Have you ever bought a car that was cheaper than dirt?
I’m not talking about a $2000 Shoney’s special that was owned by an elder statesmen or grand-mama. I’m talking cheap. As in cheaper than a Vegas wedding with a fake Elvis and a bottle of leftover hooch from the last couple that got hitched.
$500. $100. Free. Negative amounts. Nothing is better than cheap. Unless it’s also good.
It was a long day at the auction. Over a thousand cars sold in a matter of three hours. Dealers were busy paying for their pre-tax season purchases and the size of the line seemed to just grow bigger at the understaffed counters. Everyone had ‘issues’. To make matters worse, along with the lines and chaos I had a headache. A crushing headache.
So instead of engaging in random conversations with friends I’ve known for forever and a day, I wandered off to the most remote corner of the sale. The TRA lane. Also known as ‘crusher fodder’. This is where banks, car dealers and charities get rid of cars that are usually worth more dead than alive. Bidding starts at $450 plus the auction fee and for that you can either help ‘export to China’ or find the parts needed to make a problem car good again.
In the very last space sat an old 1987 Volvo 240 wagon… a Bluebird… and she had one helluva story to tell.
I want you! To spend our national debt on a beater car!
145 vehicles. 100+ dealers. If there ever was a recipe for prices leaving the stratosphere and entering the ionosphere, it was Monday morning at Carmax.
On average Carmax makes $929 on every used car that they take in and sell to another dealer. If you take the latest quarterly profit they get from their wholesale auction operations alone ($78 million) and multiply it by four, you get over $300 million in earnings. That’s an amazing profit for what amounts to minimal reconditioning (if any) and a ‘quick flip’.
Then again, the car dealers who came to the sale were looking for the exact same thing.
It came at the prime of Honda’s dominance. The Accord was the best -selling car in America. The Prelude, Civic and Integra? All market leaders par excellence. Del Sol’s and Vigors? Well, nothing’s quite perfect in the eyes of the marketplace. But the last of the Legends was pretty close for that time.
You wanted a highway cruiser? It competed with the best of Detroit’s V8’s and offered better fuel economy as well. Comfort? Nice thick leather seats that were built to satisfy posteriors aplenty. To be frank I’m trying to figure out if there was anything bad about this vehicle circa 1994.
If I remember correctly the Legends were quite pricey. It was about $55,000 in today’s dollars new. About the same as an E-Class in this day and age. But a used one with 169,000 miles as of yesterday afternoon at a Carmax sale? It was only $1515 ($1400 plus $115 auction fee).
Best deal I had in a while. Should I….
Back in the late 90’s, the VW Bug was the queen of cute and the dominant purveyor of ‘retro’ car design.
You couldn’t get away from the painfully hip commercials. The fake yellow flower with the vase. The adorable exterior that seemed to attract women better than a Prada purse giveway.
Then something happened. The designers and engineers of ‘Das Bug’ met a penny pinching force of nature called José Ignacio (“Inaki”) López de Arriortúa. A former head of purchasing for GM. Inaki decided to drive down costs at VW using the same strategies (and sources) he used at GM.
13 years and $1915 later… I get to invest in what can only be called a ‘VW money pit’.
I used to love driving aimlessly around the South. The rural South offers enthusiasts an amazing array of beautiful winding one lane roads, and true to it’s reputation, you never know quite what you will find by the end of the day.
One time I found a bar that raised mongooses. I got to ‘feed the geese’ while watching what can loosely be called a marksmanship contest. Thankfully there were no flesh wounds. But I did quickly leave after the first ricochet.
The next week I decided to wander off to the most rural county in Georgia, Taylor County. A nice little hamlet of the old South where everyone walking in the town square was dressed up in army fatigues. It was hunting season and the only places open at 8:00 PM on a Saturday were the pizza shop and the liquor store. Just enough for a fun evening!
But then gas prices went swiftly to the nether regions… and soon… well…
Remember those movies where the ‘bad guy’ would take a driver hostage and, “Whoa! Where did that random roadblock come from?!” After some pleasantries from a naive officer, the car would be waved through and the action would continue.
I’m not sure if those were old James Cagney movies or a more contemporary Cheech & Chong flick. But I do know that the holidays are coming and that many towns and cities will be orchestrating random roadblocks to ferret out the intoxicated and the illegal.
My question to the B&B is, “When, if ever, should there be random roadblocks applied towards the driving public?”
There are a lot of things you can do instead of spending five figures on a new ride. Travel the world. Pay off debt. Get a house. Heck, you can even pursue that elusive shangri-la known as retirement. Or have lunch at Waffle House for three years straight so that you can completely avoid that ‘growing old’ business.
A new car is a big chunk of an expense for a lot of folks. But sometimes it’s worth it.
There was a time when car salesmen had to sit in dark windowless rooms and watch the worst infomercials ever imagined. Take for instance…
Yesterday's butcher is today's forensic anthropologist..
Can your car move a corpse?
Well, if you lived in my home state of New Jersey in the 1970’s, most any car of that time could accommodate this minor inconvenience. Imapalas, Aspens, Volares, even so-called sporty subcompacts like the Ford Pinto Cruising Wagon could handle that load.
Need to bury a starting basketball team that crossed the wrong bookie? Or a Little League team that needs to be put on Icees? Pull out the family’s Lincoln or Caddy and hack at it. Even a Chevy would do. You could have even towed about 2000 to 5000 pounds of authentic Teamster’s cement just to smooth it all out.
But nowadays? Trunk space? Fuhgeddaboudit!!!
My brother-in-law was all of 21 years old when he bought his first house. Not just a regular dwelling… but one with two and a half acres and a lake. A two year work/study with John Deere along with four years of living at home yielded one heck of a lot of savings.
As graduation neared he asked me to find a vehicle that would be as good for his upcoming commutes as it would be for all of his ‘stuff’. I should mention that like me, my BIL Tommy buys everything on the cheap and fixes it up. Old motorycles, jet ski’s, tractors, boats, 20+ year old Porsches… I have yet to find a machine that he couldn’t bring back to life.
So I bought him a common hauler, that he turned into a one-of-a-kind.
Yesterday was a busy day at the auctions. With Thursday as an official holiday, one very large Thursday sale moved their auction to Wednesday. We’re talking about a 2000+ vehicle sale behemoth. An 800+ pound gorilla in the Atlanta market known by at least three different names.
Another smaller evening sale with about 200 units followed suit. The two smallest… dropped out. This meant bigger crowds than usual.
For me it also meant some unique inventory… from some unique consignors.
It was a pearl of mediocrity among a putrid vat of automotive shit. A 2005 Chevy Malibu. It came equipped with a V6, alloy wheels, a lime green paint job that would make Kermit proud, and only 47,000 miles. The sole great car relatively speaking among a hundred plus repos by a title lending company.
I drive about 200 hundred cars every year. Some go 0 to 60 in about 6 seconds flat… others take as long as 10 or 12 seconds. Even the slowest of these cars are amazingly fun to drive when you are in the right place and time. As for the fastest? Well they offer sport and convenience, and more opportunities to feel a Baruthian thrust.
Most folks aren’t into cars. They do want advice though; which is tricky for the B&B. While auto enthusiasts like us seek the Coltranes and Metallicas of vehicular enjoyment. They prefer… well… Jimmy Buffett. A well executed car that makes them feel comfortable, has a touch of ‘fun’ at times (the non-enthusiast types of fun), […]
Recent Comments