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What Should I Buy? - The First Car Conundrum · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  Our panel of break fix petrolheads are back for another rousing
• 0:03
  what should I buy debate.
• 0:05
  Using unique shopping criteria, they are challenged to find our first time
• 0:08
  collector the best vehicle that will make their friends go, where'd you
• 0:13
  get that, or what the hell is wrong with you, at the next Cars and Coffee.
• 0:19
  Dear Abby, my daughter Stacy is looking for her first car, and has
• 0:24
  her heart set on a Volkswagen Bug.
• 0:26
  Do you have any suggestions?
• 0:27
  You know, it's not uncommon for us to receive an email or text like
• 0:30
  this, one from friends or co workers.
• 0:33
  As fathers of future petrolheads, we couldn't resist getting
• 0:36
  the band back together for yet another What Should I Buy debate.
• 0:39
  Mind you, these messages are sometimes never more detailed
• 0:42
  than what you just heard.
• 0:44
  But it's enough to start the conversation, and like all What Should I Buy
• 0:47
  episodes, we have some great content.
• 0:48
  some shopping criteria.
• 0:50
  So obviously the next logical questions are how old, how many
• 0:53
  miles, and what's your budget?
• 0:55
  Tonight we're bringing together some of the OG What Should I Buy crew.
• 0:59
  Not Man Dan, Rob Lohrs, and Mike Storytime Crutchfield, but it wouldn't
• 1:04
  be a What Should I Buy without our panelists, William Big Money Ross.
• 1:08
  Mark, the data cruncher shank and Don Weeberg from garage style magazine.
• 1:13
  And in this episode, our panel of extraordinary petrol heads are
• 1:16
  challenged to find our first time driver, something that will make their
• 1:19
  friends go, wait, you drove that at 16.
• 1:22
  And with that, welcome back to another.
• 1:24
  What should I buy guys?
• 1:26
  Welcome.
• 1:26
  Welcome.
• 1:27
  Hello, Stacy's mom.
• 1:29
  Got it going on.
• 1:31
  Yeah.
• 1:32
  And Scotty doesn't know
• 1:36
  Eric alluded to off air.
• 1:38
  This is the first time I think everybody on the show is a parent.
• 1:41
  That's right.
• 1:42
  We're all parents.
• 1:43
  So we all are going to go through this or have gone through this
• 1:46
  at some point in our lives.
• 1:48
  This topic resurfaces every couple of seasons and it's like, Oh man,
• 1:52
  we're going to do this again.
• 1:54
  How are we going to solve this puzzle?
• 1:56
  I found it extremely challenging in doing the research because, you know,
• 1:59
  when we do other What Should I Buy's, we're buying for fictitious collectors.
• 2:03
  We have these outrageous budgets.
• 2:05
  We're trying to add cars to our garages and it's all glitz and glam.
• 2:08
  And then when you bring it down to earth and you're like, what
• 2:11
  would I buy my 16 year old?
• 2:13
  I was like completely dumbfounded.
• 2:15
  You know, it's almost like writer's block.
• 2:17
  I'm like, I don't know where to go from here.
• 2:18
  What's funny is Don gave me a call out of the blue and he's like,
• 2:22
  Hey, I'm shopping for my daughter and I'm struggling with this.
• 2:26
  Would you guys mind helping me through the thought process?
• 2:29
  And I said, Oh my God, this is like the old.
• 2:31
  What should I buy?
• 2:32
  Yeah, let's do this.
• 2:33
  Let's rock and roll.
• 2:34
  So tonight Don's in the hot seat.
• 2:36
  He's the one with the shopping criteria and we're trying to
• 2:39
  buy a car for his daughter.
• 2:40
  So why don't you refine your shopping criteria a little bit for us now?
• 2:43
  What's the budget?
• 2:45
  How old, how many miles?
• 2:46
  What are you thinking?
• 2:47
  Okay, well, according to my wife, the budget is zero.
• 2:49
  We're not going to spend any money, we're not going to buy a car, we're going to
• 2:52
  stick to what we've got in the driveway, which is a Honda Accord, a Ford Flex,
• 2:56
  and a Caprice Classic of all things.
• 2:58
  And a DeLorean.
• 2:59
  Well, yeah, but I'm not going to send that to high school with her, you know.
• 3:03
  So those are the three that would be as Eric says in the hot seat.
• 3:07
  I don't want the caprice going all original paint everything, so I
• 3:10
  don't want that thing sitting out.
• 3:11
  The flex is kind of a waste for that thing to go sit in a parking lot for
• 3:16
  nine hours of the day when my wife and I are zipping all over town and
• 3:19
  we usually have the dog with us.
• 3:21
  And the dog wears the Accord because he's just too big for it.
• 3:25
  The Accord, on the other hand, my daughter's terrified of.
• 3:28
  It's simply too quick.
• 3:30
  So she doesn't like how fast that car does everything.
• 3:34
  So she doesn't want that thing.
• 3:35
  So if my wife has her say.
• 3:37
  That'll be it.
• 3:38
  One of those three cars she picks, or she keeps getting rides from us.
• 3:42
  That said, what is the budget?
• 3:44
  I would say, you know, no more than 10 grand.
• 3:46
  We'd love to come in under that.
• 3:48
  I grew up the son of a contractor, so my first vehicle was a 74 150.
• 3:52
  It was fly yellow.
• 3:54
  You'll be proud of that, William.
• 3:56
  I'm from, uh, Being literally a contractor's truck to a contractor's
• 3:59
  truck, to our runaround truck, to my dad's hot rod that I
• 4:03
  got to drive to high school.
• 4:04
  Beautiful truck once my dad was done with it.
• 4:06
  You know, I was just happy to have a car.
• 4:08
  We're of that generation.
• 4:09
  We were just thrilled.
• 4:10
  16 years old.
• 4:11
  We got a car waiting for us and there it is.
• 4:13
  Would I have preferred other cars?
• 4:15
  Oh, hell yeah.
• 4:16
  Absolutely.
• 4:17
  But when I got to school and all the guys.
• 4:20
  Saw that yellow truck and they wondered what is Don driving?
• 4:24
  Like, I mean, his dad's a contractor, so he's always had trucks
• 4:26
  around, but what is he driving?
• 4:28
  Why is it bright yellow?
• 4:30
  Who has a bright yellow contractor truck?
• 4:32
  Oh, because this truck was retired.
• 4:34
  It's no longer in service.
• 4:35
  My sister had it before me.
• 4:37
  My dad was afraid of my sister's driving.
• 4:39
  He painted it bright yellow so that everybody would see her coming.
• 4:42
  Oh man, it's like that episode of Who's the Boss.
• 4:45
  Did he strap tires to the side of it too?
• 4:48
  No, it wasn't that bad.
• 4:49
  Wasn't that bad.
• 4:50
  My dad did tell people he was worried that Holly, my sister, was a bit of an
• 4:54
  aggressive driver, a bit of an absent minded driver, a bit of a fast driver.
• 4:59
  Bright yellow to let everybody know she's coming.
• 5:01
  Now it becomes my vehicle.
• 5:03
  I like it.
• 5:03
  It's cool.
• 5:04
  It's quirky.
• 5:05
  It's a car.
• 5:06
  I don't care.
• 5:06
  I'm 16.
• 5:07
  I got a car.
• 5:08
  I'm happy.
• 5:09
  But all the guys were smitten with it.
• 5:12
  They thought it was the coolest thing in the parking lot.
• 5:14
  Look at those white wheels.
• 5:16
  Who the hell puts white wheels on a car?
• 5:18
  Well, yeah, US Mags.
• 5:19
  They still had the white wheel with the red and blue stripe around the edge.
• 5:22
  Under the hood is a four 60 with a four barrel with a crank.
• 5:27
  I mean, dad built the thing out at forget what it is now, but at the
• 5:30
  wheels, that thing was putting out somewhere around five 50 horse now, Dan,
• 5:35
  it was a single cab, eight foot bed.
• 5:38
  With 550 horse at the wheels.
• 5:40
  This was not a friendly vehicle to a 16 year old kid.
• 5:44
  I was scared to death of that truck because I knew what it could do.
• 5:48
  And so me alone with this beast, believe me, I was not going over 30
• 5:52
  miles an hour or going to school.
• 5:53
  I was just easing through stuff.
• 5:55
  Well, First day there, my best friend jumps in the truck, wants to ride home.
• 5:59
  Okay, this is going to be fun.
• 6:00
  Well, he sees I'm driving like a grandma.
• 6:02
  He's like, dude, aren't you?
• 6:04
  Okay.
• 6:04
  Well, my mom and dad told me, be careful because the brake booster is failing.
• 6:08
  So you don't want to get in a situation where you have to slam on the brakes.
• 6:11
  Okay.
• 6:11
  What do you do at 16 years old when your best friend is encouraging you?
• 6:14
  Holy Jesus wept that thing.
• 6:17
  I could not believe.
• 6:20
  The bolt, we were forced back into the seat.
• 6:23
  The rear end started barking, the rear end started fish tailing a bit.
• 6:27
  And me being the animal rights activist, a cat runs right out in front of us.
• 6:32
  I hit those brakes as hard as I can, straight down to the floor.
• 6:37
  No master cylinder, no nothing.
• 6:38
  We're just hosting along.
• 6:40
  So now I'm freaking out.
• 6:41
  I have no brakes.
• 6:42
  I've just killed a cat.
• 6:43
  I mean, I am blowing up inside.
• 6:45
  Well, my buddy, he says, that is fine.
• 6:48
  He laid down, the truck went right over him.
• 6:49
  We're fine.
• 6:50
  How are the brakes?
• 6:51
  Well, pump them up, pump them up and you're okay.
• 6:53
  You're fine.
• 6:54
  But I'll tell you something.
• 6:55
  It scared me so bad.
• 6:57
  I took a long time to learn how to drive that truck.
• 7:00
  It was out of respect that truck taught me a mess with me, kid.
• 7:04
  I'll put you around a pole.
• 7:06
  And that was important.
• 7:07
  It taught him to respect it and it made him gun shy.
• 7:10
  Every novice driver has some point that that's going to happen.
• 7:14
  Like, and for me with my daughter, it actually happened before she even
• 7:17
  got her license when we were up at pit race and did a carting event.
• 7:20
  Someone nailed her hard and yelled at her and it freaked her out.
• 7:23
  And for her actually getting in the car, driving a road or even getting on a track.
• 7:26
  Bricked her out for at least a year.
• 7:28
  Like she was adamantly against it.
• 7:30
  I'm like, that was carding in a car.
• 7:32
  It's completely different.
• 7:33
  What it demonstrates Don is that these first cars, sometimes not
• 7:38
  necessarily by your choice are part of your story as a petrol head.
• 7:42
  That's what we say.
• 7:43
  Everybody has a story.
• 7:44
  Every car has a story.
• 7:45
  And so, okay.
• 7:46
  If cars just.
• 7:47
  Basic transportation, like a bicycle or any other appliances, then it's just,
• 7:52
  Oh, I had a Toyota Corolla big deal.
• 7:54
  You know what I mean?
• 7:55
  But the adventures you had in the Corolla, like the things that allowed you to do,
• 7:59
  that's the thing that Dan and I talk about a lot is how do we bring that to the
• 8:03
  youths and say, This is why cars are cool.
• 8:06
  It's the freedom of driving and this and go, and you can do these things.
• 8:09
  And that car took you to that place where you met those
• 8:13
  people or you did that thing.
• 8:15
  And now it's a memory and that car is part of that memory.
• 8:18
  And so I don't want to say you want to start them off with the right
• 8:20
  car, because that's the wrong thing, but you want to get them excited
• 8:23
  about what they're going to drive.
• 8:24
  It's like, Oh yeah.
• 8:25
  It's grandma's Buick 88, like, oh, big deal.
• 8:29
  You know what I mean?
• 8:29
  There's a lot to that.
• 8:30
  And then again, that goes into that social dynamic of the car
• 8:34
  and who your friend circle was.
• 8:36
  And maybe like you said about the truck, it drew people in because it was a
• 8:41
  point of attraction in the parking lot.
• 8:42
  I have fond memories of pickups as being first vehicles because
• 8:46
  you can beat the hell out of them.
• 8:48
  Honestly, there's no repercussions or it's a truck.
• 8:50
  It's meant to take some abuse.
• 8:52
  You're going to do fine.
• 8:53
  Well, I'm glad you opened that door, Don.
• 8:54
  So let's talk about first cars before we dive a little deeper into some of
• 8:58
  our suggestions and pick your brain on more of your shopping criteria.
• 9:02
  So Rob, what about you?
• 9:03
  First car.
• 9:04
  Learned on an 87 Volkswagen Vanikin GL Synchro.
• 9:08
  My man.
• 9:09
  With a manual transmission, but the first car I bought myself
• 9:12
  was an 8 valve Scirocco from 85.
• 9:16
  See, this is why we bring Rob to the party.
• 9:18
  Yeah, I'm noticing a little bias here with the Germans, with Rob
• 9:21
  and Eric, and then there's Mark in the background scouring at me.
• 9:24
  Yeah, so Mark, what about you?
• 9:25
  What was your first car?
• 9:27
  89 Chevy Cavalier.
• 9:28
  It's a good car.
• 9:29
  It's kind of an American.
• 9:31
  Turn, but it was a good car.
• 9:33
  I have genuine affection for it.
• 9:35
  The first one I really loved was a 94 Z28.
• 9:39
  Very different kind of car at that point.
• 9:41
  William, what about you?
• 9:42
  First car?
• 9:42
  1983 Mazda GLC hatchback.
• 9:45
  Oh my man.
• 9:46
  My man.
• 9:46
  Yeah, high speed.
• 9:49
  Brad, I remember your first car.
• 9:51
  It was a 1991 red Honda Civic hatchback with four on the floor.
• 9:56
  Since nothing ever leaves the mountain, I'm sure your first car is still up there.
• 10:00
  Dan, what was it?
• 10:01
  Actually, it's not here.
• 10:02
  What?
• 10:02
  Are we talking first owned car or first car that actually was
• 10:05
  put on the road and driven?
• 10:07
  Oh my god.
• 10:09
  Dan still owns all of his first cars.
• 10:11
  My point.
• 10:12
  You thought my story was gonna be long?
• 10:14
  The first one that was yours, Dan.
• 10:15
  If you considered it yours, then it counts.
• 10:17
  They were mine.
• 10:18
  So the first car I had was a 64 Chevy two Nova that I was in the process of
• 10:23
  fixing up and then unfortunately family got on part times and had to sell it.
• 10:26
  First car actually put on the road was actually a 82 Toyota Corolla.
• 10:31
  They could not be any more different.
• 10:33
  Those two.
• 10:34
  Yeah, and I'll round it out.
• 10:35
  I had an 87 Audi coupe with five speed.
• 10:39
  I had the weirdest car in the parking lot at high school.
• 10:41
  That's for sure.
• 10:42
  I don't know that's that much weirder than the Scirocco just to be clear.
• 10:44
  Everybody knew what a Scirocco was though.
• 10:46
  Everybody knew what a Scirocco was, knew what an Audi coupe was.
• 10:49
  At least I did.
• 10:50
  All my friends did.
• 10:51
  Back then, Audis were in the doghouse.
• 10:52
  Nobody had Audis.
• 10:53
  Exactly.
• 10:54
  And our resale value was printed right across the grill.
• 10:57
  You know, all zeros, worth nothing.
• 10:58
  Being the weirdest car in the world.
• 10:59
  Driven by the weird kid at school worked out.
• 11:01
  Dan, when you and I were preparing for this and talking about this, you made
• 11:08
  a very good point about the shopping criteria and kind of bracketed it
• 11:12
  using the way we do our new, what should I buy episodes, which is.
• 11:16
  Three tier, the parents assisting in the purchase, the 16 year old
• 11:21
  buying it themselves and funding it through, you know, side hustles
• 11:23
  and part time jobs and things like that, or the silver spoon option.
• 11:27
  So I kind of wondered with your first cars, how many of
• 11:30
  you guys bought it yourselves?
• 11:32
  Well, myself.
• 11:33
  Okay.
• 11:34
  So that's two.
• 11:34
  How many were a hand me down?
• 11:37
  Okay.
• 11:37
  So that's two more.
• 11:38
  And then our parents bought it for us.
• 11:41
  Okay.
• 11:42
  And that's the rest of us.
• 11:43
  And then there's William.
• 11:43
  Okay.
• 11:44
  So that rounds us out.
• 11:45
  So we're kind of evenly split amongst those three options
• 11:48
  that you mentioned, Dan.
• 11:49
  So Don, this kind of leads back to you.
• 11:52
  How do you want this to work out?
• 11:54
  Do you want her to work for the car?
• 11:55
  Do you want to gift her a car to your wife?
• 11:58
  Once it's been 0.
• 11:59
  Yeah, honestly, I think how it'll work is, I mean, if I get my way.
• 12:02
  And she doesn't end up in the Caprice of the Flex.
• 12:05
  Michelle and I will buy a car for her.
• 12:07
  And it'll just be one of those ex rental Buicks or something that we can afford,
• 12:12
  that she can beat up, you know, learning how to not hit curbs, things like that.
• 12:16
  I think it would just be something like that.
• 12:18
  Now that said, she herself, Caitlin, is a bit of a car girl.
