He Sold His BMW 2002 to a Friend. Twenty-Six Years Later, He Bought It Back.
Rob Siegel has owned roughly 70 BMWs and written about cars for 35 years, but the one he calls "Bertha" — bought back in what he describes as a whisky-soaked moment of weakness — is the one with the story that actually needed a book.
Rob Siegel is a geophysicist by day and, by his own count, has owned roughly 70 BMWs over 40 years — about 40 of them 2002s, the compact rear-drive coupe that built BMW's reputation in the US in the late 1960s and 1970s. He's written the "Hack Mechanic" column for the BMW Car Club of America's Roundel magazine for 35 years, and now writes for Hagerty and BimmerLife as well, which makes him about as close to a primary source as an owner-story subject gets — he's been documenting his own relationship with these cars, in public, for longer than most readers have been driving.
The car he calls Bertha is a 1975 BMW 2002 he bought in Austin in 1984 and drove heavily modified for eight years before selling it to a close friend. It then sat in storage for 26 years, untouched, while Siegel's life and garage moved on to other cars. What brought it back — in what he's described as "a weak whisky-soaked moment" — was a decision to buy the car back from his friend, only to open the storage unit and find something closer to a wreck than the car he remembered selling.
The saga became a full book, Resurrecting Bertha: Buying Back Our Wedding Car After 26 Years in Storage, and more recently a documented second act — Siegel has been writing a real-time series for BimmerLife titled "Re-Resurrecting Bertha," walking through what it actually takes to bring a decades-stored car back to functional condition a second time, three decades after the first restoration.
What separates Bertha from a generic project-car writeup is the sheer duration of the documentation. Most owner stories get told once, after the fact. Siegel has been narrating this specific car's condition, mechanical state, and his own decision-making in real time across four decades and two separate resurrections — which means the story isn't really about one restoration, it's about what it actually looks like to keep coming back to the same car across an entire adult life.
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