Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / What Should I Buy? - Style Over Substance: The Poser Car Debate!

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What Should I Buy? - Style Over Substance: The Poser Car Debate! · 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 get that?
• 0:13
  Or what the hell is wrong with you?
• 0:15
  at the next Cars and Coffee.
• 0:19
  To quote one of our fans, what's it like having to explain to everybody?
• 0:24
  No, it's a fake one.
• 0:26
  Wouldn't you rather have a real, any other car?
• 0:29
  And we're here to answer that very question with our petrol head panel to
• 0:33
  settle another, what should I buy debate?
• 0:35
  This time it's style over substance.
• 0:38
  It's sizzle and no steak with the posers, replicas, and kit cars.
• 0:42
  Joining us tonight are Mark Shank, our nineties expert, Don Wieberg from
• 0:47
  garage style magazine, William big money Ross from the exotic car marketplace.
• 0:53
  Author of Human in the Machine, Jeff Willis, along with Mountain Man Dan.
• 0:57
  And like all What Should I Buy episodes, we have some shopping criteria.
• 1:02
  This time, the price, the performance, and the points don't matter.
• 1:05
  Because if you don't look good, then no one looks good.
• 1:09
  Our panel of extraordinary petrolhead panelists are challenged to find our
• 1:13
  first time collector something that will make their friends go, seriously?
• 1:17
  At the next Cars and Coffee.
• 1:19
  We are going to venture down a path that has been brought up
• 1:22
  many times on this show before.
• 1:24
  Our fans of What Should I Buy should know that we've mentioned over and
• 1:28
  over again about kit cars and replicas.
• 1:30
  Don, it's really your fault that we're here.
• 1:32
  What the hell's a poser?
• 1:33
  Oh, good.
• 1:34
  Throw me under the bus.
• 1:35
  Thanks.
• 1:35
  You know, it's a good question.
• 1:37
  What is a poser?
• 1:38
  Well, I think the first time I brought it up on your show, and
• 1:41
  I've always kind of wondered it, as you all know very well, I'm a huge
• 1:45
  fan of the Chrysler TC by Maserati.
• 1:47
  I have secretly often wondered, if you drive that car, are you just an SL poser?
• 1:53
  Are you an Elante poser?
• 1:54
  Are you a Riata poser?
• 1:55
  Is the Riata a poser?
• 1:57
  What is a poser?
• 1:58
  Is it someone trying to be like someone else?
• 2:01
  Let's take the Cadillac Elante, for example.
• 2:03
  The advertising doesn't directly go after the Mercedes SL, but it does
• 2:08
  instead show the SL in the background.
• 2:11
  A big, beautiful, bright red Elante.
• 2:13
  And this little gray SL in the background looking ever so Eastern European.
• 2:18
  Is the Elante trying to pose as the next SL?
• 2:22
  And in that, does it make it a poser?
• 2:24
  Now that being said, the Elante was introduced for the 1987 automobile year.
• 2:28
  Is somebody going to pull his card yet?
• 2:31
  He's mixing up his adjectives, I think he said beautiful,
• 2:34
  but I think he meant hideous.
• 2:36
  Oh no you didn't.
• 2:37
  What he did is he added ER to POS.
• 2:44
  All jokes aside, when you brought this up Don, we talked about posers.
• 2:48
  I immediately went in a completely different direction and you have hit
• 2:52
  on something, you've struck a nerve.
• 2:53
  It's a car trying to be something else or a marketing department trying to give you
• 2:58
  this illusion that this car will satisfy a need or a void in your life because
• 3:03
  maybe you can or can't afford that SL Mercedes or the 7 Series BMW or whatever
• 3:08
  it is that you're really lusting after.
• 3:10
  So we're talking posers.
• 3:11
  Is it just a car or is it the individual that dresses in all the garb?
• 3:15
  I don't think our lawyers want us to focus on the individuals, especially
• 3:20
  in the eighties with those Corvette jackets and the Trans Am jackets, the
• 3:23
  nice silver ones and all that stuff.
• 3:25
  And any Corvette owners got all his Corvette gear, anything he's got
• 3:28
  his jeans hugged up to his tits.