• 12:22
  She has a penchant for the modern VW Beetles.
• 12:25
  She loved Beetles period.
• 12:27
  She doesn't care how old they are, but she definitely has more of
• 12:30
  an interest in the newer Beetles.
• 12:32
  Outside of that, it basically goes a little wonky.
• 12:35
  She starts loving 50, 51 Hudson, like Doc Hudson.
• 12:38
  She really starts getting into the, uh, the Corvettes, which I think that's
• 12:44
  She loves everything we have, the Fiat, the Mustang, the DeLorean, the Caprice
• 12:48
  has long been one of her favorites.
• 12:50
  Literally, ever since she was a little girl, she's just been
• 12:52
  a little gaga for the Caprice.
• 12:54
  She would love to take that to school, and we've actually talked
• 12:56
  about finding another brick to join this brick, and She has my flavor
• 13:02
  a little bit with the Baguan paint.
• 13:04
  Definitely interested in having a little fun with hippie
• 13:07
  schemes or things like that.
• 13:09
  Part of me says, yeah, an old brick could be perfect for that.
• 13:12
  And then there's another part of me that's like, you know, those bricks are
• 13:15
  starting to dry up and they're starting to gain in some value a little bit.
• 13:19
  Getting a little harder for me to say, yeah, go ahead, honey.
• 13:21
  Go take that brick and screw it up.
• 13:23
  Leads into another question, which is the next logical conclusion.
• 13:26
  And I'm sure I'm going to get a church nod for this one is.
• 13:28
  The maintenance part of this aspect, which is a lot of things a first time driver
• 13:32
  forgets about it was sort of the bill I was handed when I got my first car.
• 13:36
  It's like, we're going to buy you the car and here's a bag of wrenches and
• 13:39
  you're on your own after that point.
• 13:40
  So I was there to figure out how to pay for my insurance.
• 13:43
  Anything that broke, if I wanted to do mods, it was on me.
• 13:46
  And it always seemed like on the Audi, the magic number was like 1100 bucks.
• 13:49
  Every time I turned around, I had to come up with a thousand dollars
• 13:52
  to replace suspension or do exhaust or whatever, because it was a 10
• 13:56
  year old car by the time I got it.
• 13:57
  Right.
• 13:57
  So it needed everything.
• 13:58
  What's your thought there?
• 14:00
  Is she going to go to work to pay for that stuff?
• 14:03
  If something breaks as a, Hey dad, I'm on the side of the road.
• 14:06
  How is that going to play out for you guys?
• 14:08
  It's funny.
• 14:08
  That kind of brings us right into a secondary point that I always concerned
• 14:13
  about in my family, we were car people.
• 14:15
  We grew up cars.
• 14:16
  We had my God at any given time, there were 10 cars hanging around the house.
• 14:21
  We just had the ones that were specific to us that we drove every day, but
• 14:24
  they were all, except for my mom and my dad's dailies, All of them were old.
• 14:28
  They were all in some form of disrepair.
• 14:30
  It's interesting, as I went through life, I had fun with that.
• 14:32
  I bought the Fiat, I bought tons of Lincolns, tons of old Dodges, tons
• 14:36
  of whatever I could get my hands on.
• 14:38
  And this is where I start to sound a little un far guy.
• 14:40
  Earned up a ton of cash.
• 14:42
  I mean, just burned through it like a wildfire.
• 14:45
  And looking back, one of the last old cars was supposed to be a Mercedes.
• 14:49
  It belonged to my grandmother.
• 14:50
  Things didn't go right with me and my grandfather, so I
• 14:53
  ended up not buying the car.
• 14:54
  But I ended up with a very slightly used Toyota 4x4 pickup.
• 14:59
  Absolutely gorgeous.
• 15:00
  Bright red.
• 15:01
  The whole in yard.
• 15:02
  That car.
• 15:03
  Got me through 15 years, something like that.
• 15:06
  I don't even know, but it got me through everything.
• 15:08
  Got me through three colleges.
• 15:10
  Got me through God knows, you know, how many friends, relationships, Hey,
• 15:14
  Don, what are you doing this weekend?
• 15:15
  I'm doing something else.
• 15:16
  The keys are on the shelf.
• 15:17
  I don't want to help you move.
• 15:18
  That was the only problem with having a pickup.
• 15:20
  I'm sure Mountain Man Dan can attest to that as well.
• 15:23
  But what resonated with me was the Mercedes was a 73.
• 15:27
  There's no way in hell.
• 15:29
  Okay.
• 15:29
  That Mercedes would have gone through everything that Toyota
• 15:32
  went through day in, day out, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
• 15:35
  And it hit me how little money I spent on that truck.
• 15:38
  Yes, there was the cost of it.
• 15:40
  That was one of the ones, you know, my parents were going to buy it.
• 15:43
  I had to come up with the money.
• 15:44
  I had to make the payments.
• 15:46
  I was working at Paramount.
• 15:47
  Everything was good.
• 15:48
  So I was fine.
• 15:49
  But I think when all was done, interest everything, I think I was
• 15:52
  out the door 17, 000 and change.
• 15:55
  So 18, 000 for that truck.
• 15:57
  And yet, look at everything it got me through, trouble free.
• 16:00
  I put one set of tires on that truck, one, that's it.
• 16:03
  I put no brakes on that truck, none.
• 16:06
  I always took it to the dealer because I was my father's worst nightmare.
• 16:09
  Never put brakes on the truck, always downshifted.
• 16:12
  It needed one clutch, so that kind of makes sense.
• 16:14
  No brakes, but I replaced the clutch.
• 16:16
  Still, total everything up in that truck, I didn't spend all that much money to
• 16:21
  get me through to the next vehicle, which was the Australian GTO, which
• 16:26
  was another absolutely fantastic car.
• 16:28
  But we'll go into that another time.
• 16:30
  So the thought is much as I'd love to get her an old beetle or.
• 16:34
  An old caprice to screw around with.
• 16:36
  I remember the thought of how well the Toyota served me.
• 16:40
  And I look at her and I think, okay, you're just starting high school.
• 16:42
  You know, let's go screw something up.
• 16:44
  Let's get the wrecks out of our system.
• 16:45
  Let's get that and do that with some old jalopy.
• 16:48
  That's not going to bother anybody if you wreck it.
• 16:50
  But I live in, and this is another part of the equation we
• 16:53
  need to take in very seriously.
• 16:55
  I have never seen worse drivers in my life.
• 16:58
  Then where I live right now, where are you?
• 17:01
  The Dallas area, Dallas, Fort Worth.
• 17:03
  But every road is seven lanes wide and dead straight.
• 17:06
  Pretty much.
• 17:07
  They are extremely emotionally driven, no pun intended, but what they love to
• 17:13
  do is get right on your back bumper.
• 17:15
  We all love the littler cars.
• 17:16
  They're fine.
• 17:17
  They're fun.
• 17:17
  They're enjoyable all the way, but yeah, it does have to do with.
• 17:21
  You drive those things around here, you're gonna get bullied.
• 17:24
  I towed the tractor, I loaded the Miata everywhere I went.
• 17:25
  It would be hilarious to be next to someone's, like, perfectly normal SUV and
• 17:29
  think, like, they can't see me at all.
• 17:31
  I am below the window line of the visibility of that 18 year old who
• 17:35
  doesn't know what they're doing in their mom's caravan, right?
• 17:37
  So there's a fear factor to saying, like, Get a BRZ or get a TC or
• 17:42
  Miata, like there's a fear factor.
• 17:43
  Yeah, well, it's funny though, you bring that up the rear view mirror.
• 17:46
  I can't see the Miata.
• 17:48
  If it pulls up close enough to the flexes rear end, you can't see it.
• 17:52
  You cannot see that car.
• 17:53
  So yeah, there's a definite fear factor.
• 17:55
  There's little cars.
• 17:56
  So you need to roll coal so you can throw giant black.
• 17:58
  Yeah, so you can start rolling coal and they'll back off pretty fast, right?
• 18:02
  Now being from LA, it is a different driving style in
• 18:05
  California period compared to Texas.
• 18:07
  all the way around.
• 18:08
  So I had to relearn, okay, how are these guys expecting me to drive?
• 18:11
  It kind of helped adapting to how they do things, but this is God's honest truth.
• 18:15
  We had a friend visiting us, Sarah, two years ago, something like that.
• 18:18
  She came out for a weekend visit.
• 18:20
  In that three days that she was with us, nine car wrecks, nine that we
• 18:26
  counted just in Mansfield, which is the exact town where I live.
• 18:29
  They are scary out here.
• 18:31
  They're very emotional.
• 18:32
  Most of them drive massive pickup trucks with bumpers that weigh
• 18:37
  as much as the DeLorean itself.
• 18:38
  Pure steel sitting out there, just waiting to topple something.
• 18:42
  This is where the Flex is really, really fantastic because it's not huge.
• 18:47
  It's not a suburban, but it's got that old dog sense to it.
• 18:51
  You know, it's there, you know, it's big.
• 18:54
  You know it's heavy, it's gonna fight back if you nudge it.
• 18:57
  People know that.
• 18:57
  You put the Accord on the road, my god, you're getting
• 19:00
  bleed left, right, and center.
• 19:01
  They just cannot wait to shove you out of the way.
• 19:04
  Even if you're in the slow lane doing 80, and I'm not kidding you,
• 19:07
  80 out here is sort of the beginning of, this is our freeway speed.
• 19:11
  They just lie out here.
• 19:13
  So it's very unsafe.
• 19:14
  Bottom line, so when I look at the Beetle, when I look at even the Caprice,
• 19:18
  even though the Caprice is a solid piece of work, no airbags, it's very
• 19:21
  unforgiving, in a wreck, it's really not going to be your best friend.
• 19:25
  So I keep looking at vehicles that are a bit safer, a bit
• 19:29
  more solid, a bit more robust.
• 19:32
  But my thought is, I'd love for her to have a car that's gonna see her, assuming
• 19:36
  we go to college, at least get her halfway through her college education.
• 19:40
  And fortunately, we're in this era right now, you go back to the 90s,
• 19:45
  some of these cars are tanks, the way they were engineered, because safety
• 19:49
  was a huge concern for everybody.
• 19:51
  I do think that you have to think seriously about crash safety
• 19:55
  standards and how they matured.
• 19:58
  Which challenges a lot of the cars from the 90s, post 98, there was
• 20:02
  a big change in the crash safety standards and that's why a lot of
• 20:05
  those cars got heavier after that.
• 20:08
  Hope that gives you a few of the parameters we're thinking about.
• 20:10
  All of us are in different parts of this journey, right?
• 20:13
  Even as fathers of petrolheads.
• 20:15
  So, you're right in the middle of this.
• 20:17
  Rob's right behind you.
• 20:19
  Dan just went through this and so did William.
• 20:22
  And then obviously Brad, Mark, and I are on the, still on the front end
• 20:25
  of this, catching up with you guys.
• 20:26
  So what I want to do is turn it to Dan and to William to say with your
• 20:31
  girls, what did you go through?
• 20:32
  What was some of your thought process?
• 20:34
  What were the considerations that you made for your daughters
• 20:37
  picking their first car?
• 20:38
  Being in Ohio, one four wheel drive, two safety, It's not like we get
• 20:42
  blizzards every other week or something like that, but it gets pretty shitty.
• 20:46
  When it snows, it doesn't snow here, it just gets ice.
• 20:49
  That's all we get.
• 20:49
  We just get ice.
• 20:51
  Ice doesn't matter if you got six wheel drive.
• 20:52
  Doesn't matter.
• 20:53
  You're gonna slide.
• 20:54
  Now, frankly, I had a ball learning how to fishtail and learning
• 20:57
  how to correct in my old truck.
• 20:59
  I thought that was more fun than anything.
• 21:00
  You get that light rear end out there, it's gonna be a little
• 21:03
  weird, but times have changed.
• 21:06
  You know, the police are not so Open minded about a young person learning how
• 21:10
  to correct the skid and things like that.
• 21:12
  But the big thing was for me was just the four wheel drive.
• 21:15
  Kind of like how Don's saying, you know, where he's at.
• 21:17
  Your child's a new driver.
• 21:18
  They're not really adjusting themselves to environment and how
• 21:21
  they should be driving or whatnot.
• 21:22
  It's more like they're just freaking out going, Oh, okay.
• 21:25
  What's going to give them the most sense of calmness?
• 21:28
  So they feel safe.
• 21:29
  We had a 2014 Acadia just sitting there.
• 21:32
  So she wasn't fond of it because of the size, but she got accustomed to it.
• 21:35
  She got used to it as what you do with anything.
• 21:37
  Yeah.
• 21:37
  And then she'd get towed her friends all around and everything like that.
• 21:40
  But for her, that worked the best.
• 21:42
  We lucked out.
• 21:42
  So that's what I had sitting there.
• 21:43
  The initial plan was to get an older vehicle to restore with her.
• 21:47
  So she'd know every nut and bolt, but unfortunately budget didn't allow
• 21:51
  that to happen for what she wanted.
• 21:52
  So she wound up commandeering one of my trucks and that's what she
• 21:56
  drives the majority of the time.
• 21:57
  And I have a car here that she'll eventually start driving once she gets
• 22:01
  a little bit better driving manual.
• 22:03
  Surprisingly, she's really taken to my dually and every chance she
• 22:06
  gets, she steals that from me.
• 22:07
  It's good having her in a bigger vehicle, but at the same time, it's scary because I
• 22:10
  tell her all the time, like, the dually's a lot wider than the other vehicles.
• 22:13
  You hit something, you're paying for it.
• 22:14
  I say the same kind of crap.
• 22:16
  Are you really gonna bankrupt your child if they hit something with your dually?
• 22:20
  That's not worth that.
• 22:23
  Luckily not, but I'll definitely get some sweat and labor out
• 22:26
  of her if she weren't a record.
• 22:27
  Yeah, fair enough, fair enough.
• 22:28
  Alright, honest answer.
• 22:29
  I appreciate that.
• 22:31
  That'd be a lot of cursing, that's for sure.
• 22:33
  But the thing is, they don't realize that, so it's a valid threat.
• 22:36
  It's a valid threat.
• 22:37
  They don't appreciate the reality of the situation.
• 22:40
  You're just trying to make a threat that registers.
• 22:42
  I get it.
• 22:42
  Is the truck that she does use, is that a manual or automatic?
• 22:45
  It's an automatic.
• 22:46
  It's actually a 86 Chevy K ten four wheel drive.
• 22:50
  Square bucket.
• 22:50
  Nice.
• 22:50
  Don, is manual an option or that's off the table right now?
• 22:53
  Automatics only, right?
• 22:54
  It'll go either way.
• 22:55
  Okay.
• 22:56
  Caitlyn and Michelle both wanna learn how to drive stick shift.
• 22:59
  So now that the Fiat's back and now that the weather's getting a
• 23:02
  little better, we do have plans to go out in the neighborhood
• 23:05
  and run the fiat around and Okay.
• 23:07
  Learn how to do that.
• 23:07
  So we'll go.
• 23:08
  We'll go either way.
• 23:09
  I want to ask, for the two of you who've already gone through this, were your
• 23:12
  choices and criterias based on your experience with your first cars, or
• 23:19
  what you wanted to correct from what you felt happened in your first one?
• 23:22
  Because my current thought with my kids are very different for very different
• 23:25
  reasons, so I really want to hear what's going through there on that side.
• 23:28
  I wanted to get her a small car, it was a 5 speed or something, you know, she'd
• 23:31
  learn how to drive a stick in that, but It was weird because she wanted to
• 23:34
  get her driver's license, but she was really nervous and scared about driving.
• 23:39
  I think it was probably five or six months that she had her license
• 23:42
  before she even got on the highway.
• 23:43
  Did she learn from you or from your wife or from elsewhere?
• 23:46
  My wife, I got zero patience.
• 23:47
  I helped her a little bit with the maneuverability
• 23:49
  stuff, kind of learning that.
• 23:50
  But other than that, no, she always went out with my wife.
• 23:53
  I was putting my foot through the imaginary brake in the floor in
• 23:55
  the passenger seat all the time.
• 23:57
  And it would drive her nuts.
• 23:58
  She's like, stop that.
• 23:59
  Like I said, I wanted to get her a manual.
• 24:01
  Thought was, okay, Hand on the steering wheel, hand on the gears lever, she's
• 24:04
  moving, she can't be on her phone, da da da, you know, that kind of stuff.
• 24:07
  As a kid though, you'll figure it out.
• 24:09
  I did.
• 24:09
  We all did, I had a manual.
• 24:11
  You figured it out how to drive with big golf, whatever, and everything like that.
• 24:15
  Texted with manuals with a 9E phone.
• 24:18
  With T9, you're younger than I am.
• 24:21
  I had already long since learned to drive before like the first
• 24:23
  car phones were installed.
• 24:25
  It's a rite of passage to learn how to drive with your one knee.
• 24:28
  Yes.
• 24:28
  The one thing I still do, my kids in the backseat, they'll be like,
• 24:31
  dad, where are your hands doing?
• 24:32
  I'm like, I'm busy eating this.
• 24:34
  My knees got control of the car.
• 24:36
  You're fine.
• 24:36
  Somebody just said it, and I think it was William.
• 24:38
  You do sort of get comfortable with the car.
