Commode

So I swapped the Type R STI. I was offered this as a swap and guessed that since I hadn’t owned one before, I should give it a shot.

It’s a VZ model Commodore Wagon of the Acclaim trim level (Electric windows all round was the main difference). It was a great car to drive on the open road, surprisingly good on gas and just easy to drive. Cruise control helped.

When I got the car I didn’t realise what I was getting myself into. It was an ex company car, and was fully sign written down both sides and the tailgate. “oh, that won’t be an issue” I said. Damnit, never again!

Multiple hours of hard manual labour, plastic scrapers, a bottle of DeSolvit and a bad run-in with a pot scrub later and the stickers were finally gone. In hindsight I would’ve used a Caramel wheel to remove it quicker, but I didn’t know that at the time. Once all the stickers were gone I was left with lots of shadow from where the stickers were, and some heavy marring of the paint in one spot (see run-in with pot scrub). It looked like the stickers had eaten into the paint, and as we know, black is super unforgiving.

I ended up handing the car off to a team of professional groomers to machine polish the exterior. They did a fantastic job and the paint looked great afterwards. There were a couple of spots where the paint was too thin and they had started to burn through it, but otherwise it shined like nothing else.

This was a good car to drive, but make no mistake, it’s huge. Like piloting a supertanker around town. Parking was an effort, with no sensors or camera. That was really the deciding factor to sell, it was too practical with all that boot space.