When 22-year-old actor Robert Pattinson emerged as a big star last year for playing an alluring vampire in “Twilight,” he still drove an old beat-up BMW. 

    But he has now has leased a new car and moved on from his 20 year-old convertible BMW, whose dashboard had reportedly once caught fire while Pattinson was driving.

   Pattinson said the old junker was towed recently and that he had good reason for moving on to another ride, despite the appeal of showing he was still a regular guy who happens to be a movie star.

“I was getting a bit scared that I was going to die in it, and thinking is the street cred value worth dying for? And I kind of decided it wasn’t,” he told Reuters.

  Still, the old car appears to continue to attract Pattinson, who in “Twilight” plays a vampire in a star-crossed love affair. 

“I miss it already so I think I might go back to that one,” the actor said of his old BMW.

Pattinson knows a thing or two about cars. Growing up in Britain, his father imported luxury cars for a living. Who knows if dad would be interested in a certain 1989 BMW?

For now, Pattinson has no need for his old car. Instead of driving around Los Angeles, he is in Vancouver readying himself for production of “New Moon”, the next movie in the “Twilight” franchise which Pattinson said could be more somber than the first.