• 24:40
  You do sort of figure out.
• 24:42
  The idiosyncrasy of the car.
• 24:43
  So Dan, if you want to answer the same question that William answered.
• 24:46
  No, the automatic just mainly having as to what was here, but having
• 24:49
  her drive a manual is definitely a requirement I had for her.
• 24:52
  Surprisingly, the first manual she drove was my race car up at
• 24:55
  pit race a couple of years ago.
• 24:56
  And I was amazed that she didn't stall it out with the clutch that's in it.
• 24:59
  She's gotten better with manuals where she has a dirt bike and stuff like that.
• 25:02
  She rides, but initially she wanted an old Volkswagen bug.
• 25:05
  And then probably when she was about 12 years old, that changed and she decided
• 25:10
  she wanted an old fifties model truck.
• 25:11
  Yeah.
• 25:12
  But unfortunately, I couldn't find one in decent enough condition
• 25:15
  for the prices they were asking.
• 25:16
  Because initially I was going to get her the vehicle for her 13th
• 25:19
  birthday and I was going to give us three years to rebuild it.
• 25:21
  And my biggest concern was her knowing how to work on the vehicle.
• 25:24
  If something happened, she broke down alongside the road.
• 25:27
  It was more along the fact of her being a female and not having someone
• 25:31
  come take advantage of her not knowing the vehicle than whether it
• 25:34
  was manual or automatic car or truck.
• 25:37
  With the truck, I've taught her damn near everything on it, and she's been around
• 25:41
  square bodies since she was little because I've owned them since before she was born.
• 25:44
  It's one of those things, luckily, that generation of GMs in general, whether
• 25:48
  it be car or truck, engine wise, are very similar if it's a small block.
• 25:51
  So Rob, all that being said, where's your head at?
• 25:53
  So going back to sort of what William said, it's definitely manual.
• 25:56
  I mean, my first driving experience was taking the whole family to
• 25:59
  upstate New York in that Vanagon manual, and that was the first time
• 26:02
  I had driven the car, in any car.
• 26:04
  And I just remember, like, getting on the highway was fine, and then I get to
• 26:08
  these stoplights, and at one point, I was in the middle of New York somewhere.
• 26:11
  I couldn't get it started again in first.
• 26:12
  Turns out I was in third, finally figured it out.
• 26:14
  But I had cars behind me, you know, swearing, swinging around
• 26:17
  you and doing everything.
• 26:18
  Looking back, like, I loved that fear factor, because that fear factor, like,
• 26:22
  gave you a sense of what a privilege more than a right it is to drive,
• 26:26
  and to have to understand how the car works and how everything works.
• 26:29
  In order to drive it.
• 26:31
  And it wasn't an appliance, right?
• 26:32
  It wasn't like I hit the power button on my electric vehicle and to step
• 26:35
  on the gas and it's just going to go.
• 26:36
  It was no, no, I need to know how to do a few things and sort of earn the respect
• 26:40
  of this is how a car works and how I interact with other people on a road.
• 26:43
  And I loved that experience.
• 26:45
  You know, I have the GTI now and I've considered getting something different.
• 26:48
  And I'm like, Nope, either that or a golf or something in that realm
• 26:50
  is what I want my kids to learn on.
• 26:53
  Whether I want that to be the first car is different.
• 26:54
  I think it's a little too quick, but my head is 100 percent
• 26:56
  on it has to be a manual.
• 26:57
  I don't want an automatic.
• 26:59
  Even now, right?
• 27:00
  I have friends who are like, Oh, can I borrow your car?
• 27:01
  I'm like, you don't know how to drive stick.
• 27:03
  You know, you can't help.
• 27:03
  Like I got a buddy who drives stick, but his wife doesn't.
• 27:06
  And so whenever we try to trade off cars, it's like this mental gymnastics.
• 27:09
  I'm like, no, my kids need to learn how to drive stick.
• 27:11
  I agree with you there because I've always.
• 27:13
  idea that if you learn how to drive a manual, then you can pretty much
• 27:18
  drive anything, whether it's a tractor or a truck or a motorcycle.
• 27:22
  If you understand the mechanics of how a manual transmission works, it's not
• 27:25
  just about the car you have, but also older cars too, because if you end
• 27:29
  up in the collector world or if you, somebody goes, Hey, Let's go for a spin.
• 27:33
  And you know, my old nine 11 SC, well, you look down and you go, well, that's
• 27:36
  an interesting anti theft device.
• 27:38
  You got to learn what the three pedals do and it makes you a better driver.
• 27:41
  And I agree with William with the distracted driving thing too.
• 27:44
  I mean, yes, you can defeat that, but realistically you're more situationally
• 27:48
  aware when you drive a manual.
• 27:49
  Because there's more things you have to physically do when you're driving.
• 27:52
  So I'm with you on all that stuff.
• 27:54
  When I got to college, I ended up driving buses.
• 27:56
  I drove transit buses and I ended up being an instructor of new students
• 28:00
  who came in and even driving buses.
• 28:02
  And again, we're driving those big transit buses around Western Massachusetts.
• 28:05
  All the training was done on manual transmission, double
• 28:08
  clutching school buses.
• 28:09
  And so we got kids who had never driven a stick before that are coming in.
• 28:12
  They're like, Oh, it's, I want to learn how to drive buses.
• 28:14
  You know, they watch bus drivers with automatics.
• 28:16
  And they're like, wait, I got to learn this.
• 28:18
  Every one of them by going through that learning process, I would put
• 28:21
  up the drivers that we had, even in college as college kids, right.
• 28:24
  Who are just all a bunch of punks.
• 28:26
  We would go to these bus rodeos and we would always finish in the top part
• 28:29
  because we were one of the few groups in new England that would mandate
• 28:32
  only manuals for instruction purposes.
• 28:34
  Manuals with no synchros.
• 28:36
  That's a big difference relative to what.
• 28:38
  People deal with 100 percent and I feel like even seeing it at the college
• 28:42
  level just made a huge difference in the abilities of all the drivers, but
• 28:45
  coming out of driving manual Volkswagen buses and stuff like I didn't find
• 28:48
  it to be that big a deal because I understood the mechanics of it.
• 28:50
  It was pretty easy.
• 28:51
  Really want to mess, get a three on the tree.
• 28:53
  Yeah.
• 28:54
  Oh boy.
• 28:54
  Or does Chaveau with that umbrella handle in the dashboard.
• 29:00
  And that first VW.
• 29:01
  Plus even like this van against synchros have so much low end torque that like,
• 29:05
  you know, once we figured out the gear thing, like you don't even need the gas.
• 29:07
  You just slowly release the clutch and it'll go 10 miles an hour.
• 29:10
  Fine.
• 29:10
  And so like, it's a easy car to learn on.
• 29:12
  That was kind of a fun aspect of it too.
• 29:14
  But yeah, that's where my head's at was purely gotta be manual.
• 29:16
  I want it small.
• 29:17
  I also, I worry about this might be a cultural thing.
• 29:21
  I worry about a vehicle that has too much.
• 29:23
  People storing ability because I know that my kids will easily get, you know,
• 29:27
  six kids in the back going crazy and boom, that's, you're going to have it.
• 29:30
  Like the one accident I ever had in my entire life as a kid was driving
• 29:34
  the bus back from an ultimate frenzy return with five people in the car and
• 29:37
  everyone's talking and chattering and I'm like, okay, yep, okay, yep, I'm fine.
• 29:40
  I'm fine.
• 29:41
  And, uh, Sideswiping a guardrail is you just get distracted from all the people.
• 29:44
  And it wasn't phones or stereos, it's the people.
• 29:46
  And so I'm a big fan of like, two doors, tight cars, smaller cars.
• 29:50
  Like I had the Scirocco, and it was one of those like, you gotta work to cram
• 29:52
  four people, and none of them are happy.
• 29:54
  But I want less space.
• 29:55
  And so like, the idea of a pickup is great, because yes, as they get
• 29:57
  used to it, they put seven kids in the back to go drive into the
• 30:00
  mountains to go do stuff, fine.
• 30:01
  But the drive into school and back, you're not picking up seven people.
• 30:04
  You don't have people throwing stuff in the back and distracting you.
• 30:07
  So you're actually a less distracted driver with having
• 30:09
  less people capacity in the car.
• 30:11
  It's a very valid point.
• 30:12
  You sort of tripped over here because Don and I talked about this off air.
• 30:16
  There's a sociological aspect to your first car.
• 30:20
  And do you want to be the cool kid from 90210 with the ZR1 Corvette and
• 30:25
  everybody goes, Ooh, look at him.
• 30:26
  He's the next James Dean.
• 30:28
  Or are you suddenly the designated driver because you have mom's old minivan.
• 30:33
  And to your point, you can tote around nine or 10 of your drunk friends and
• 30:37
  you're never having any fun at the party.
• 30:39
  Not saying that you should be doing that.
• 30:40
  Don't drink anymore.
• 30:42
  But there's sort of this.
• 30:43
  now social dynamic that builds around your first car because
• 30:47
  Rob's the guy with the van.
• 30:49
  We're going to go ask Rob and to Don's point, well, you got the pickup.
• 30:51
  Can you help me move?
• 30:52
  And you're like, I don't want to do that.
• 30:54
  So to your point, choosing that first car actually puts your kid
• 30:58
  into a weird social swim lane.
• 31:01
  And I think you need to be careful about what you choose
• 31:03
  based on their personality, based on who their friends are.
• 31:06
  Again, this is why I said at the beginning, this is a very challenging
• 31:08
  subject because I never realized how many layers there were to buying
• 31:12
  a car, especially a first car.
• 31:14
  So I have to disagree a little bit with the social impact there,
• 31:18
  compared to when we were getting our license, we were like dead set
• 31:22
  wanting it the day we were allowed to.
• 31:24
  Today's generation is not as.
• 31:27
  Press to get their license and my daughter wanted to get hers, but it
• 31:29
  was like it wasn't near as much as me.
• 31:32
  I was like out the gates running as fast as I could.
• 31:34
  My daughter's nonchalantly walking to get hers basically.
• 31:37
  And I've noticed more and more, especially dealing with all her friends.
• 31:40
  They don't care as much what the car is as we did.
• 31:43
  Which is surprising because it's like a completely different dynamic
• 31:46
  to the way we looked at cars compared to how they look at it now.
• 31:49
  And I'm not sure how your guys kids are with how it might change by the time
• 31:52
  yours are getting their license, Eric, because that's a couple years from now.
• 31:55
  I agree.
• 31:55
  It feels almost European in the sense that you used to say Americans were house.
• 32:02
  Car clothes and Europeans were clothes house car in priority of spending,
• 32:09
  just kind of like a stereotype when not a lot of kids get their license.
• 32:13
  The fact that you have your license in a car in and of itself makes you unique.
• 32:17
  It doesn't matter what the hell drive period.
• 32:19
  End of story.
• 32:20
  And so the fact that you have a car stands out when you're 16 or 17 years
• 32:25
  old in a modern context where we went from a, you know, 70 to 80 percent
• 32:30
  of 16 year olds getting licenses down to, it's like something like
• 32:33
  under 40 percent or whatever today.
• 32:35
  I think if you're on this podcast, you obviously enjoy automobiles
• 32:39
  and you'd rather your kid's first car be an N A or N B Miata.
• 32:44
  Look, it's just two of you and it's a manual and it's a little car, but
• 32:47
  SUVs and pickup trucks are a thing.
• 32:48
  And I don't want my kid to die.
• 32:50
  So that's probably not going to be their first car.
• 32:53
  But there's the other side of this too, Mark, where I look at some of
• 32:57
  the kids that are driving around the schools that our kids go to,
• 33:01
  and I'm like, I would kill for the hand me downs that they're getting.
• 33:05
  I'm like, you're driving your dad's old five series.
• 33:07
  Like, seriously, I had a 2, 000 piece of crap and that was expensive back then.
• 33:12
  You know what I mean?
• 33:13
  So I look at some of these other cars and I'm like, you have got to be kidding me,
• 33:16
  but there's a social dynamic to that too.
• 33:19
  Even if you're receiving a 10 year old BMW, it's a 10 year old BMW.
• 33:23
  It's like, Holy cow.
• 33:24
  That's a good car by the standards of cars that we drove.
• 33:27
  So it's really awkward.
• 33:29
  It's really strange.
• 33:30
  And I'm not jealous, but on the same token, to your point, I want
• 33:34
  my kids to have like a cool car.
• 33:35
  But to Rob's point, I don't want it to be so good that then everybody
• 33:39
  wants to be on the party bus.
• 33:41
  You know what I mean?
• 33:41
  It's tricky.
• 33:42
  It's I do think for me, the killer feature for a 16 year old, I'm going
• 33:47
  to say dumb ass kid lovingly for my own children would be auto braking.
• 33:52
  And if you look at who's out there and who has good systems that can hit
• 33:56
  the brake on a car before your kid actually hits the brake on the car.
• 34:00
  Toyota does really well.
• 34:02
  Obviously Tesla does really well as much as we love to hate.
• 34:05
  You know, I'm one of those haters too.
• 34:07
  Fine, fair enough, put me out there.
• 34:08
  But they do well in that camp.
• 34:10
  The Subarus do pretty well in that too.
• 34:12
  The newer EyeSight one, you can get a Forester, which is a
• 34:15
  similar vehicle to a lot of this.
• 34:16
  But the newer ones, they got good at that in the last five years or so,
• 34:20
  at least according to my reading.
• 34:21
  I would agree, but you can get a five year old Forester for starting
• 34:24
  to get into this range, because people bought them as appliances.
• 34:27
  And so you have to start thinking about the killer app of what's really going
• 34:31
  to be a big safety mechanism for that distracted kid who's maybe listening to
• 34:37
  their friends as we've talked about the back or they're getting a text message
• 34:41
  or Spotify notification on their phone.
• 34:43
  The other aspect besides that, which I hate to even mention, because I'm not a
• 34:47
  fan of this and kids are sort of forbidden from, Phones for a reason, right?
• 34:50
  Is, and it's only in the newer cars, making sure it has a head unit with
• 34:53
  CarPlay, being able to abstract the need to look at a phone, any of the newer
• 34:58
  ones, right, you hit a button and it just reads you what the text message is.
• 35:01
  And you can, you know, do you want to reply?
• 35:03
  You just say, yes, tell Jill, LOL or something, and it just does it for you.
• 35:06
  And they never need to actually.
• 35:08
  reach down and pick up a phone and take their eyes off of the road.
• 35:11
  To that point, that's also a feature that we haven't even discussed at all, right?
• 35:14
  Which is more whiz bang.
• 35:15
  So there's the distraction, but it removes the, I'm going to physically
• 35:18
  pick this thing up and do this to answer my question, as opposed to
• 35:22
  just hit a button on a big giant screen in the center of the console.
• 35:25
  It's not whiz bang to say, Hey Siri, give me directions to school
• 35:29
  or give me directions to home.
• 35:30
  Right.
• 35:30
  In Apple CarPlay or Google Android is infinitely better
• 35:35
  at that than the OEM systems.
• 35:37
  And you look at where generative AI is coming in relative to Apple
• 35:41
  coming out with, you know, there's going to be huge advancements there.
• 35:45
  Siri replying to me right now, mid podcast, because I made
• 35:49
  the mistake of saying her name.
• 35:51
  And that's something we haven't talked about either, which is Do you really
• 35:54
  want to eliminate distracted driving?
• 35:56
  Is AI a component of that and the ability to have legitimate natural
• 36:02
  language interpretation and just say what you want your car to be able to
• 36:06
  do and it gives you those directions or it responds to you in that kind of way?
• 36:10
  And is that inherently more safe?
• 36:13
  I think there has to be some legitimacy to that.
• 36:15
  I do think that CarPlay as a platform will help older cars be better at
• 36:19
  that very quickly, because you put a more modern iPhone plugged into an
• 36:23
  older Apple CarPlay implementation, it will inherit those capabilities.
• 36:27
  And so that will be a big boon to these kids in this type of situation.
• 36:32
  A lot of it depends on where you are too.
• 36:34
  That was going to be my next question for Don as we try to get closer to the
• 36:36
  actual answer, right, is like, I live in the city, I live in Capitol Hill,
• 36:39
  my kid is walking to middle school or biking to middle school every day, and
• 36:42
  the high school is closer than the middle school, like if he goes to the local one,
• 36:45
  right, so no one needs a car around here.
• 36:48
  Now that said, my kids know that I'm a gear head that I work on.
• 36:51
  Like the GT I have is because I taught a friend how to do everything.
• 36:54
  And my kids ardently watched and my kid's biggest joy is like getting
• 36:57
  onto an on ramp and seeing if I can get the car sideways on an off ramp.
• 37:01
  And my kids love that stuff, right?
• 37:02
  So they're going to learn to drive the moment they can.
• 37:04
  They're going to want me to.
• 37:05
  Thank God, get back to doing track days.
• 37:07
  And so I can bring them out and have them start learning.
• 37:08
  So I'm excited for that to happen, but their commuting
• 37:11
  side, isn't going to be there.
• 37:12
  Right.
• 37:12
  So like in my case, I could totally make their first car an NB Miata.