• 3:30
  This is said by a Fiero owner who told everybody it was really a
• 3:33
  Trans Am jacket, not a Fiero jacket.
• 3:37
  That's all I was just wondering.
• 3:39
  I think we're going to focus on the cars more than anything, but this is going to
• 3:42
  turn into a really interesting discussion about a niche corner of the collector
• 3:46
  car market that I don't think a lot of people spend time looking in because maybe
• 3:50
  they're hunting for that rare M3 or that particular 911 or, you know, some year
• 3:56
  Corvette numbers matching or otherwise.
• 3:58
  There's some real diamonds in the rough here that really haven't been exposed
• 4:02
  and the values around these kit cars, replicas and so on are quite affordable.
• 4:07
  Oh, definitely.
• 4:08
  If we do a lot of digging and especially deciding what you want out of your kit
• 4:13
  car, there's a plethora of options.
• 4:15
  Now, obviously back in the 80s, it was either, okay, you put it
• 4:18
  on a Fiero chassis or, you know, a beetle chassis, what have you.
• 4:21
  That was about it.
• 4:22
  Now, I mean, you have the kit car and with the passing that law
• 4:25
  too, it's like they can sell you the whole basic kit and caboodle.
• 4:28
  I mean, they're building the whole two frame chassis.
• 4:30
  And there's a ton of them out there and they're doing very well.
• 4:32
  I mean, you got everything from track day specific stuff that should go to track,
• 4:36
  but it can be street driven, but then you got those stuff that's on the lower end.
• 4:40
  But I mean, there's so many options today of what you can get.
• 4:44
  As a kit car that the quality level is pretty high.
• 4:47
  It's almost like the Ikea of the car world in a sense, because you basically
• 4:51
  buy it all arrives on your doorstep and you assemble it by the list of
• 4:55
  a goes to a B goes to B exactly.
• 4:57
  You guys might remember a print ad from the seventies and eighties
• 5:00
  for the gazelle automobile.
• 5:02
  You remember that it was always a full page ad or a half page ad.
• 5:05
  And it's a great little picture of this.
• 5:07
  Semi concocted an SSK Mercedes and an MG had a baby and this was it.
• 5:13
  But the parts are on the floor and there's a father and a son and they're
• 5:16
  working on this thing and they're in the garage and it really is kind of a great
• 5:20
  thing, but you know, it was all built on a Fiero chassis or the VW Beetle,
• 5:24
  those were huge chassis going around.
• 5:26
  And then go back to the dune buggy, for God's sake, we could even bring
• 5:29
  up the Myers Manks if we wanted to.
• 5:30
  And how many posers, if you want to call them that, were sprung.
• 5:34
  From the dune buggy concept.
• 5:36
  I used to work for a magazine back in the day.
• 5:38
  We had a trade thing going on with garage style.
• 5:41
  It was called kit car builder.
• 5:42
  Do any of you remember that magazine?
• 5:44
  Yeah.
• 5:44
  Learning from them.
• 5:45
  They had some amazing, amazing coach built kit cars.
• 5:50
  When you go back and you look at the history of kit cars, et cetera, it
• 5:53
  actually goes back, believe it or not, to the 1800, when you start researching
• 5:56
  this stuff, it started in England.
• 5:58
  There was a guy who literally had what they call a drop down kit and he
• 6:02
  ordered a drop down kit and he sent you.
• 6:04
  All the parts and pieces to put it together.
• 6:06
  I think publications like that actually help educate everybody.
• 6:09
  They educated me.
• 6:10
  I had no idea that those cars existed.
• 6:11
  Just having a magazine out there for a kit car builder.
• 6:15
  I mean, it just shows there's a big market out there, big
• 6:17
  enough to support a magazine.
• 6:18
  If you went down a rabbit hole, looking around and not all of them are
• 6:21
  going to be online or have websites, but I think it would be shocking.
• 6:24
  You'd look to see, especially around the world now, you know, you don't
• 6:27
  have to worry about just the United States, but there are hundreds, if not
• 6:30
  thousands of these little boutiques.
• 6:33
  Doing 5, 8, 10 cars a year.
• 6:35
  That's it.
