, but exceed that and the temperature gauge started creeping ever higher on the scale. Slow back up to 65 and it settled back down to its "normal" position. It really was almost laughable. It was like there was a policeman controlling the car. "Watch what happens when you speed. Go too fast and you destroy your engine."

At this point there was an interlude when I didn't have a BMW as a daily driver. I had a Nissan pickup that had good air conditioning, but (at that time) typical pickup brakes. If the road was anything more than damp, when you put on the brakes, you flipped a coin to see which side the rear end of the truck would pass you on. That was really awful, so then I had a couple of minivans. They were simply terrible drivers, but very functional cargo/people carriers. They did have pretty good brakes, and not very good reliability.

The next BMW was a 1994 5-series. Aha! Back to a really good daily driver. And this was my first really computerized car. This one had really good air conditioning that was comparable to anything else on the road. It also simply wouldn't overheat unless there was some component failure like a hose. What was my evidence that it wouldn't overheat? I was driving in traffic on a hot summer day in Burbank. The dashboard outside temperature gauge read 112 degrees. You would have never known it. Inside the car, it was cold. But... ask for some power from the engine and there wasn't very much. The computer had backed off the timing to preserve the engine from overheating. The engine temp gauge on the dashboard never moved from its "normal" indication. The "lack of power" was easily a "sacrifice" I would make for reliability. It certainly still had enough power to keep up with traffic.

My current daily driver is a 2000 5-series. It, too, has really good air conditioning. The difference between this one and the 1994 is that the inside temperature control is automatic. Set the desired temperature and that's what you get. This whole story came to mind this weekend with 110 plus temperatures in some places again. I was out driving this weekend and found that I always got nice cold air from the air conditioning system and I also found that the engine temperature gauge never strayed from the "normal" position (I watched pretty carefully as this was a test for me). But, again I found that there was a little less power available when you were driving normally. I did make a test at an onramp stop sign on the Pasadena Freeway. I floored the throttle and the car took off. The air conditioning completely shut down so that I had maximum power! This shouldn't be a surprise. As soon as I reached cruising speed, the air conditioning immediately came back on and the car went into normal operation. Everything worked exactly as it should have in a modern computerized car.

The message is very clear to me. As I have grown older, I realize that I have gotten accustomed to comfort when I am driving. I actually was astonished at the number of cars and trucks I saw this weekend with the windows open. Yes, these were older cars. Would I like to go back to the old days with one of my previous BMWs. Nope.