• 37:16
  The only purpose of this is to drive to an autocross spot or a drive to a
• 37:19
  track day, and then work on car control skills and drive home because their
• 37:23
  day to day life through high school, at least doesn't going to involve a car.
• 37:26
  You hit the nail on the head through high school.
• 37:28
  And Don sort of alluded to this earlier about the weather.
• 37:31
  One of the things that I was thinking about is don't buy a car.
• 37:35
  For your current situation, especially with a 18 year old.
• 37:40
  Maybe they're starting to drive a little bit later.
• 37:42
  If they're going off to college, think about the climate in that area.
• 37:46
  If you're going to the middle of the country, go into Ohio or William is, or
• 37:50
  you're going to new England where it's going to snow, not inches, but feet.
• 37:54
  You don't want to show up with a Miata in the winter time when you're in school,
• 37:57
  because you're going to be bumming rides.
• 37:59
  From your friend with the Toyota four by four.
• 38:01
  If you're going to Florida, then a convertible is perfect.
• 38:03
  Think about where they're going to be going and make the car buying part of
• 38:08
  maybe the college selection process.
• 38:10
  These are other parts that suddenly made the equation way more
• 38:14
  complicated than, man, I'm really interested in an 82 Trans Am.
• 38:17
  It's way more dynamic than buying a collector car.
• 38:21
  I mean, we can end it right now because there's one car that fills every bill.
• 38:25
  Every bill is filled by one car, and that is the 89 Chrysler TC by Maserati.
• 38:30
  I thought you were going to say the Cadillac Elante.
• 38:32
  Why is that not on your list?
• 38:33
  You should buy her an Elante.
• 38:35
  The Elante is a wonderful car, but it's a little ostentatious.
• 38:37
  The Chrysler's a little more sedate, you know?
• 38:40
  A little unmodified.
• 38:41
  That Chrysler's on my list.
• 38:43
  And what's funny is we were hinting at the younger kids,
• 38:45
  like me and Mark and Brad, right?
• 38:47
  What are they going to be driving six years from now?
• 38:49
  Let's say that because they're all in that, you know, 10 year old range.
• 38:52
  So for Brad's kids, you're catching up a little bit more.
• 38:54
  Yeah, I think the car that my kids are going to drive hasn't been built yet.
• 38:58
  It's not around yet.
• 38:59
  Well, you're hitting it right on the head.
• 39:01
  So my math is always what was available new 10 years from the date
• 39:08
  that they're going to start driving.
• 39:09
  So if we're looking at 2024, We need to start talking about what
• 39:13
  was available in 2014, plus or minus a year 2013 to 2015 in that range.
• 39:17
  I consider those new cars, by the way, just to be clear.
• 39:20
  I'm old enough that, like, if somebody handed me a 2014, I'd
• 39:22
  be like, that's the newest car I've ever seen, like, ever owned.
• 39:24
  But, Don gave us a number.
• 39:26
  Ten grand.
• 39:27
  So we have some wiggle room to play with.
• 39:30
  Even when looking at under 10 K.
• 39:33
  There are so many really cool cars out there, and I actually love that.
• 39:39
  They think, you know, your modern cord is too fast, so it's like, great,
• 39:43
  let's go back to the nineties when everything didn't have 280 horsepower.
• 39:47
  There's just so many cool things out there.
• 39:48
  This is going to be a lot of fun.
• 39:49
  I need you to put on your thinking caps here, boys.
• 39:52
  I need you to think of something that ain't going to get
• 39:53
  bullied around in the bathroom.
• 39:55
  So who wants to take a stab?
• 39:57
  At some suggestions for Don in the 10, 000 and under category within,
• 40:01
  let's say, maybe the last 10 years.
• 40:03
  And if you got something outside of the 10 year window, I am curious, my
• 40:06
  default was we go so much older than 10.
• 40:09
  So I'm really saying, you know, if I'm going back to 2014.
• 40:13
  I'm saying 2014 and 10 grand.
• 40:16
  Is that what I'm looking at?
• 40:17
  Yeah.
• 40:18
  Right.
• 40:18
  And there are cars that ended their lives in 2014.
• 40:21
  So it's very fair to say I'm going to get the 2002 version of that because
• 40:25
  it spanned the whole gamut up to 2014.
• 40:29
  So you can still kind of get the last version of that old car, which
• 40:33
  is actually a very smart thing to do if you're a conscientious buyer.
• 40:37
  So I'm leaving a little bit of wiggle room, but I think the further you go
• 40:41
  back, the more problems you may run into with a new driver in a super old car.
• 40:46
  I think that's totally fair, man.
• 40:48
  It's tough.
• 40:49
  I mean, the nice thing though for him is that Being in Texas, you obviously have
• 40:53
  a very broad range of where you can go around and find the car, but two, you
• 40:58
  don't have to worry so much rust and that stuff, cars, not going to get beat
• 41:02
  up all that much in regards to stop and go and that, because you're out there
• 41:05
  in the wide open spaces, higher mileages are really something to be too afraid.
• 41:09
  And I spent way too much time on cars.
• 41:12
  com in this category.
• 41:14
  I'm going to throw one out.
• 41:14
  I'm going to chum the water for you guys.
• 41:16
  And then I'll let you guys rip from there.
• 41:18
  And I know that Don is a huge fan of the Ford Flex.
• 41:22
  And he talked about maybe getting a second one because Caitlyn loves his Ford
• 41:25
  Flex, but he doesn't want to give up his.
• 41:27
  So he'd have to get another one, sort of like the Caprice thing, right?
• 41:29
  But Don, for your consideration, might I offer you for the low, low price of 8,
• 41:35
  500, a Lincoln Mark T with the EcoBoost.
• 41:39
  Which is just a Ford flex with leather.
• 41:41
  Yeah, that would work.
• 41:42
  The only thing, and this happened to mine just recently, I just found
• 41:46
  out about the water pump on the 3.
• 41:48
  5 liter Ford and perhaps even the 3.
• 41:50
  7 liter, I'm not sure yet, the water pump on these 3.
• 41:53
  5 liter Fords is internal inside the engine.
• 41:57
  So when it pops, I have the receipt somewhere.
• 41:59
  It was 4, 100 to repair mine.
• 42:02
  It's not so much the part and getting into the motor and changing it out.
• 42:07
  That's not the problem.
• 42:08
  The whole front end has to come off.
• 42:09
  The whole car basically comes apart when you do the water pump.
• 42:13
  That's not true for every car.
• 42:14
  Yeah, right.
• 42:15
  As somebody who belongs to the Audi club and owns Volkswagen, I thought
• 42:17
  the front end had to come off for all that stuff anyways in every car.
• 42:20
  Service position is engine out.
• 42:21
  I was gonna say, isn't that normal?
• 42:23
  I thought that was normal.
• 42:24
  I've seen people do that during a track day.
• 42:25
  They pull off the whole front end of the Audi to check the water pump.
• 42:28
  We won't talk about that, but it is true.
• 42:32
  What else I found what was interesting is 3.
• 42:34
  5 liter in the F 150 because The engine is mounted longitudinally.
• 42:39
  It's a different water pump.
• 42:40
  Okay.
• 42:40
  So they only put it internal for the front wheel drive packaging, but it's
• 42:44
  going to be narrower fit in between fenders rather than firewall and grill.
• 42:48
  So that's apparently where the thinking was.
• 42:51
  So if you didn't have one 50, you're going to be okay with that V6, but
• 42:54
  yes, to your point, the MKT, the flex, both of them are great vehicles.
• 42:58
  You just gotta be prepared for when that water pump.
• 43:01
  Needs to be replaced.
• 43:02
  That was what I call my cheap, chic choice.
• 43:05
  If you wanted to have something a little classy and go back to Lincoln,
• 43:08
  but I also will throw in there.
• 43:10
  And I didn't realize that the bottom had fallen out of these cars.
• 43:13
  And my wife owned one is the Cadillac SRX.
• 43:16
  You can get one of those.
• 43:18
  For around 6, 500 to 8, 500 bucks.
• 43:20
  Like the Lincoln.
• 43:21
  I saw Lincoln's in that range as well.
• 43:23
  And the Cadillac was great.
• 43:24
  The only thing we experienced with it that was bad was their Q system,
• 43:28
  which is the infotainment thing.
• 43:30
  It would go numb, but other than that, the Camaro motor that's in it.
• 43:33
  Was rock solid.
• 43:34
  The all wheel drive was fantastic.
• 43:36
  It's a haulback system from the UK.
• 43:38
  We had zero issues with the bunch of years that we had the Cadillac.
• 43:41
  But finally, when we got rid of it, the infotainment system, which
• 43:45
  controlled the HVAC, which was the bigger issue started to get wonky.
• 43:49
  And that's a very expensive replacement.
• 43:51
  It's almost 8, 000 to include labor.
• 43:54
  Cause they have to rip basically the whole front of the interior part.
• 43:56
  If you get one that was blessed that doesn't have the defect, then
• 44:00
  those cars are amazing and they're a lot of fun and they're funky.
• 44:03
  They're like the tall CTS too fast.
• 44:05
  Yeah, it's true.
• 44:05
  330 horse in that stole my 2 cents in manual diesel Jetta
• 44:11
  Hundred horsepower baby.
• 44:12
  Those are the newer, the TDI ones are quick as hell though.
• 44:15
  Off the line.
• 44:15
  New ones, but we're talking.
• 44:17
  Oh, we're talking, you know, 20 12, 20 14 ish.
• 44:21
  110 horsepower.
• 44:22
  I think.
• 44:23
  Something like that.
• 44:23
  A lot of torque at the low end, though.
• 44:25
  But that thing will run forever.
• 44:27
  If you want something that's gonna get her all the way through
• 44:28
  college, everything, there you go.
• 44:30
  Those things are bulletproof.
• 44:31
  But timeout, the only thing I wouldn't do to a kid going through
• 44:35
  this experience myself, I would never recommend a German car, especially
• 44:39
  a VAG product, to a 16 year old.
• 44:42
  In Texas.
• 44:43
  The funnier part of this is that it's diesel, which means they're
• 44:45
  always going to go to the wrong pump and they're going to screw that
• 44:47
  part up first, just to be clear.
• 44:49
  First time my daughter took the dually, which is a diesel, and she's used to
• 44:51
  driving the halftime, which is gas, I'd caught her for something right
• 44:56
  as she pulled up to the gas station.
• 44:58
  And she's like, yeah, I'm about to throw gas in the truck.
• 45:00
  I'm like, you're about to put what in the truck?
• 45:01
  She's like, gas.
• 45:02
  I'm like, you better put diesel in it.
• 45:04
  She's like, oh yeah.
• 45:05
  Had I not caught her at that point, there would have been full tank of gas in my
• 45:08
  diesel truck and I would have hated life.
• 45:10
  I love my diesels, but for a kid that age, sometimes they're
• 45:13
  a little bit absent minded.
• 45:15
  I agree.
• 45:15
  My older one has ADHD.
• 45:17
  Keep it simple.
• 45:18
  Keep it simple.
• 45:18
  It's gotta be gas or for Brad's kids, electric at that point.
• 45:21
  And that's why the Mark T the reason I brought that up first is it breaks my
• 45:25
  sort of rule, no turbos for first drivers, because that adds a layer of complexity.
• 45:31
  That doesn't need to be there.
• 45:33
  And I don't want to have to explain forced induction or repair it, or why does it
• 45:37
  run like crap and all that kind of stuff.
• 45:39
  So for me, it's got to be normally aspirated.
• 45:42
  And I think Rob, you made kind of the side comment about Volkswagen's
• 45:46
  in Texas and this and that dealership network or repair shops.
• 45:50
  It's gotta be something domestic or domestically built.
• 45:53
  So we're talking Honda, Toyota.
• 45:54
  The big three and maybe a couple other cars where there's
• 45:58
  a decent dealer network.
• 45:59
  Again, going back to my thought about where are they going to college?
• 46:02
  Because suddenly you find yourself in Utah and it's like, you're the
• 46:06
  only gal in town with a beetle.
• 46:07
  And they're like, well, that's a pretty car.
• 46:09
  Where are you going to get that worked on?
• 46:11
  So you don't want to be in that situation.
• 46:13
  I'm making a gross generalization, but it's another piece of this.
• 46:17
  Puzzle that you have to factor in is where can you get the car serviced
• 46:20
  when you're not home with mom and dad?
• 46:22
  All of my trips back to california with the family.
• 46:25
  I've never counted them.
• 46:26
  I don't think but it was always really nice You know, you're busting down
• 46:29
  the freeway the ford blue oval the ford blue oval the ford blue oval
• 46:33
  There's dealerships all along the way and right across the freeway,
• 46:36
  well, there's the Chevy Bowtie.
• 46:37
  Either way, you know, Chevy Ford seemed to be kind of the best
• 46:42
  way to go in terms of servicing.
• 46:44
  You got to think we are a traveling family.
• 46:46
  We go back to LA, we go to El Paso, we go up north to Kansas.
• 46:49
  So it is sort of something we need to take into consideration too,
• 46:53
  is yeah, if that puppy breaks down somewhere in the middle of the country,
• 46:57
  We're hoping that, yeah, there's a dealer network to take care of it.
• 47:00
  Now, Volkswagen, I'd have some confidence in, they've got a
• 47:02
  pretty good dealer network.
• 47:03
  They're pretty big these days.
• 47:04
  Yeah.
• 47:04
  Them and Subaru are actually more places than you think now.
• 47:07
  Like you can be in the middle of podunk nowhere.
• 47:09
  There's a Subaru dealership and a VW dealership.
• 47:11
  Like those are becoming ubiquitous.
• 47:13
  Similar to Ford Chevy.
• 47:14
  So many parts share in the Volkswagen group.
• 47:16
  Yeah.
• 47:16
  I don't mean to disagree with Eric, but it feels like a little bit of a 90s kind
• 47:20
  of Maybe in all these point of view, old fashioned, if we're saying we're
• 47:24
  looking within the last decade, there's so much part sharing and Volkswagen
• 47:27
  group has alternated around the largest by volume factor in the world.
• 47:32
  Right.
• 47:33
  You have a golf or a Jetta or a Passat or this or that, or all those
• 47:37
  things use the exact same parts.
• 47:38
  That 10 year old beetle is basically a golf, which is the
• 47:41
  same as a Jetta, which is the same.
• 47:43
  Yeah.
• 47:43
  All those things are small.
• 47:44
  That is true.
• 47:45
  But here's the problem with the German cars.
• 47:47
  I know this firsthand.
• 47:49
  When they break, even though they're all the same, the same
• 47:52
  part breaks on all of them.
• 47:54
  It's a stupid reason that it broke and then it's idiotically
• 47:57
  expensive to replace.
• 48:00
  I disagree.
• 48:01
  You end up learning yourself how to do it.
• 48:02
  Like, I remember driving home and that Scirocco in a rainstorm, replacing an
• 48:06
  alternator on the side of the highway.
• 48:07
  It was like one of those rites of passage.
• 48:09
  It was kind of fun.
• 48:10
  Because you could, Rob, but do that on a 2014 GTI.
• 48:14
  You don't have the Schwaben XYZ tool necessary to take the alternator out now.
• 48:19
  Other than that, the Scirocco had parts that were actually made of like, Cast
• 48:23
  aluminum or metal and stuff like that.
• 48:25
  A lot of these new it's all plastic.
• 48:27
  It's all plastic and plastic.
• 48:28
  Yeah.
• 48:28
  Eric and I know firsthand for the fact when the Mark fours, the coolant
• 48:32
  lines that are made of plastic, like the Y pieces and stuff, and
• 48:34
  it's like, it's going to break, there's no question about it.
• 48:37
  It's just when so much of the stuff is made of plastic.
• 48:40
  And then of course the electronics, like you guys were mentioned
• 48:43
  with some of those stuff.
• 48:43
  That's another nightmare in itself for a 10 year old vehicle.
• 48:46
  So as much as you complain about plastic and crap falling apart, Cars
• 48:51
  are so much more durable and longer lasting than they have ever been.
• 48:56
  And you can see the average age of the fleet in the cars registered
• 49:00
  in the United States getting older every year as evidence of that, and
• 49:04
  it does have to change your calculus.
• 49:07
  So you're saying we should look at 20 year old vehicles is what I'm hearing.
• 49:10
  I agree with where you're headed here, man.
• 49:11
  I like this idea.
• 49:13
  Let's go older.
• 49:13
  Older is better.
• 49:14
  It's kind of funny that I really don't have much objection
• 49:18
  to finding another brick.
• 49:19
  Another Caprice.
• 49:20
  I really don't.
• 49:21
  Here's the other problem.
• 49:21
  The older the car is, the more difficult it's going to be to insure,
• 49:26
  especially if you want full coverage.
• 49:27
  And then there's a lot of companies that maybe don't want to cover that.
• 49:30
  Now, do you need to get classic?
• 49:31
  It becomes a nightmare.
• 49:32
  So if you stay in a 10 year window, you're still on GEICO or Allstate
• 49:37
  or Nationwide's amortization tables so you can insure the car.
• 49:41
  Almost, I assume everybody on this call This is going to be the third
• 49:45
  to seventh to twelfth car on a plan.
• 49:47
  It's not going to make a big impact to anybody.
• 49:49
  I only have two currently on mine.
• 49:51
  I had three for a while.
• 49:52
  Adding a third is not going to, like, it could be a 1950s car.