• 6:36
  You know, not building thousands that are doing just small things
• 6:38
  and they're all over the place in preparation for this episode.
• 6:41
  If anybody Google search, there's lists top 20 kit car manufacturers of 2023.
• 6:47
  I mean, as current as today, there's at least 20 manufacturers out there building
• 6:52
  something that you could be assembling in your garage or based on a car that
• 6:55
  you might already have in your stable.
• 6:57
  So it's kind of interesting that it's a community that doesn't.
• 7:00
  Market itself.
• 7:01
  Well, it doesn't advertise as loud as the big manufacturers, but it's
• 7:04
  been thriving for a hundred years.
• 7:07
  If you think about going back to the original custom coach builders, these
• 7:10
  kits have been around to Don's point forever, fast forwarding to the seventies,
• 7:14
  the sixties, if you really think about modernism, I kind of think that the Myers
• 7:18
  Manks was the original sort of kit car because you could buy it assembled or you
• 7:22
  could buy it where you put it together yourself, you could do it either way.
• 7:25
  That kit alone.
• 7:26
  There were so many people that went out and replicated it under different names.
• 7:31
  Nowadays, if you find an actual legit Myers Manks, it's worth easily, you
• 7:36
  know, a lot more than the knockoff.
• 7:38
  There were so many others made that it's hard to find a legit one.
• 7:41
  I was just at a show the other weekend and, uh, so there was a legit one.
• 7:44
  I was like pretty surprised.
• 7:46
  It was shocking to see a legit one.
• 7:47
  Cause I think the legitimate ones, there's only like.
• 7:49
  600 or 700 of them that are legitimate, true Meyers Manks cards.
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  The rest, thousands of them are all the knockoffs.
• 7:55
  Cause unfortunately Bruce Meyer didn't do what he was supposed to do.
• 7:59
  You know, as they said, he was brilliant getting that stuff put together.
• 8:01
  So it was a horrible businessman and he just didn't the patent wires or whatnot.
• 8:04
  So he just basically got ripped off and everyone else making them.
• 8:06
  So he didn't really make any money on them.
• 8:08
  But set the trend and like even Don said, I think that's where
• 8:11
  it kind of started from there.
• 8:12
  There are absolutely great things to explore out there, even though they
• 8:16
  fall into these categories, like if we're talking about stuff, you know,
• 8:18
  affordability, a self built Caterham, it's a kit car, it's a great track day
• 8:23
  type thing, you know, it's really cool.
• 8:25
  It's insurable.
• 8:26
  You're going to die if it hits anything.
• 8:28
  And another example of has a large proliferation of knockoffs.
• 8:32
  So officially Lotus had sold it off to Caterham and then they built
• 8:35
  the super seven from 1961, 62.
• 8:38
  Two ish up until today and they still sell it as a kit that you can assemble.
• 8:42
  There's even top gear episodes about could they build one fast enough as the
• 8:45
  guys, you know, traverse continental Europe and all this stuff, but then
• 8:48
  you have all these other super seven knockoffs, all the Honda powered ones,
• 8:52
  like the low cost, there's like an arms length of names where they just basically
• 8:56
  took that simple Lotus seven design and then let's put an eco tech in it.
• 9:00
  Let's put this in it.
• 9:01
  Let's put a, that in it.
• 9:02
  We'll change the two frame a little bit.
• 9:03
  We'll call it this other thing.
• 9:05
  And so.
• 9:05
  Like the Myers Manks, I think there's a lot of these little roller skate
• 9:09
  Lotus sevens running around or quote unquote, you know, knockoff Lotus
• 9:12
  sevens running around out there.
• 9:14
  If you want to say knockoff vehicles, you'd have to basically say almost every
• 9:18
  vehicle made in China, because it's a knockoff of another manufacturer.
• 9:24
  That's a slippery slope, Daniel.
• 9:27
  True.
• 9:28
  The aura punk cat, which is a duplicate of the old beetle, you know, stuff like that.
• 9:32
  That's like the Mercury Mountaineer.
• 9:34
  Posing to be a Ford Explorer, right?
• 9:37
  So we like to call that badge engineering.
