Alistair,
I'm not so sure that time in your garage is always a good indicator of your fondness for a car, or more a practical reality that comes from accepting the foibles and idiosyncratic traits of a given car. My measure is the number of halcyon drives I can attribute to the car, that stand head and shoulders over everything else I have experienced. That could be a combination of roads, company or circumstances that contribute to making it more memorable.
I had my Porsche 930 Turbo for nearly 10 years and can only count 2 really halcyon drives in all that time. By comparison I had a Mercedes E320 sportline cabriolet I had for a two years covered about 60k miles in it, where it just excelled on some many levels with its balance of balance of power and useable performance and was such great fun roof down and lead to a further 4 examples being in my garage upto quite recently when the last one was stolen whilst in storage.
Of course everyone will have their own measures of what constitutes a halcyon drive., but may I suggest that lengthy periods of inactivity whilst garaged isn't one of them. Whilst I enjoy my Roadster, I prefer to drive in it in the spring and autumn months where the problems of cabin heat sink and holiday traffic laden local roads form less of a hinderance to its enjoyment. I'd take my old E320 cabriolet with all year round use any day over it, which I used to drive roof down all year round as long as the mohair hood was dry. But as they say each to their own.