• 49:56
  It's not going to make a huge difference.
• 49:57
  Well, you got boys and I hate to say it's going to cost Double.
• 50:00
  Yeah, I know.
• 50:01
  And which is why they're getting a manual transmission
• 50:03
  element or a old beat up Golf.
• 50:05
  But the insurance for those is not going to be a major consideration.
• 50:09
  It's going to be a lot.
• 50:10
  Yeah, but we all have multiple cars.
• 50:12
  You're going to go from two grand to 2, 800 a year.
• 50:14
  It's not going to be a big thing.
• 50:15
  What?
• 50:15
  Have you looked lately?
• 50:17
  Dude!
• 50:17
  30 years ago now, I was paying 2, 500 a year in insurance for a 10 year old car.
• 50:23
  What do you pay right now in insurance?
• 50:25
  For your fleet.
• 50:25
  Three cars, it's about that, with two drivers.
• 50:28
  Is it only three that are insured right now?
• 50:29
  Yeah, it's only three.
• 50:30
  Why would you insure a race car?
• 50:31
  This is a track insurance.
• 50:32
  I know.
• 50:32
  It's separate.
• 50:33
  I didn't know if you had other crap lying around somewhere else.
• 50:35
  No, no.
• 50:35
  This doesn't count the 914?
• 50:37
  No, no, no, no.
• 50:37
  This doesn't count the TT?
• 50:37
  No, no, no, no.
• 50:38
  This doesn't count the No, no, no.
• 50:39
  Okay.
• 50:39
  It's just the Pacifica and the stuff that actually has tags.
• 50:43
  Yeah, okay.
• 50:43
  But anyway.
• 50:44
  The point is, but you had a fourth of that, right?
• 50:46
  Let's say the nine 14 was stock and you added it to that, right?
• 50:48
  That's an older car.
• 50:49
  If you were to add that on there, it's not going to make a, it's like, I'm
• 50:52
  not going to double that or anything like that, but you also have to
• 50:54
  factor in every state's different.
• 50:56
  Don in Texas has to go through all his inspections and registrations.
• 51:00
  California is extremely, it's Texas.
• 51:02
  So he's going to make sure he's got his gun rack installed and has his concealed
• 51:05
  carry permit attached to his window.
• 51:07
  That's another reason I like the caprice.
• 51:09
  There's plenty of room for guns.
• 51:11
  Seriously.
• 51:11
  All right.
• 51:13
  Sorry, had to go there.
• 51:15
  But for everybody else that's listening to this, 10 year old card.
• 51:18
  Anybody else have suggestions?
• 51:19
  Because I've got a list that we can kind of go through here if nobody wants
• 51:22
  to throw something up on the table.
• 51:24
  I'm really torn between the enthusiast aspect of it and
• 51:28
  the practical aspect of it.
• 51:30
  In trying to thread the needle between those two things so that, like, I can
• 51:35
  hopefully engender, I'll say engender instead of encourage, I can engender in my
• 51:40
  kid some degree of automobile enthusiast, while at the same time, not feeling guilty
• 51:45
  that, like, I'm in some way endangering my child because I put him in a.
• 51:49
  Fox body convertible Mustang.
• 51:53
  Are you endangering your child in the fox body or are you endangering
• 51:56
  all the civilians and speculators?
• 51:58
  Well, that's true.
• 51:58
  It is a Mustang after all.
• 52:00
  That convertible fox body is a bit of a death trap.
• 52:03
  Let's just call a spade a spade.
• 52:04
  As a side note, I recommend everybody do what Eric did, and I didn't do this.
• 52:08
  Go to cars.
• 52:09
  com and try to look in that age range, like under 10 grand.
• 52:12
  It is everything from like Mercedes Benz GLKs to like Yes, there's a lot of cars.
• 52:18
  Yeah, that's what I mean by we are in a wonderful generation right now, because
• 52:22
  the cars that are going back 10 years, even 20 years Are so nice compared to
• 52:27
  what all of us had is our first cars.
• 52:29
  These cars are really incredible.
• 52:31
  If this was 500 podcasts ago, by the way, I'd have to pull out the fact that you can
• 52:34
  get an HHR from 2011 and call it a day.
• 52:37
  We're going to get there, but I'll throw this on the table.
• 52:40
  Don, did you know?
• 52:42
  Because you're a blue oval man, you could get a Ford Taurus
• 52:45
  Police Interceptor for 8, 500.
• 52:48
  Depending on the year, yeah, I know.
• 52:50
  Yeah, believe me, I looked at the Tauruses, but again, the fear factor of
• 52:53
  the modern Taurus is front wheel drive, 3.
• 52:57
  5 liter.
• 52:57
  But there's no fear factor, you've got rhino bars on the front of that thing.
• 53:01
  You do.
• 53:02
  If you've ever actually looked at the police package Fords, they're incredible.
• 53:06
  Big brakes, sway bars, suspension.
• 53:07
  Yeah.
• 53:08
  Oh yeah.
• 53:08
  And there's literally a division at Ford.
• 53:10
  That's all these guys do.
• 53:12
  They develop, think about and build police cars.
• 53:15
  That's it.
• 53:16
  But when it comes to the Taurus, if you're going for the modern
• 53:18
  one, you're looking at that 3.
• 53:20
  5 liter again, and it's going to be that funky little water
• 53:23
  pump, which all I'm getting at though, is I'm looking at the 3.
• 53:26
  5.
• 53:26
  It's in the Explorer, it's in the Taurus, it's in the Flex, it's in all these
• 53:30
  front wheel drive application vehicles.
• 53:32
  I have a feeling in just a few years, we're going to start seeing these things
• 53:36
  winding up at the junkyard because people just don't want to afford to fix them.
• 53:40
  My mom and I talked about this the other day.
• 53:41
  She has the Explorer with a front wheel drive and a 3.
• 53:44
  5 liter.
• 53:44
  And I told her, you know, the comical thing about all of this, four
• 53:48
  grand we paid for that water pump.
• 53:50
  I've always wanted a Range Rover.
• 53:51
  I have always had a thing for Range Rover.
• 53:53
  I've always been.
• 53:54
  Terrified of them.
• 53:55
  Could I hear these horror stories all the time?
• 53:57
  Guess what?
• 53:58
  I'm living the horror story.
• 53:59
  My wife's power window switch on the Honda went out because of my dog who
• 54:03
  kept stepping on the button and somehow broke something in power window world.
• 54:07
  Yeah, whatever it was, it was 900 just for the part.
• 54:11
  So when I hear this, I think to myself, okay, why do we not have an older Maserati
• 54:15
  and an older Range Rover in the driveway?
• 54:17
  Why be scared now?
• 54:19
  Which goes back to the 2005 Buick LeSabre, the 85 Caprice, et cetera, et cetera.
• 54:25
  Those cars were tanks.
• 54:27
  Yes.
• 54:28
  They're built better today than they ever have been, but the
• 54:30
  parts are so much more expensive.
• 54:32
  It's the availability.
• 54:33
  And here's my litmus test for that.
• 54:35
  And I know where Mark was going to with buy an older car, but if you go
• 54:39
  to rock auto and the parts list is this long, that's not the car you buy.
• 54:44
  Because it means you cannot service it.
• 54:45
  It makes it really, really difficult to maintain.
• 54:48
  So that's why 10 years is that sweet spot.
• 54:51
  They're still making replacement parts.
• 54:53
  People are keeping those cars on the road.
• 54:55
  And to your point, Don, the junkyard, when I grew up, that
• 54:58
  was like every other weekend.
• 55:00
  We're going, going to find this, looking for that shit.
• 55:02
  Dan and I still do that.
• 55:03
  Now looking for parts for the race car.
• 55:04
  Good thing when it comes to salvage yard down in Texas and the Southwest, the
• 55:08
  salvage yards there are many times better than I hear on the East coast, because The
• 55:12
  weather's better so the cars can sit there for longer and a lot of the guys have a
• 55:15
  lot more land But the point is junkyard is a gold mine if you know what you're
• 55:20
  doing But after a while even the junkyard starts to dry up and they stop buying
• 55:25
  those cars because they're like they're too old Because they're working in a 10
• 55:29
  year window So I think that 10 year window is super important to a first time car
• 55:35
  buyers decision making process Well, and you and I talked about this off camera.
• 55:38
  We talked about the volvos And I'm a big Volvo fan.
• 55:42
  I've always loved Volvo.
• 55:43
  My daughter likes the Volvos.
• 55:45
  So it seems like it'd be a shoe and they're very safe.
• 55:47
  They have a sort of bulldog ish nature to them, but you start pushing that 10 year
• 55:52
  mark, that 15 year mark, you talk about a small section of the parts catalog.
• 55:56
  I mean, there's nothing there.
• 55:57
  And if there is.
• 55:59
  You better bring your wallet that they are not going to be cheap
• 56:02
  to find parts for those Volvo.
• 56:04
  So the Taurus was my last three and a half liter special, the Cadillacs, a 3.
• 56:07
  6 liter Camaro engine.
• 56:10
  So do you want to go into the Mopar camp or would you want to go to a
• 56:13
  car that would fit inside the flex?
• 56:15
  When it comes to Mopar, there's really only one car to discuss.
• 56:18
  All right.
• 56:19
  So let's go B spec for a moment.
• 56:21
  Rob, a car you might appreciate.
• 56:22
  The Honda Fit.
• 56:23
  I just looked, I saw Fits are available, and I'm, at first I was
• 56:26
  scrolling through it, I'm like, oh, Mini Coopers you could get for that
• 56:28
  much, and I was like, oh, the Fit.
• 56:29
  That's basically that, but slower and better parts availability.
• 56:32
  100%.
• 56:33
  The Mini is one of those you're going to pay the BMW tax on,
• 56:36
  and you have to be ready for it.
• 56:37
  Yeah, and the Fit's the same car when it's that old, for
• 56:40
  the purposes of a new driver.
• 56:42
  You can still get a manual or automatic, and they will run
• 56:44
  forever, and are bigger in the inside than they seem on the outside.
• 56:48
  And so easier to parallel park and when you're done, you can
• 56:50
  sell it for what you paid for it.
• 56:51
  When you're done, you strip it down and you go Sunday Cup racing with Gridlife.
• 56:55
  What are you talking about?
• 56:55
  You have a built in race car.
• 56:57
  Yeah, the other one would be the RAV4, kind of the competitor to that.
• 57:02
  Yeah, if you want to go SUV.
• 57:04
  If I go to Toyota, I go like, I'm almost thinking like the Scion TC or something
• 57:08
  also sort of fixes this problem.
• 57:09
  So you get like, so the boxy two door action and you can go with the Matrix.
• 57:12
  It's a little, that's the bigger version of that.
• 57:14
  Pontiac Vibe, right?
• 57:15
  Well, Vibe and Matrix, same car.
• 57:17
  Yeah.
• 57:17
  Again, it's basically a Toyota.
• 57:19
  So parts availability is easy and reliability is good.
• 57:21
  Again, though, we're getting into that bully factor.
• 57:24
  Those cars, they're gonna get bullied.
• 57:26
  So if you don't want to get bullied around, that takes a couple other
• 57:28
  cars off my list though, because I had the Dodge Dart on the list because
• 57:32
  you can get those for under 10k.
• 57:33
  You can also get the Chrysler 200 on that list under 10k.
• 57:37
  I would not want that car.
• 57:39
  I don't think anybody wanted that car.
• 57:40
  You can still get them new on dealerships.
• 57:42
  If you're going to stay in a car, sedan, now you can start talking about Impalas.
• 57:47
  But if you want to go cheap chic, Chrysler 300 is an option with the 3.
• 57:53
  5 liter Pentastar.
• 57:54
  That's actually not a bad idea, the 300 or the Charger, either one of them.
• 57:57
  Yep.
• 57:58
  I haven't seen a Charger yet scrolling through here.
• 58:00
  I've seen the other one.
• 58:01
  300's all day with the six cylinder.
• 58:02
  Yeah, 300's yeah, but I haven't seen a Charger in here yet.
• 58:05
  And they're making 300 horse, but it's heavy.
• 58:08
  I really enjoyed those as rental cars.
• 58:10
  They were smooth.
• 58:11
  They're like Paleozoic era, Mercedes chassis.
• 58:14
  They're just nice and comfortable.
• 58:16
  You can put four people in it.
• 58:18
  You can put luggage in it.
• 58:19
  It's not a hatchback.
• 58:20
  It's not a truck.
• 58:21
  It's kind of like, give me a little bit of everything and you're good to go.
• 58:24
  And again, I was surprised how cheap they were.
• 58:27
  I like that Chrysler 300.
• 58:28
  That's a great car.
• 58:29
  My dad had one of those way back.
• 58:31
  You know, I love that car.
• 58:32
  I think it was great.
• 58:33
  Great on the highway.
• 58:34
  Great cruise.
• 58:34
  I think it was a great car.
• 58:35
  And knowing that she's kind of afraid saying the cord's too fast, and kind of
• 58:39
  how Don was saying when he's driving down there 80s in the slow lane and whatnot,
• 58:44
  you're going to want to have something.
• 58:45
  I mean, I don't know if she's going to be driving on the highways, but you know,
• 58:48
  she's going to want to have something.
• 58:49
  It's going to have some oomph to it.
• 58:50
  Because she's gonna have to get out of the way.
• 58:53
  She's gonna have to move or do whatever, you know, so it's you don't
• 58:55
  want to have something that's got 110 horsepower that she puts her foot to
• 58:59
  the floor and, you know, she's got a F 350 Dually behind her, rolling coal,
• 59:03
  he's got his stacks going, he's laying on his air horn, freaking her out.
• 59:07
  It's kind of like you got to have something that's going to
• 59:09
  have some get up and go also now.
• 59:11
  You start getting Jeep Renegade, Ford Escape.
• 59:15
  All that RAV4, CR V, every car in that class is available.
• 59:18
  Nissan, Rogue, I mean, they're all the same.
• 59:20
  Yeah, you can have any of those.
• 59:22
  Exactly.
• 59:22
  Well, and I'm glad you went there, because I also considered The Jeep Patriot.
• 59:27
  As a car guy, I hate the existence of that along with the compass.
• 59:30
  I can't in good conscience recommend any of that crap.
• 59:33
  Oh, the Patriot looks awesome if you slam it down and put it on big wheels.
• 59:35
  Yeah, if you do a bunch of stuff to it that turns it not into
• 59:37
  a Patriot, then it's great.
• 59:39
  Yeah, that's true for a lot of things.
• 59:40
  Well, because it's a Neon, right?
• 59:42
  Yeah, but no, no.
• 59:43
  It's like a Jeep Liberty.
• 59:44
  Like, don't, don't.
• 59:45
  Yeah.
• 59:45
  Get a Grand Cherokee or a Wrangler or stay out of that.
• 59:48
  Exactly, exactly.
• 59:49
  Now, that's another option, Don, if you want to go a little bit bigger.
• 59:52
  The Grand Cherokee.
• 59:53
  Is a very similarly appointed interior to the 300, especially in that age
• 59:59
  rage, when it became the later WK twos shares, a lot of the same parts.
• 1:00:04
  It's the same Pena star.
• 1:00:05
  You're going to get the same gas mileage.
• 1:00:07
  It weighs about the same as the 300.
• 1:00:09
  So you kind of have your choice.
• 1:00:10
  Do you want the sedan or do you want the SUV?
• 1:00:12
  Do you want the all wheel drive or do you just want two wheel drive?
• 1:00:15
  So the grand Cherokee is definitely something to consider.
• 1:00:18
  And I think they're quite a handsome looking SUV.
• 1:00:21
  Now you can go a little ways back.
• 1:00:22
  Brad had an early WK2, which was a little bit more stodgy and Mercedes
• 1:00:28
  with the more utilitarian interior.
• 1:00:29
  If you like it a little bit more boxy.
• 1:00:31
  But shares the same chassis.
• 1:00:32
  Now, Brad, the only thing you worried about was the Hemi tip.
• 1:00:35
  I didn't have any issues with that, but I had premature water pump failure, which
• 1:00:38
  is known problem with those Hemis, but it was only a 700 fix and that's on the V8.
• 1:00:44
  That was the V8, but the V6, those things are bulletproof.
• 1:00:47
  There are early pen and stars.
• 1:00:48
  They had problems, but they worked out the kinks.
• 1:00:50
  So now the pen and stars are really good.
• 1:00:52
  Motor cost is an issue.
• 1:00:53
  Instead of going with the grand Cherokee, just a regular Cherokee
• 1:00:56
  would be a little bit cheaper.
• 1:00:57
  Yeah, that's true.
• 1:00:58
  But I will say the Grand Cherokee is super easy to work on.
• 1:01:01
  It's built like a truck, just wrenches and screwdrivers and
• 1:01:05
  hammers and you're good to go.
• 1:01:06
  I mean, it's not hard to work on at all.
• 1:01:08
  The nice thing about those jeeps specifically, it's like we were saying
• 1:01:12
  early, early, early in the conversation, the beauty of having a truck.
• 1:01:14
  You don't have to worry about it too much.
• 1:01:16
  It'll take a beating and keep on going.
• 1:01:18
  The Jeep is in that same boat.
• 1:01:19
  They are built fairly solidly.