• 9:39
  And I like the fact that you went there, Jeff, because that happens all the
• 9:43
  time and GM is notorious for it, right?
• 9:45
  Competing with itself or does it too, but GM is more so than anybody.
• 9:49
  It's like, here's the same thing.
• 9:50
  Six times we'll call it, you know, the terrain, the envoy and the
• 9:53
  trail blazer and the, this and that.
• 9:55
  And you're like, come on guys, it's all the same truck.
• 9:56
  Then there's other companies kind of like you were saying Caterham.
• 9:59
  That was one that I remembered.
• 10:00
  And then there's, I don't know if you guys have heard of Superformance.
• 10:03
  That's one of my favorite newer ones that they remake the Daytona, the Cobra, the GT
• 10:09
  40, the GT, and they do a fantastic job.
• 10:13
  And so it's like, besides the nostalgia, sometimes the ones
• 10:16
  that they make mechanically are actually better than the original.
• 10:19
  That's true.
• 10:20
  I've heard really good things about the Superformance GT40 as well.
• 10:24
  It brings up an interesting thought that flashed through my head as we
• 10:27
  were talking about the Myers Manks and using the Beetle as a platform.
• 10:30
  Do we want to include the old American hot rods in this?
• 10:33
  Because essentially you've got guys in the backyard, in the garage, taking
• 10:37
  a chassis from something and taking an engine from something, taking a
• 10:40
  body from something, slapping it all together, kind of got to kick cars.
• 10:44
  Just say, didn't get that name.
• 10:45
  They got known as the hot rod because of their engine.
• 10:48
  So let's just argue about what a hot rod is then.
• 10:51
  Right?
• 10:52
  Yeah, exactly.
• 10:53
  Here he goes.
• 10:55
  I can see where you're going with that, Don, but I think that's an
• 10:57
  episode unto itself, actually talking about rat rods and hot rods and chop
• 11:01
  tops and the real customization of thirties, forties and fifties classics.
• 11:05
  So I think they're exempt from this discussion.
• 11:07
  We're looking more for like William was alluding to these Fiero conversions.
• 11:12
  So those are the cars we're really focusing on.
• 11:14
  And, you know, going back to what Jeff was talking about, Superformance, there's
• 11:17
  people doing the Porsches as well.
• 11:18
  The Beck, for example, is one of them.
• 11:20
  The Beck Spider is awesome.
• 11:21
  Yeah.
• 11:22
  There's a guy in the San Fernando Valley.
• 11:23
  I forget his company name, but he does some spectacular
• 11:26
  Coupes, 356s and Speedsters.
• 11:29
  He does some great stuff.
• 11:30
  So that's another one of those Superformance.
• 11:32
  Could the Hennessey Venom be considered a kit car?
• 11:36
  So the Hennessey is a boutique manufacturer.
• 11:38
  That's a whole different classification of car.
• 11:41
  I think that'd be more like Shelby.
• 11:43
  Yeah.
• 11:43
  I mean, by going to Don's point though, in regards to like going back to the
• 11:46
  forties and fifties and that stuff, building the hot rods and stuff, you
• 11:49
  have the kits now for that, that you can buy the fiberglass body factory five.
• 11:53
  It's got a really nice that you can buy putting modern running gear
• 11:58
  under it, disc brakes, whatnot.
• 11:59
  Normally people, you know, they're buying the Ford, but
• 12:01
  they put the Chevy motor in it.
• 12:02
  So you can buy the fiberglass bodies from God, particularly
• 12:05
  there's a ton of them out there.
• 12:06
  They can get them.
• 12:06
  It can't be considered a kit, but it's more, I guess we'd go along the
• 12:10
  lines of the clone because I know the first generation Camaros, they're
• 12:13
  building actual steel bodies again.
• 12:16
  And they're even doing the same with a lot of the early Jeeps and stuff
• 12:19
  where you can get an entire tub.
• 12:20
  That's not fiberglass.
• 12:21
  It's, they make them an aluminum and steel for the Jeeps.
• 12:24
  Mustangs too.
• 12:25
  Yeah.
• 12:25
  A lot of companies got the rights from the factory themselves to rebuild those.
• 12:29
  Dynacorn is doing the Mustangs.
• 12:31
  Blazers, the Broncos, all of these are starting to come back out with just to buy
• 12:35
  the body and you can start rebuilding it.
• 12:37
  Like with the Mustangs, there's a guy down in Florida, Revology, you know, he's
• 12:40
  taking the Dynacorns and building the car, but then he's also doing an electric.
• 12:44
  So there's quite a few of them out there that are utilizing those remade
• 12:47
  or wherever you want to call them.
• 12:48
  I mean, they got all the prints, everything from the factory
• 12:50
  itself and got licensed for it and spot on, bam, there you go.
• 12:54
  So it's like, you want to replace some panels and have originally just want
• 12:56
  to take the chassis and drop a new one on or put it on a new chassis.
• 12:59
  I mean, there's a lot of things you could do with.
• 13:00
  That kind of opens up a whole nother can of worms in regards to, I mean,
• 13:03
  is that considering a kid car then?
• 13:05
  Is that a re pop using a term from your world, Don?
• 13:08
  Now, what William was bringing to the program there with
• 13:11
  all the Dynacorn, et cetera.
• 13:12
  So you go to the guy in Florida and you say, okay, I want this, but I want
• 13:15
  this engine, I want this suspension, I want this, I want this, I want this.
• 13:19
  All of a sudden, I think that guy in Florida doesn't have the marketing cache,
• 13:23
  doesn't have whatever, but all of a sudden he's in the same swimming pool as Singer.
• 13:27
  Oh yeah.
• 13:28
  Because they're making a bespoke Mustang or they're making a bespoke
• 13:32
  Bronco or bespoke Camaro, Firebird.
• 13:34
  Whatever it might be, they're doing this sort of knockoff.
• 13:37
  If you call it a knockoff, but it's the same basic ball of wax.
• 13:41
  So again, I think you're getting into custom coach building.
• 13:43
  I think it's what you're doing.
• 13:44
  No.
• 13:44
  And like Jeff said, you know, super performance does phenomenal job, but you
• 13:47
  know, there's a outfit up Michigan RCR.
• 13:49
  They also own super SLC, you know, they do a nine 17, they do a GT 40.
• 13:55
  They do a nine, six, two.
• 13:56
  They do a couple of them.
• 13:57
  Phenomenal work.
• 13:58
  I mean, you get the right engineers, you got CAD work, you got the right equipment
• 14:01
  in your thing, you can build these things.
• 14:02
  What level do you want to be at?
• 14:03
  Do you want to spend 25, 30 grand?
• 14:05
  Do you want to spend a hundred, 200 grand?
• 14:07
  And what do you want to have?
• 14:08
  One of the first of those, if you want to go to the neoclassics, you know, you
• 14:12
  had Kline in the 1970s, Kline coachworks, I think it was called, and they had
• 14:17
  the Kline series one, two, three.
• 14:19
  Three and four, and they only built about 400 cars from what I understand.
• 14:23
  If you ever watched the old show, Matt Houston, he drove an Excalibur.
• 14:26
  They all kind of looked the same.
• 14:28
  You had the Excalibur, you had the Clunet, later on you had the Spartan
• 14:31
  two, which was kind of a spinoff.
• 14:33
  It had to be called Spartan two, because over in England,
• 14:35
  they already had Spartan one.
• 14:37
  Yeah.
• 14:37
  Nobody even knows about that car, but that was built on a Triumph
• 14:39
  Herald chassis, I believe that was.
• 14:41
  But they all had that same SSK porch kind of look to them.
• 14:45
  You know what I like about these cars going just specifically to the
• 14:48
  neoclassics is they are really unique.
• 14:51
  They are a little weird, but like all of us have been saying, you
• 14:54
  get that modern running gear.
• 14:55
  These were built in the seventies.
• 14:57
  So they're now classic neoclassic cars, which is really kind of interesting.
• 15:01
  There is sort of a bubbling going on in the market.
• 15:04
  You see these clinics, you see these Quicksilvers, you see these zimmers,
• 15:08
  they're all going up in value.