• 1:01:21
  The Jeep to me is like a Swiss army knife.
• 1:01:23
  It's the reason I chose one and I love it.
• 1:01:25
  And I have zero complaints.
• 1:01:26
  Knock on wood.
• 1:01:27
  It's been really trouble free.
• 1:01:28
  It's something definitely to put on the list.
• 1:01:30
  Now you're probably going to pay a little bit more for a grand.
• 1:01:33
  You're probably gonna be 10, 12, 14, but you're going to get something lower
• 1:01:37
  mileage, probably adult maintained.
• 1:01:39
  It's not a bad buy for what it is.
• 1:01:42
  If you stretch your wallet just a little bit, but the 300 comes
• 1:01:46
  in under 10 grand pretty easily.
• 1:01:48
  Yeah, the sister to that, of course, would be the Durango,
• 1:01:50
  the Dodge side of the family.
• 1:01:52
  Yeah, basically the same exact car, it's just a different body.
• 1:01:55
  Correct.
• 1:01:56
  All three of those are good ideas.
• 1:01:57
  Now, if you notice, I stuck to a no turbo rule except for the
• 1:02:00
  Lincoln, which had the EcoBoost.
• 1:02:02
  Yeah, and I agree with that.
• 1:02:03
  But I'm also staying away from V8s because I want to think a little bit
• 1:02:06
  economically to Mark's point from earlier.
• 1:02:08
  I don't want to bankrupt my kid every third day at the gas pump at 4 a
• 1:02:12
  gallon because you got to run premium in your Hemi or whatever it is.
• 1:02:16
  So a V6 is this nice compromise between torque.
• 1:02:20
  And horsepower and being able to rev up and go and not be a slug in traffic
• 1:02:24
  because a Honda fit as fun as that is for us enthusiasts, you know, rowing
• 1:02:28
  the gears and burning it up at 8, 200 RPM with the VTEC on and all that stuff.
• 1:02:32
  That's fantastic, but it can't get out of its own way.
• 1:02:34
  So a nice three and a half liter, let's just say V6.
• 1:02:37
  Is a great all around engine.
• 1:02:39
  It's not going to set the world on fire from an economy standpoint,
• 1:02:43
  but it's also not going to bankrupt you every time you go to the pump.
• 1:02:45
  When we were kids, one of the good starting cars was like a
• 1:02:48
  Saturn cause it was all plastic.
• 1:02:50
  Cause I'm thinking any kid is going to be door ding central.
• 1:02:53
  And so like you just sort of pop it out and therefore things weren't a thing.
• 1:02:56
  You didn't really have to worry about a lot of that kind of stuff.
• 1:02:58
  Thinking about which of these cars have.
• 1:03:00
  easier repellability which ones have like the trim stripe along the door that
• 1:03:03
  sort of helps prevent some of those door dings those kind of Things for some of
• 1:03:06
  the minor crud that's going to happen in a high school Parking lot right in
• 1:03:09
  the college parking lot as they drive into it Because at some point that car
• 1:03:12
  is going to be in your driveway and as a car guy Having the beat to hell scratched
• 1:03:16
  up car that your kid comes home and it's like what did you teach that kid?
• 1:03:19
  My wife's dad is a huge car guy And every time we come in if my wife's gotten a
• 1:03:22
  scratch on her car He literally is like i'm almost ashamed to have you park in my
• 1:03:26
  driveway like that What did I teach you?
• 1:03:27
  This should have been taken care of.
• 1:03:28
  And that goes back to the point earlier about the German cars and why I'm not
• 1:03:33
  recommending a single one of them.
• 1:03:35
  Because as enthusiasts, we buy a GTI and I got to have the blue iridescent pearl
• 1:03:41
  magic paint, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:03:43
  And you buy that as a hand me down from somebody.
• 1:03:46
  If you want to do paint correction, open your wallet because it's not
• 1:03:49
  just red or blue or white like a Honda or Toyota or whatever it is.
• 1:03:53
  And I'm not saying they don't have their special colors, but the German stuff
• 1:03:56
  is always sort of over the top and to replace a fender on a GTI, if you get
• 1:04:01
  into a scrap, let's just say something even happens in the parking lot or you
• 1:04:04
  get hit by a shopping cart or whatever.
• 1:04:06
  How many Jeeps were produced in a single year versus GTIs?
• 1:04:10
  You can go get a fender for 20 bucks versus 250 or 2, 000 for something
• 1:04:16
  that is quote unquote, exotic, like a GTI would be in comparison, bringing
• 1:04:20
  back the 300, the charger, the flex.
• 1:04:23
  You have a slab side.
• 1:04:25
  If a very flat sided are, they show everything, every little thing that
• 1:04:30
  can happen on the one of those cards.
• 1:04:32
  You're going to see it because it's so flat.
• 1:04:34
  That's where we kind of go back to.
• 1:04:36
  There were Jeep Cherokees.
• 1:04:38
  I don't know.
• 1:04:38
  Grand Cherokees.
• 1:04:39
  They had plastic cladding on the side.
• 1:04:43
  The Chevy Avalanche invented the whole concept of that.
• 1:04:46
  Some of the Grand Cherokees did, too.
• 1:04:48
  That's what I was trying to remember, if that The earlier ones.
• 1:04:50
  Yeah, the earlier versions all had that plastic, which made it easier, because
• 1:04:53
  it was ridged in a certain way, and The Aztec perfected the plastic clasp.
• 1:04:57
  It was ahead of its time.
• 1:04:59
  My Scirocco, my mom's, you know, GTI and GLI and such.
• 1:05:02
  I mean, they all had that nice black sticker rubber on the side, which worked
• 1:05:04
  so well for preventing the bullshit dings.
• 1:05:07
  And actually, my current 2012 GTI Every time I look at it,
• 1:05:09
  I'm like, I wish this had that little raised door ding bar on it.
• 1:05:13
  Cause otherwise every little scratch that somebody should like, you see it.
• 1:05:16
  Whereas if you had that little bit of rubber, it just preserves it that much
• 1:05:18
  better from that sort of stupid crap.
• 1:05:20
  You know, we were talking about kids driving later, but there's also a
• 1:05:23
  lot of kids that are a little bit more earth conscious or eco friendly.
• 1:05:27
  I started thinking about, you know, are there any hybrids
• 1:05:30
  available for under 10 K?
• 1:05:31
  The only thing that comes up on the list is probably going
• 1:05:33
  to be very, very obvious.
• 1:05:35
  But you can get Priuses for that kind of money if that's what you're into.
• 1:05:39
  From what I understand, you know, some of those second and third gen Priuses,
• 1:05:43
  a lot of them are just unbreakable.
• 1:05:45
  I mean, they just run forever and they don't seem to have a ton of problems.
• 1:05:49
  Much to the sadness of everybody who's stuck owning one of them.
• 1:05:51
  That's a different definition of slow.
• 1:05:53
  True, but then there's the other side of that that makes me worried in that
• 1:05:56
  the people that have their Priuses and love them aren't getting rid of them.
• 1:06:00
  So if you're selling a Prius, why are you selling it?
• 1:06:02
  What's wrong with it?
• 1:06:03
  So that was my only word of caution when I saw those come up on the list.
• 1:06:07
  And there's other cars like that, where you're like, that car is so good.
• 1:06:10
  What's the story here?
• 1:06:11
  Why are you getting rid of it?
• 1:06:12
  There's reasons and seasons for everything.
• 1:06:14
  Usually Prius folks are very, very faithful.
• 1:06:16
  You know, if we're going to go with the 10 year mark, the Camry
• 1:06:20
  had the hybrid during that time.
• 1:06:22
  Yeah, anything in the Toyota family that's a hybrid.
• 1:06:25
  If you're eco conscious and not interested in a diesel or anything like that,
• 1:06:29
  and you want to save money on gas, I would definitely look in that camp.
• 1:06:32
  As much as, as an enthusiast, those cars, they irk me a little bit, but there's,
• 1:06:36
  I don't find anything wrong with them.
• 1:06:37
  They're just stylistically, uh, you know, whatever.
• 1:06:40
  But, uh, For their purpose, for their reason, they make
• 1:06:42
  a thousand percent sense.
• 1:06:44
  Camrys are known to be just a plain Jane vehicle.
• 1:06:46
  In the dictionary, it's just a car.
• 1:06:47
  It's a picture of a Camry.
• 1:06:49
  Yeah, right.
• 1:06:49
  A hundred percent.
• 1:06:50
  I recently saw one of the new TRD Camrys.
• 1:06:53
  Yeah.
• 1:06:54
  And had to do a double take because it caught my eye.
• 1:06:55
  And I was like, that looked sharp.
• 1:06:57
  And I didn't think I would ever say that about a Camry.
• 1:06:59
  It needs to be a GR Camry.
• 1:07:01
  When they come out with that, then you got my attention.
• 1:07:04
  There is another car that I think we've avoided, and it's sort of the last one
• 1:07:08
  on my list of cars under 10 grand I would give a kid, that I think are sort of,
• 1:07:12
  not Tonka toys, but you know, they're sort of, you're looking for a car that's
• 1:07:15
  bulletproof, right, you're looking for an engine that's bulletproof, like we
• 1:07:18
  said, a car that can take maybe a slight fender bender, that can take a couple
• 1:07:21
  door dings, that can live through high school, shenanigans, can go through
• 1:07:24
  college, and there's one car, we joke about this on the drive thru pretty
• 1:07:28
  often, they're absolutely indestructible, you see them everywhere you turn
• 1:07:31
  around, And that's the Nissan Altima.
• 1:07:34
  I have to disagree slightly there because if it has the 3.
• 1:07:38
  5 liter V6 in them, they were known because the Kelly converter
• 1:07:42
  was part of the downpipe.
• 1:07:43
  Yeah.
• 1:07:44
  Right.
• 1:07:44
  If it had enough miles on it would start to suck debris back in and
• 1:07:48
  it would wipe the rings on it and then you had issues with the engine.
• 1:07:51
  Yeah, but those people still kept driving them.
• 1:07:53
  Yeah, that's why they were smoking.
• 1:07:55
  Stouted taxes, they're gonna think you're running drugs from, uh, Mexico.
• 1:07:58
  I was about to say, you also have to not live in Maryland.
• 1:08:00
  So if you live in Maryland, you have one of those, it's probably a
• 1:08:02
  temporary tag, and you've probably slammed it into a telephone pole, or
• 1:08:05
  multiple other cars, and then ran away.
• 1:08:08
  But it's still Every accident in D.
• 1:08:11
  C., every accident in D.
• 1:08:13
  C.
• 1:08:13
  is like a Nissan Altima with temporary Maryland tanks.
• 1:08:17
  Yes.
• 1:08:17
  Like, every one of them.
• 1:08:19
  They're probably all the same car.
• 1:08:20
  They're all like the original Eleanor from Gone in 60 Seconds.
• 1:08:24
  You just cannot kill those things.
• 1:08:25
  I know.
• 1:08:26
  At the end of Nuclear Holocaust, There's going to be
• 1:08:28
  cockroaches and Nissan Altimas.
• 1:08:30
  So that's a solid buy.
• 1:08:32
  They are indestructible.
• 1:08:34
  And remember too, the 3.
• 1:08:35
  5 liter was a fantastic engine.
• 1:08:38
  When that thing came out, it blew everybody away.
• 1:08:41
  How quick it was, how rev happy it was.
• 1:08:43
  They put that in the Maxima first.
• 1:08:45
  Those Maximas were super fast with that.
• 1:08:47
  It bloody was one of those.
• 1:08:47
  Those were crazy quick.
• 1:08:48
  But when the Altima came out, they also had the 2.
• 1:08:50
  5 liter, the four cylinder.
• 1:08:53
  And if you drove one of those, believe me, you were not disappointed.
• 1:08:56
  Good.
• 1:08:56
  That little guy would really get up and put, and you didn't quite
• 1:09:00
  have all the problems that the 3.
• 1:09:03
  5 that was the same 2.
• 1:09:03
  5 ended up putting in the little, uh, the center of SCR.
• 1:09:07
  Yes.
• 1:09:07
  It's the same motor yet, which was pretty peppy in that kind of agree
• 1:09:10
  with what you're saying though.
• 1:09:11
  There's a certain or, uh, It goes with the Altima ownership.
• 1:09:17
  And believe me, when I worked at Stillen, I was introduced to these
• 1:09:20
  cars at Motor Trend when they first came out with the big Altima 3.
• 1:09:23
  5 liter, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:09:25
  I was hooked.
• 1:09:26
  Oh my God.
• 1:09:27
  I thought these were the greatest cars in the world.
• 1:09:29
  And when I worked at Stillen, we had the orange car, which you can look
• 1:09:32
  that up on Google if you want to.
• 1:09:33
  It's the Stillen Orange Altima.
• 1:09:35
  It's an incredible car.
• 1:09:36
  Amazing cars.
• 1:09:37
  They really are.
• 1:09:38
  But today, as life goes on.
• 1:09:41
  And sadly, I think it's most of the Nissan family.
• 1:09:44
  And it's really weird, but they're very accident prone.
• 1:09:46
  Nissan only sells Altimas and then the Z, that's it.
• 1:09:50
  Because the Murano's a Taltima, right?
• 1:09:52
  And the Rogue is, it's all the same.
• 1:09:53
  I mean, to be clear, I had a Pathfinder for a while that was spectacular.
• 1:09:56
  But that's different.
• 1:09:57
  All right, so that kind of rounded out my punch list.
• 1:10:00
  I think the only honorable mention, and I said I was going to talk about German
• 1:10:04
  cars, but the only one I brought up was the American made Passat with the
• 1:10:08
  five cylinder, because you can get that with DSG, with the automatic, or with
• 1:10:12
  the five or six speed manual on that.
• 1:10:14
  Those five cylinders, they've been perfected, they've got
• 1:10:17
  30 years of evolution in them, they will literally run forever.
• 1:10:20
  They were rust prone though, those Passats were, I don't know why, but
• 1:10:23
  like, not the Jettas, not the Gulls, but those Passats were rust prone.
• 1:10:26
  That is the Achilles heel to the American made Passat, but as far as the sheet metal
• 1:10:31
  around the engine, the engine is amazing.
• 1:10:32
  Yeah, the engine's fine, yeah.
• 1:10:33
  That's the only reason I was like, this is an honorable mention,
• 1:10:36
  if you had to have something German, that would be your option.
• 1:10:39
  And those ranged wildly from like, 5 grand to 9 grand, they were all over
• 1:10:44
  the map, and it was just like, okay, it couldn't really pinpoint an average there.
• 1:10:48
  As Don will mention, it's not bad because, once again, Don's in Texas,
• 1:10:52
  the rust issue won't be near as bad.
• 1:10:53
  Yeah, that's true.
• 1:10:54
  That's very true.
• 1:10:55
  That sort of rounds out my punches.
• 1:10:56
  Anybody else have something that they came across that would fit the bill here?
• 1:11:00
  I have a joke list.
• 1:11:02
  I mean, I do too, but we'll get to that in a minute.
• 1:11:04
  My generic answer to what car I wish I could get my kids, because my
• 1:11:07
  brother had one, but stupidly sold it because I wanted to give it, was
• 1:11:10
  a manual transmission Honda Element.
• 1:11:12
  Ooh.
• 1:11:13
  Enough room to haul crap.
• 1:11:15
  It's a Honda.
• 1:11:16
  He doesn't know shit about cars.
• 1:11:18
  Ran it into the ground.
• 1:11:18
  The car still worked perfectly fine when he sold it because
• 1:11:21
  that's the way they work.
• 1:11:22
  Great on road trips, fine on gas, they have that funky two doors, you have to
• 1:11:25
  have like, the side doors, you have to have friends who are comfortable climbing
• 1:11:28
  the back, you can sort of help people move, but you don't have to, you can
• 1:11:31
  sort of have four passengers, but you can also fold the seats up into the wall
• 1:11:35
  and say, no, I'm taking my mountain bike, or I'm taking this, or I'm off to hockey
• 1:11:38
  practice and I have all my crap in it.
• 1:11:40
  And it's high enough off the ground, has enough safety features, has
• 1:11:43
  all wheel drive, has the manual transmission, and it's still kind of
• 1:11:46
  cool and funky and different and isn't going to get boxed around by trucks.
• 1:11:49
  Like to me, if I could find one, like that's the perfect starting vehicle right
• 1:11:53
  there is a manual transmission element.
• 1:11:55
  And it's an ultimate Halloween car.
• 1:11:57
  If you get it in silver, you put brown foam.
• 1:11:59
  It looks like a toaster.
• 1:11:59
  If you get an orange, it's.
• 1:12:00
  The Great Pumpkin, you know, the whole nine yards.
• 1:12:02
  I got a friend in Boulder who just bought one.
• 1:12:04
  She found one because she's married, but she frequently goes by herself on
• 1:12:07
  climbing trips and she's like, I needed something I could sleep in and put
• 1:12:10
  all my crap in that would never break down and could drive over the passes
• 1:12:13
  in Colorado and be perfectly fine.
• 1:12:15
  Cause she lives in Boulder and she's like, it's wonderful.
• 1:12:17
  She's taken it all last winter, all the way to Crested Butte, all over
• 1:12:20
  the place and says like, can't find a better car and they're cheap.
• 1:12:23
  They're well in the price range.