• 15:09
  And what's funny is the zimmers, they were largely built on Cougar,
• 15:14
  Mustang, Mark seven bodies.
• 15:16
  You can see the door, you can see the, the C pillar and the B pillar
• 15:20
  back when they were new, I remember.
• 15:22
  Living in LA, they're not all over the place, but we had a fair
• 15:25
  number of them running around.
• 15:26
  I remember laughing at them as a kid, thinking these things are a joke.
• 15:29
  But isn't it funny how the joke has turned, and today, here I am, so many
• 15:33
  years later, looking at these things online saying, you know, it might
• 15:36
  be kind of cool to have one of those cards, because they're so weird.
• 15:39
  And these were the true, tried, we're going to put this together.
• 15:43
  We're going to try and make a manufacturing.
• 15:45
  Look, the Kline, they had crystal ashtrays, they had etched glass.
• 15:49
  They had pinstriping that literally took something like
• 15:52
  17 hours to apply to the body.
• 15:55
  If you see where I'm going with this, these are the same practices, Rolls Royce.
• 15:59
  Preachers, the same level of attention to detail that Rolls Royce
• 16:03
  and Bentley put into their car.
• 16:04
  Arguably the best cars, especially back in the day, when you look
• 16:08
  at that level of detail and you can pick up a mint condition for,
• 16:12
  Oh, I don't know, 20, 25, 000.
• 16:14
  You're getting a lot of car because that car sold new for roughly 80.
• 16:18
  But here's the problem I have with that, Don.
• 16:20
  When you look at those cars, and they all look like Cruella de
• 16:23
  Vil cartoon gangster cars, right?
• 16:25
  It's sort of like buying a conversion van.
• 16:28
  All this detail, and all this extra, and all this stuff, and this malaise that
• 16:33
  goes along with it, and yet, it's worth nothing, and nobody really wants it.
• 16:37
  That's the problem.
• 16:38
  And I'm glad you brought up the Klené because that was one of those cars
• 16:41
  for me that actually fit in the Poser category, because it isn't trying to
• 16:46
  be a Rolls or a Duesenberg or anything.
• 16:49
  It's just trying to be itself.
• 16:50
  And some of those were based on Beatles and really these Frankenstein chassis
• 16:55
  where they'll take them and spin them around and do all this crazy stuff.
• 16:57
  So you're right.
• 16:58
  They're oddballs.
• 16:59
  I was trying to think of this as like, what's the traditional Poser mobile
• 17:03
  that might be starting to turn a corner.
• 17:05
  The H2 jumped out at me.
• 17:07
  A Hummer?
• 17:07
  Yeah, the H2.
• 17:09
  Yeah, because it's not a real Hummer.
• 17:10
  It's because it's not a real Hummer.
• 17:11
  Good one.
• 17:12
  So in the original, back in the day, it was just a jumped up Tahoe.
• 17:17
  It was a square box, pretending to be an H1.
• 17:20
  But now you go back.
• 17:21
  Would you rather have that Tahoe from that same year or would you rather have the H2?
• 17:25
  I think you would pick the H2.
• 17:27
  That's actually a fair, fair point.
• 17:28
  And those H2s aren't worth anything either.
• 17:30
  You know, they do have kind of that cool boxy look.
• 17:33
  It's a Tahoe.
• 17:34
  You can do anything with it.
• 17:35
  You could do to a Tahoe.
• 17:36
  I'll counter that, though.
• 17:37
  Would you rather have an H2 or a Chevy Avalanche?
• 17:40
  Oh, boy.
• 17:40
  Now, wait a minute, if you're bringing up the Avalanche.
• 17:42
  You got to bring up the AXT.
• 17:44
  I refute the premise.
• 17:45
  The Avalanche isn't a pose a mobile.
• 17:46
  It's just a sophisticated person choice.
• 17:48
  Isn't it posing as a full size pickup truck?
• 17:51
  And what the hell is it?
• 17:53
  It's not a halftone chassis.
• 17:54
  It's the Ranchero or Eldorado of our time.
• 17:57
  It's a classy automobile.
• 17:59
  When I was at MotorTrend, those things came out and the guy
• 18:02
  over at TruckTrend had a great description for what that really is.