• 1:12:25
  How hard is it to find the elements of a manual?
• 1:12:27
  It's not as hard because there's sort of bulletproof engines on those things
• 1:12:31
  because they're used in everything.
• 1:12:32
  It's a Civic motor.
• 1:12:33
  Yeah, so it's not hard to find those things.
• 1:12:36
  My friend in Boulder said she could choose between like 10 of them when she bought
• 1:12:38
  hers and that's out in the mountains out there and I've seen them around here.
• 1:12:42
  If you want to go newer, you could also go with the Toyota Matrix.
• 1:12:46
  Nope, like an element.
• 1:12:47
  Venza?
• 1:12:47
  No, no, Venza's too new.
• 1:12:48
  The XB?
• 1:12:49
  The FJ.
• 1:12:50
  Oh, the FJ, yeah.
• 1:12:51
  So you can find like a FJ.
• 1:12:53
  In manuals, they're actually cheaper than they are in automatics.
• 1:12:56
  I have a buddy who owns one who's going to sell it and I was going to buy it off him
• 1:12:59
  and then he's like, I decided to keep it.
• 1:13:00
  And so, but I mean, it was going to be sub 10K.
• 1:13:03
  And both elements and FJs can go either way, but in terms of like the all wheel
• 1:13:06
  drive safety aspect, a little higher up and also less people space, but enough
• 1:13:10
  space, I still like that class of vehicle.
• 1:13:12
  They're taller.
• 1:13:13
  I don't know that that class seems good for first cars.
• 1:13:16
  And they're both not so high.
• 1:13:18
  That they're going to be prone to tip over?
• 1:13:20
  No, it's not a Wrangler, but it's also, yeah, it's not quite a Subaru
• 1:13:24
  Outback or Forester or Impreza.
• 1:13:26
  It's a little bit higher than that.
• 1:13:27
  But as we said, with all the trucks and big SUVs in the road, it's
• 1:13:29
  nice to have that little bit more height for the younger drivers.
• 1:13:32
  I will say, Rob, you hit something on the head there.
• 1:13:34
  I've teased my wife for years now that my girls will get two choices.
• 1:13:37
  And they will both be manual.
• 1:13:39
  They get to pick from either a Wrangler or a Veloster, one or the other.
• 1:13:41
  That's it.
• 1:13:42
  Because both are extremely uncomfortable to your point, but
• 1:13:45
  they can kind of go anywhere.
• 1:13:46
  So if you're going South, the Veloster is awesome.
• 1:13:48
  If you're going North, the Jeep will take you anywhere you need to go.
• 1:13:51
  My kids love Jeeps.
• 1:13:52
  We have a buddy with a farm down in Charlottesville that has.
• 1:13:54
  A Wrangler he keeps there and we get down there immediately.
• 1:13:57
  They bugged my buddy.
• 1:13:58
  They're like, Mr.
• 1:13:59
  Paul, take us to the Jeep, take us to the Jeep.
• 1:14:00
  Cause he'll just, you know, go up the sides of things and they love it.
• 1:14:03
  Yeah.
• 1:14:03
  I got it.
• 1:14:03
  I gotta be real blunt here with that.
• 1:14:06
  When you brought up the element, I don't think I've ever even
• 1:14:09
  thought about the element.
• 1:14:10
  And I got to tell you that really struck me.
• 1:14:12
  I thought that's a damn good car.
• 1:14:15
  It's a Honda.
• 1:14:16
  It'll run forever.
• 1:14:17
  It's utilitarian.
• 1:14:18
  The interior is completely plastic.
• 1:14:20
  The side body cladding, like we're talking about door dings in a high school
• 1:14:23
  parking lot, backpacks, whatever, it's not gonna, it's not gonna get too damaged up.
• 1:14:29
  That's actually a really sharp idea.
• 1:14:31
  It really is.
• 1:14:32
  The element really turned me on.
• 1:14:33
  I thought that was a good idea.
• 1:14:35
  That was, yeah, literally my first thought.
• 1:14:36
  I mean, looking through this list, I mean, strangely, you can get a ton
• 1:14:39
  of Odysseys in this price range, but if you want the giant minivan, but
• 1:14:42
  for anybody who's seen, uh, Deadpool and Wolverine, you can't really
• 1:14:45
  suggest an Odyssey without laughing.
• 1:14:46
  And if you haven't seen it, you'll get that joke when you watch it.
• 1:14:50
  So the Odyssey is a horrible driving car.
• 1:14:53
  Yes.
• 1:14:53
  It's a miserably, which again, if you've seen the movie, it gets
• 1:14:55
  a lot of Funnier and funnier.
• 1:14:56
  But yes, the element I think is sort of the key.
• 1:14:58
  You can get a pilot in that same price range.
• 1:15:00
  What was that?
• 1:15:00
  The passport, which was the Isuzu rodeo.
• 1:15:02
  Yeah.
• 1:15:02
  But I think the element just makes more sense for that sort
• 1:15:04
  of phenomenal college car, right?
• 1:15:06
  Like you're moving from a dorm room to off campus housing.
• 1:15:09
  Like you don't need the pickup.
• 1:15:10
  You just fold those seats up and throw all the crap in it.
• 1:15:12
  Do a couple of runs if you want.
• 1:15:13
  Well, and the nice thing too, you're not going to have friends banging on
• 1:15:16
  your door saying, Hey, help me move.
• 1:15:17
  No, because it looks like a really small box.
• 1:15:19
  It does.
• 1:15:20
  My brother's wife had one teacher in Massachusetts and she's like, I needed
• 1:15:23
  a car I could put a full timpani in.
• 1:15:25
  And it doesn't look that big, but I have no problem fitting full size timpanis
• 1:15:28
  in that you can't fit in most wagons.
• 1:15:30
  Like you need a pickup, even minivans have trouble with it.
• 1:15:33
  And then judging by its boxy nature, it's gotta be the easiest
• 1:15:37
  thing in the world to park.
• 1:15:38
  Yeah, they are.
• 1:15:39
  Cause they're shorter than you think they're not the wheelbase.
• 1:15:41
  Yeah, but nice and slow and boxy.
• 1:15:43
  And I don't know, my neighbor's daughter was given an element by her grandparents.
• 1:15:49
  When she was like 17 and she drove that thing till it had like 380, 000 miles on
• 1:15:55
  it before they finally decided to just sell it and it was still running, but
• 1:15:59
  they decided she didn't want it anymore.
• 1:16:01
  And I think she used it at least 2 to 3 years into college
• 1:16:04
  before she switched vehicles.
• 1:16:06
  Mileage wise, they'll go forever as long as the maintenance is done.
• 1:16:09
  Had a couple of little things here and there that helped them fix on
• 1:16:11
  it, but it was nothing extreme and major that broke the bank easy to work
• 1:16:15
  on to real simple cars to work on.
• 1:16:17
  And I think we can safely assume just by virtue of being a Honda,
• 1:16:21
  being a civic, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:16:23
  You're not going to have any trouble finding parts for that thing, because
• 1:16:25
  even though the element is a little bit weird unto itself, so the body parts
• 1:16:29
  might be a little hard to find, but everything else mechanically chastity,
• 1:16:33
  et cetera, has got to be pretty simple.
• 1:16:34
  Could it solve just in the Honda family?
• 1:16:36
  Yeah.
• 1:16:36
  Okay.
• 1:16:36
  Maybe that let's just say for a number, they built a hundred thousand elements.
• 1:16:39
  They built.
• 1:16:40
  A million civics.
• 1:16:42
  Yep.
• 1:16:42
  So you've got that million that you still have to serve with those parts.
• 1:16:46
  The element just takes advantage of it from the bottom and it just happened
• 1:16:49
  to be able to still get parts for.
• 1:16:50
  And there's actually some hot rod elements if you look and you
• 1:16:54
  want to spend a little extra.
• 1:16:54
  What is it?
• 1:16:55
  The element SE, which is like, Their version of like
• 1:16:57
  a type R or whatever it is.
• 1:16:59
  And it came with different wheels and there were some options in there in
• 1:17:03
  the last couple of years of that thing.
• 1:17:04
  If that's what you're into and you're geeking out, take a look at the packages.
• 1:17:07
  Now, I had a friend that owned one of those, like the hot rod one.
• 1:17:10
  The only thing I thought was weird was the stadium seating that they had
• 1:17:14
  inside where the passengers in the back are up higher than, than the front.
• 1:17:16
  So that way the idea was that if you're talking, then you don't get
• 1:17:20
  drowned out or something like that.
• 1:17:21
  I was like, okay, cool.
• 1:17:22
  To me, it was a little awkward, but to Rob's point, it If you're
• 1:17:25
  a hobbyist of any hobby, you just take them out, move stuff around.
• 1:17:29
  What was the joke?
• 1:17:30
  That you could just power wash the inside of it because it's all rubber?
• 1:17:33
  You can't.
• 1:17:33
  Yeah, you can hose out the interior.
• 1:17:34
  We have to take it to beach frisbee tournaments and literally
• 1:17:37
  afterwards you'd hose out the whole interior and just call it a day.
• 1:17:39
  With the fact of trucks being in Texas, it's not uncommon for people to be driving
• 1:17:43
  them, but If you don't want her to get into a full size thing, I guess, compared
• 1:17:47
  to older trucks, it would be considerable.
• 1:17:48
  So something like a Colorado, since they don't like to make
• 1:17:51
  S10s or anything anymore.
• 1:17:52
  And you're worried about the rear end on it being light, but majority of
• 1:17:55
  the Colorados nowadays are crew cab.
• 1:17:58
  So a lot of that weight is very similar to that of like a crossover or an SUV for
• 1:18:02
  the weight displacement on the chassis.
• 1:18:04
  Like Honda did, like the Ridgeline.
• 1:18:05
  There's those options as well, if you're looking for something.
• 1:18:08
  We've mentioned most of the others that I thought of.
• 1:18:10
  Oh, we forgot one.
• 1:18:11
  It's super special.
• 1:18:12
  The biggest I would go is sort of like that element size is similar, but like
• 1:18:16
  the RAV4, the CRV style sort of world that I find if I go up my front door
• 1:18:21
  right now, there are 30 of those, right?
• 1:18:23
  There are 30 Mazda CX 5s, CRVs, RAV4s, they're everywhere.
• 1:18:28
  I don't like having what everybody else has so my brain immediately
• 1:18:31
  is like back to those, you know, the FJ and the Element and some of
• 1:18:35
  the stuff that's a little more fun.
• 1:18:36
  And if you, you know, sounds like you don't want the smaller cars.
• 1:18:38
  I think a lot of the smaller cars are awesome in this price
• 1:18:40
  range for those kids, right?
• 1:18:41
  I mean, as we said, the Scion TC or the smaller Golfs, the Honda Fit
• 1:18:45
  is an amazing car for that, right?
• 1:18:47
  You can get some of those.
• 1:18:48
  That size car I think is great, but to your point, if they're all
• 1:18:50
  driving around with people with F250s, it's not going to work.
• 1:18:53
  You need something a little bigger.
• 1:18:54
  And again, it brings me back to that Element FJ pseudo truck ish sort of
• 1:18:59
  but still cool and still small enough to park and not worry about but can
• 1:19:02
  hold its own and not get pushed around.
• 1:19:04
  Well I found a car that we've all forgotten about and it fits
• 1:19:07
  in our window because it ended at the beginning of our window.
• 1:19:10
  You're not going to get bullied because people are going to
• 1:19:12
  be too busy laughing at you.
• 1:19:13
  You're not going to have to worry about being like everybody else
• 1:19:16
  on the road because you haven't seen one of these in a while.
• 1:19:19
  It's roomy, you can haul people, you can haul things, it's versatile.
• 1:19:22
  Some would argue that it's stylish.
• 1:19:25
  And if you got the right package, peppy enough.
• 1:19:28
  So for your consideration, I will throw out The PT cruiser.
• 1:19:32
  I hate to admit it, but I thought about that.
• 1:19:34
  Mark's like falling out of his seat.
• 1:19:36
  I thought it was HHR.
• 1:19:37
  I had mentioned that one earlier.
• 1:19:38
  Yeah, I did.
• 1:19:39
  I thought about the PT and I thought about the HHR.
• 1:19:42
  I think both of them are cool.
• 1:19:44
  I got to use both of them at Motor Trend.
• 1:19:46
  Michelle and I actually had one for multi thousand mile journey
• 1:19:49
  around California and HHR.
• 1:19:51
  We loved it.
• 1:19:52
  We really did.
• 1:19:52
  It was a fantastic little car.
• 1:19:55
  The PT surprisingly had more space than it looked like from the outside.
• 1:19:58
  And yeah, I don't think people will believe it.
• 1:20:00
  I think they're scared of it.
• 1:20:01
  Exactly.
• 1:20:02
  I don't know how you're going to respond.
• 1:20:03
  So I'm going to give you some space because you're a weirdo.
• 1:20:06
  But you know, it's funny going to the, either one, the HHR has, if you're worried
• 1:20:09
  about performance, you've got the SS.
• 1:20:12
  And that is one serious little machine, especially if you have the,
• 1:20:16
  uh, six speed manual transmission, that is a really, really fast
• 1:20:19
  car on the Chrysler side of life.
• 1:20:21
  You got the GT 2.
• 1:20:23
  4 liter turbo, but we're breaking that rule of turbocharging.
• 1:20:27
  They were known for the turbo seal inside getting bad to
• 1:20:30
  where oil and corn would mix.
• 1:20:32
  The same as the neon.
• 1:20:34
  Yeah.
• 1:20:34
  Yeah.
• 1:20:34
  It'd be fun, but it is an element that is going to break at some point.
• 1:20:38
  Versus like the 300 and the Jeep and some of the bigger stuff that we talked about.
• 1:20:42
  If you're looking at an element, I would really consider, especially in
• 1:20:45
  the right paint scheme, a PT cruiser.
• 1:20:47
  She might enjoy that.
• 1:20:48
  It's different.
• 1:20:49
  It's quirky, but on the same token, it doesn't have enough
• 1:20:52
  power to get you into trouble.
• 1:20:53
  It's pretty insurable.
• 1:20:55
  You can't hose it out.
• 1:20:56
  No, you can't.
• 1:20:56
  That's for sure.
• 1:20:57
  You'll get a convertible though.
• 1:20:59
  That's true.
• 1:21:00
  You can't get a PT convertible.
• 1:21:01
  I forgot about that.
• 1:21:02
  Yeah, those were kind of cool.
• 1:21:03
  I kind of like those.
• 1:21:04
  Mark's making this face like he just wants to hang up the call.
• 1:21:08
  Like, all right, lay it on me.
• 1:21:10
  We're in an interesting spot.
• 1:21:12
  I'm definitely not a PT cruiser fan, in spite of it being the TARDIS of vehicles,
• 1:21:18
  apparently, according to Mountain Man Dan.
• 1:21:20
  And honestly, I think that this whole conversation has gone in an
• 1:21:24
  interesting direction that I wouldn't have anticipated prior to coming into
• 1:21:27
  it, where I'm now legitimately thinking about buying my kid a Honda element.
• 1:21:32
  Um, Rob is definitely hitting it out of the park tonight.
• 1:21:36
  Right.
• 1:21:37
  And FJ Cruze is totally cooler, but it is a challenging space to try to operate in.
• 1:21:43
  And so I am thinking that at least for my kids.
• 1:21:47
  I struggle going back more than 20 years, you know, that kind of 2000
• 1:21:52
  to 2020 time range in that space.
• 1:21:55
  I want something with a little higher belt line.
• 1:21:58
  That's going to take a hit from another vehicle with a higher belt line.
• 1:22:03
  And so, you know, you just kind of add these requirements up and it starts
• 1:22:07
  to winnow the list down and it takes out a lot of the cool stuff that I
• 1:22:11
  love as an enthusiast, but I struggle to put my 16 year old inside of and
• 1:22:16
  so is the magic spot one of these midsize SUVs that we've kind of keep
• 1:22:24
  coming back to and talking about.
• 1:22:26
  Yeah, sure.
• 1:22:27
  Maybe I just don't get rid of my X five and my kids, that kid that
• 1:22:30
  drives their dads old X five.
• 1:22:34
  I don't want that to be the situation, but I don't know, maybe that, maybe
• 1:22:37
  that's the most pragmatic situation.
• 1:22:39
  And I was, Oh, Zs are going to come off that thing real quick though.
• 1:22:43
  Yeah.
• 1:22:43
  Yeah.
• 1:22:43
  Okay, fine.
• 1:22:44
  Maybe they don't need Italian wheels, but I've gotten more out of this
• 1:22:47
  conversation that I've contributed to it.
• 1:22:50
  It has made me think a lot more about it than maybe originally I was.
• 1:22:53
  You know, here's a question, Don, is it going to be your decision or is
• 1:22:57
  she going to be have input in this?
• 1:22:59
  Oh, I think there'll be input from both Michelle and Kaitlin.
• 1:23:02
  Yeah.
• 1:23:03
  I mean, all three of you sitting down going through auto tempest or whatever
• 1:23:06
  and kind of, Hey, what about this?
• 1:23:07
  You know, and try and feel it out.
• 1:23:08
  You'll, you know, try and gauge, you know, to make her happy.
• 1:23:11
  Yeah.
• 1:23:12
  I was, you know, you put in your two cents, I mean like that, but
• 1:23:15
  Kind of boils down to is you kind of want your kid to like the car.
• 1:23:20
  She's interesting because she has quirky taste.
• 1:23:22
  I mean, she really does.
• 1:23:23
  She is a bit of a car gal.
• 1:23:25
  Caitlin is similar to Rob in that she sees too many of a certain car.
• 1:23:31
  She suddenly gets turned off by them.
• 1:23:33
  She doesn't really want to have anything.
• 1:23:35
  And yet, you know, flip side of the coin, she likes Mustangs.
• 1:23:38
  Mustangs are belly button cars.
• 1:23:39
  Everybody has one, but she likes them.
• 1:23:41
  So it's kind of interesting, but yeah, that's where, again, I think the
• 1:23:44
  element would really be interesting.
• 1:23:46
  I, that one, Rob really, really struck a chord with that car
• 1:23:50
  because it, it is durable.
• 1:23:51
  It is tough.
• 1:23:52
  It does have that bulldog sort of nature where you're not quite sure, can you
• 1:23:56
  bully this thing around psychologically?
• 1:23:58
  It's going to last forever.
• 1:23:59
  It's all wheel drive.
• 1:24:00
  You can get a manual transmission if you want.
• 1:24:02
  You hose out the interior.
• 1:24:04
  It swallows up grand piano.
• 1:24:05
  There's no problem.
• 1:24:06
  It's really, really an interesting choice.
• 1:24:08
  And it's quirky enough that somebody like Caitlin would probably enjoy this car.
• 1:24:13
  It's different enough.
• 1:24:14
  You're not going to see another one in the high school parking lot.
• 1:24:17
  Her other friends are going to really enjoy it.
• 1:24:19
  As is tradition with all of our, what should I buy episodes?
• 1:24:22
  We're going to do a little lightning round here to close out all the
• 1:24:26
  things we spoke about, but this one's a little bit different as
• 1:24:28
  enthusiasts, as dads, we're going to play the selfish dad lightning round.
• 1:24:33
  And that means if you were 16 today and handed 10, 000 bucks to buy
• 1:24:38
  your first car, what would it be?
• 1:24:41
  And it could be from any era, any age, any decade, you got 10
• 1:24:45
  grand to spend on your first car.
• 1:24:47
  Are you going to buy?
• 1:24:49
  Facing up to today's prices.
• 1:24:51
  Okay, I'll have to think about this.
• 1:24:52
  Can you do something like you buy something, you're going to build it up?
• 1:24:56
  You know that's how this game works, so you just go ahead.
• 1:24:58
  If you want a Corvette engine Miata and you can do it for 10 grand, have at it.
• 1:25:02
  I like him.
• 1:25:04
  All right, who wants to go first?
• 1:25:05
  I've got a list of six cars.
• 1:25:07
  Oh, Brad, Brad coming in swinging.
• 1:25:09
  Go ahead.
• 1:25:10
  I'm going to go back through the years.
• 1:25:12
  All of these I found for less than 10 grand.
• 1:25:14
  I'm going to start with the newest car and work my way back to the oldest car.
• 1:25:18
  All right.
• 1:25:19
  So the newest car is a 2015 Lexus RX 350.
• 1:25:23
  Probably get the Lexus RX 300 for even cheaper.
• 1:25:26
  2013 Land Rover LR4.
• 1:25:28
  I'm ignoring mileage and maintenance.
• 1:25:30
  Cause you're gonna need 10 grand of maintenance on that land rover right away.
• 1:25:33
  Well, here's where the, here's where it starts to get fun.
• 1:25:35
  A 2008 Porsche Cayenne.
• 1:25:37
  Those are surprisingly cheap, by the way.
• 1:25:38
  2003 Mercedes CL 500.
• 1:25:42
  One of my all time favorite cars.
• 1:25:44
  I love those cars so much.
• 1:25:46
  The suppository model.
• 1:25:47
  Yes, yes, yes.
• 1:25:48
  Is the big giant tic tac.
• 1:25:50
  I love it.
• 1:25:51
  Here's the one I think Don's going to resonate with the most
• 1:25:54
  1995 Jaguar XJ VandenPlasse.
• 1:25:58
  And then an 86, nine, four, four, all of these are under 10 grand.
• 1:26:03
  I love Brad's recommendations.
• 1:26:05
  You can't get a nine four, four turbo anymore for 10 grand.
• 1:26:08
  Is it just that guy?
• 1:26:09
  I'm sure that's not a thing.
• 1:26:10
  Yeah, it's not possible.
• 1:26:11
  You can, but you have to fix it up.
• 1:26:13
  My brother in law has one and just went to nine 44 fest out.
• 1:26:17
  It was the track in Ohio, middle, not middle.
• 1:26:19
  Ohio, the smaller Nelson ledges Nelson ledger, the dead flat one.
• 1:26:22
  So he has a nine 44 turbo.
• 1:26:24
  He got it for less than 10, but has it put another like five in to get it.
• 1:26:27
  Remo, it's now beautiful, like it's a gorgeous fun car, but you can't get a
• 1:26:31
  well sorted one for under 10 right now.
• 1:26:33
  Fair enough 15.
• 1:26:34
  You could pull it off 10 more.
• 1:26:35
  William's buying a mondial t for 10 grand, right?
• 1:26:38
  Yeah, put 50 into it to keep it running All right.
• 1:26:42
  I mean, I think buying an english car as a 16 year old pretty low
• 1:26:46
  income is pretty horrible idea
• 1:26:52
  But you're 16.
• 1:26:53
  You are the epitome of horrible ideas at that age.
• 1:26:56
  Yeah.
• 1:26:56
  You're not making good decisions.
• 1:26:58
  This is an optimum scenario where I'm taking my 43 year old self to being 16
• 1:27:04
  in 2024 and I get 10 grand to buy a car.
• 1:27:06
  I think it's American muscle.
• 1:27:08
  It has to be something that's.
• 1:27:11
  Fun, fast, easy to maintain and sustainable.
• 1:27:16
  Probably tough on gasoline.
• 1:27:18
  I'll give you that.
• 1:27:19
  You can get a Cobra from 99.
• 1:27:21
  Yeah.
• 1:27:21
  I mean, I'd love an old predator Cobra prior to COVID.
• 1:27:24
  Those were totally doable for 10 grand, but that's not true anymore.
• 1:27:28
  So I think I would probably look for an SS Camaro just because, you know, the
• 1:27:32
  V8 there is just in a different class in that price category than the Mustangs.
• 1:27:36
  Sorry for the four people.
• 1:27:37
  I'm not really affiliated one way.
• 1:27:40
  I love them both equally.
• 1:27:41
  I'm going to say in this generation, if I've got 10 grand,
• 1:27:44
  it's probably an SS Camaro and I might not make it to graduation.
• 1:27:48
  It's a horrible idea.
• 1:27:49
  I'd never buy that for my 16 year old kid, but if I was 16 and I had
• 1:27:54
  10 grand, that's totally what I buy.
• 1:27:56
  Kind of agree with Mark.
• 1:27:57
  The Z28, when did that body style come out?
• 1:28:00
  Like 90, the LT1.
• 1:28:02
  You can do better than an LT1.
• 1:28:03
  Do an LS1 was 98 to 2002.
• 1:28:06
  Yeah.
• 1:28:07
  I mean, that, that was, that still is one hell of a package for the money.
• 1:28:11
  I mean, what you're getting in that car, it's a lot of car.
• 1:28:14
  It really is.
• 1:28:15
  And yeah, you're right.
• 1:28:15
  You might not make it to graduation.
• 1:28:17
  I had a friend in high school who had, uh, two, he had the RS was the car
• 1:28:22
  to have back then that really slow.
• 1:28:24
  That's what that stood for really slow.
• 1:28:26
  Car was actually very, very scary, quick, fast.
• 1:28:30
  He wrecked two of them.
• 1:28:31
  Challenge over what the car can do.
• 1:28:33
  But yeah, I think you're going to be hard pressed to go bad with one of those Z28s.
• 1:28:38
  The Mustang, always a good option.
• 1:28:40
  16, 10 grand.
• 1:28:42
  I do, I think I'd find a Mustang GT or a Camaro Z28.
• 1:28:46
  V8 manual.
• 1:28:48
  So either a Mustang, C4 Vette or a Camaro.
• 1:28:51
  Oh yeah, I'm killing myself before I get to graduation.
• 1:28:54
  You're gonna look good doing it.
• 1:28:55
  Rob, are you in the same camp?
• 1:28:57
  10 grand, you're 16 again?
• 1:28:59
  I've always wanted a V8 Mustang because I love the sound of it, but
• 1:29:02
  I don't think I would choose it.
• 1:29:04
  It's just not in my nature.
• 1:29:05
  I'd want to have one to drive, but I wouldn't want to own one, if that makes
• 1:29:08
  sense, because I wouldn't take it.
• 1:29:09
  So, just scrolling through, the first one that jumped out at me is you can get
• 1:29:12
  a Fiesta ST for under 10 grand, which is a pretty ridiculously fun choice.
• 1:29:17
  If I lived where I lived when I was 16, my answer would have
• 1:29:20
  been either a WRX or a Wrangler.
• 1:29:23
  I want the WRX because I grew up in Massachusetts and I wanted to
• 1:29:25
  go just sliding around mountain roads and rally style driving.
• 1:29:29
  Even now I have friends who own a house in Davis, West Virginia,
• 1:29:31
  and they're like, The guy with the mini countryman would be like, Rob,
• 1:29:34
  you know what you're doing here?
• 1:29:35
  Take the key.
• 1:29:36
  Then I just slide up the mountain roads and have a complete blast.
• 1:29:39
  I love that feeling of just sliding the cars up those roads.
• 1:29:42
  And the WRX fits that bill really well.
• 1:29:44
  The other one growing up again in Massachusetts is I, I always as a kid
• 1:29:48
  wanted a Wrangler, I love the idea of, I could go skiing in the mountains with it.
• 1:29:52
  And then I could go to the beach and take off the top and the doors and fold the
• 1:29:54
  windshield down and cruise around in it.
• 1:29:56
  It's a pretty big range, but one of probably a Wrangler or a WRX are my two
• 1:30:01
  Top choices for those reasons, but I cannot possibly disagree or have any shade
• 1:30:06
  whatsoever on the people choosing the V8 because even now as a, you know, I drive
• 1:30:10
  sort of sportier cars and love them.
• 1:30:11
  And my dad's got a, you know, 911 SC, the air cooled that I drive around,
• 1:30:15
  but I get a chance to, I still roll down the windows to listen to somebody
• 1:30:18
  in a V8 Mustang just rev, just the sound of that just makes me happy.
• 1:30:22
  And I'd love to have one of those under my right foot for a little while.
• 1:30:25
  Don't know if I'd want that as much as I'd want to be sliding around roads in a WRX.
• 1:30:30
  Or off roading it up in a Wrangler.
• 1:30:32
  All right, Dan, did we buy you enough time?
• 1:30:34
  Are you just going to say some year plus square body?
• 1:30:37
  Of course I would always add to the square body collection, but so here's
• 1:30:40
  the thing I have to say, I'm glad we weren't doing this three years ago
• 1:30:43
  when the used car market was insane.
• 1:30:45
  But you could buy an old Nissan and that's about it.
• 1:30:48
  So I'm glad that the market has corrected some.
• 1:30:52
  But the 16 year old me, back when I was 16, it would have been that 68 Camaro,
• 1:30:56
  with that as that not being the option.
• 1:30:58
  Modern day me, if I was 16 today, I definitely like the
• 1:31:01
  idea of WS6 9802 Trans Ams.
• 1:31:05
  I like the Trans Ams better than the Camaros.
• 1:31:07
  Also, I love the CTS V with the 6 speed.
• 1:31:10
  You get those for 10k?
• 1:31:12
  No.
• 1:31:12
  I haven't seen one yet.
• 1:31:13
  If I saw one I had to window shop for them every so often.
• 1:31:15
  They normally need a little bit of work, but you can get them at that price.
• 1:31:18
  A little bit of work.
• 1:31:19
  I will say, to Rob's point there, I feel like we've all been doing
• 1:31:23
  this We were all going to cars.
• 1:31:26
  com, where we really need to hang out, is Dan's favorite site, Facebook Marketplace.
• 1:31:32
  You can find a treasure trove of shit on Facebook Marketplace.
• 1:31:37
  You mean Craigslist?
• 1:31:38
  I swear, that's where we need to be for all the fun stuff.
• 1:31:42
  I agree.
• 1:31:42
  I did find a Quattroporte.
• 1:31:44
  On, uh, Autotrader, by the way, for under 10k.
• 1:31:47
  A Maserati.
• 1:31:48
  But you're right.
• 1:31:48
  My brain was like, I should be going to Craigslist, and I should
• 1:31:51
  be going to Facebook Marketplace.
• 1:31:52
  And then all of us are like, Oh, I'll take a, you know, a 986 911, or I'll
• 1:31:56
  take a RS5 that for some reason somebody misposted at a different number.
• 1:32:00
  I mean, they're all 6.
• 1:32:03
  Exactly.
• 1:32:03
  Me, when I was 16, though, I did try to buy a 914 and still kick
• 1:32:06
  myself that I didn't buy it.
• 1:32:07
  Because that would have been a dream car back then that you can't get for 10k now.
• 1:32:10
  Otherwise, that would be on my list.
• 1:32:11
  Well, I'll wow you guys with my selfish dad.
• 1:32:14
  If I could be 16 again with what I know now for 10 grand,
• 1:32:18
  it would have to be black.
• 1:32:19
  Is the 3.
• 1:32:19
  8 liter Hyundai Genesis Coupe.
• 1:32:22
  That's a fast, fun car.
• 1:32:23
  Genesis are pretty cool.
• 1:32:24
  Those are fun cars.
• 1:32:25
  At 16 and I got 10 grand to blow on a car.
• 1:32:29
  Something different in the high school parking lot for sure.
• 1:32:31
  And on that bombshell, Brad, it's time to take us home.
• 1:32:34
  It's a tough call to make on behalf of a young driver.
• 1:32:37
  Not only are the economics of the situation, a challenge or an additional
• 1:32:40
  burden, so this particular type of car buying, we hope that this episode
• 1:32:44
  gives you some food for thought.
• 1:32:46
  And if you'd like to continue the conversation or expand on some
• 1:32:49
  of the topics here, don't be shy.
• 1:32:50
  podcast, Facebook group, or discord, where you can get in contact with
• 1:32:55
  the panelists you heard here tonight.
• 1:32:56
  And I want to thank our panel for another great, what should I buy debate?
• 1:33:00
  Oh, you know, we haven't heard from my Crutchfield and it's a shame we've run
• 1:33:04
  out of time and we'll have to get to them next time on the next, what should I buy?
• 1:33:08
  Well guys, for most of the general public, it's safe to assume that in
• 1:33:12
  their lifetime, they will probably own a total of five cars, max per person.
• 1:33:16
  And that's based on our very scientific method of talking to non car friends and
• 1:33:21
  asking about their car buying history.
• 1:33:23
  But as we talked about earlier.
• 1:33:25
  It's those first impressions that are lasting impressions.
• 1:33:28
  So helping to pick that right first car is really important to the future
• 1:33:33
  of your petrol heads and their story.
• 1:33:36
  As they look back on what they imprinted on.
• 1:33:38
  So remember everyone has a story and it's this point, this very moment,
• 1:33:42
  when you decide on that first car, that's going to Second trajectory
• 1:33:45
  of where their story's gonna go.
• 1:33:47
  Consider that when you're purchasing a car for your first time driving.
• 1:33:50
  Well, thank you guys.
• 1:33:51
  This has been helpful.
• 1:33:52
  Was it, Don?
• 1:33:53
  Did you get something out of this?
• 1:33:54
  It was, I think Rob hit it out of the park actually really feeling a
• 1:33:58
  gravitational pull toward that Honda.
• 1:34:01
  The question is, can we find one, can we afford it?
• 1:34:04
  And.
• 1:34:04
  Is the wife and daughter on board with it.
• 1:34:06
  I very much appreciate this.
• 1:34:07
  And I look forward to getting back together with y'all very, very soon.
• 1:34:10
  Obviously we do these all the time.
• 1:34:12
  This is a blast.
• 1:34:13
  I feel like it's both been only like a day and yet it's been
• 1:34:15
  a decade since I was last on.
• 1:34:17
  And like last time it was a lot of more HRR talk, just to be clear.
• 1:34:20
  Yes.
• 1:34:21
  Yes.
• 1:34:21
  But we've matured since those days.
• 1:34:23
  All right.
• 1:34:23
  Well, thanks you guys.
• 1:34:24
  Take care.
• 1:34:25
  Thanks.
• 1:34:26
  And make sure you got to make sure you report back with what she ends up getting.
• 1:34:28
  Yeah, for sure.
• 1:34:29
  Okay.
• 1:34:29
  We'll do.
• 1:34:40
  We hope you enjoyed another awesome episode of Brake Fix Podcast brought
• 1:34:44
  to you by Grand Touring Motorsports.
• 1:34:47
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• 1:34:49
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• 1:34:54
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• 1:34:57
  be sure to check out the follow on article at GTMotorsports.
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