• 18:05
  It's an SUV with a birth defect.
• 18:09
  One way to put it.
• 18:10
  Uh huh.
• 18:10
  Because if you look at it, it is a Tahoe that had its rear end hacked
• 18:14
  off to turn into a modern Subaru brat.
• 18:16
  You can't use that bed for anything.
• 18:18
  It's not useless.
• 18:19
  You put your refrigerator in there and that's it.
• 18:21
  You're done.
• 18:21
  I've got two cars I want you to weigh in on.
• 18:24
  Mark, specifically, since you're our 90s guy, our expert here, what about
• 18:28
  the Plymouth Prowler and the Chevy SSR?
• 18:31
  Man, it is really hard to set aside the hatred I had for those cars as a kid.
• 18:38
  And I think I was just Disappointed.
• 18:41
  You know, as a kid in the 90s, I didn't appreciate who that vehicle was targeting.
• 18:45
  It wasn't me.
• 18:46
  They weren't putting a V8 in it.
• 18:48
  You know, they were making something that looked cool.
• 18:50
  It was a nice drive and it was a cruiser.
• 18:53
  It was very literally a cruising car, but I still have a hard time getting over it.
• 18:57
  Like the Aztec, that's ironically cool.
• 18:59
  It's like, it's almost ironically cool, but I don't know.
• 19:04
  The only time I thought the Prowler was cool was on that episode of Home
• 19:08
  Improvement, if you remember, where he does a drag race in his Nomad
• 19:11
  against Bob Vila and the Prowler, and I was like, Oh, that's kind of cool.
• 19:14
  And he got his ass kicked, which was great, but I never
• 19:17
  understood Prowler's purpose.
• 19:19
  So what is it pretending to be?
• 19:21
  Well, the problem is they stick it as like a 3.
• 19:23
  5 or 3.
• 19:25
  6 V6 piddly motor.
• 19:26
  If you're going to do that, why are you putting that little motor in there?
• 19:28
  I mean, that didn't make any sense.
• 19:30
  If you look at the measurement, 3.
• 19:31
  5, it's actually a pretty healthy size V6, but it was only 215 horsepower.
• 19:36
  Yeah.
• 19:36
  It really had no horsepower.
• 19:38
  It's taken right out of the LH sedan, which was the Dodge Intrepid, the
• 19:41
  Chrysler Concord, the Chrysler LHS, all those front wheel drive family cars
• 19:46
  that they were building at the time.
• 19:47
  It was a good motor, but it had no inspirational qualities at all.
• 19:51
  It was just a stoic V6 that got the job done.
• 19:54
  And that was the end of it.
• 19:56
  Known two people who've had those cars.
• 19:58
  And it's interesting.
• 19:59
  Good one.
• 20:00
  He's just a bonafide car guy.
• 20:01
  He just loves cars.
• 20:02
  Doesn't matter what kind of car you wanna talk to him about, he'll love it.
• 20:05
  He just wants to talk about cars.
• 20:06
  And he loved that prowler just 'cause it was so weird.
• 20:09
  He never really was a hot rodder that that's the one genre he never got into.
• 20:13
  And of course the prowler was trying to be a modern take on what would hot or a
• 20:19
  customizer build, how would that be done?
• 20:21
  But it's so obviously failed at that.
• 20:23
  It was a shit hot rod.
• 20:25
  They made a rest mod hot rod and didn't make it.
• 20:28
  It just means they're selling to, like, the middle aged Camry buyer
• 20:32
  who's having a midlife crisis.
• 20:34
  It's all pants, no trousers, the very definition of the term.
• 20:38
  It's like it was purposely built to pose.
• 20:40
  Or do you think it was maybe purposefully built to be a platform for Hot Rod guys?
• 20:46
  To put something better.
• 20:47
  That's an interesting take.
• 20:49
  That seems like a stretch to me.
• 20:51
  I've never seen a problem where that's got like a V8 dumped into her.
• 20:54
  I had me stuffed in everything.
• 20:55
  I don't know, but an LS fits in all things.
• 20:58
  No, but I have seen them get supercharged and that helps them a lot.
• 21:03
  Cause remember the 3.
• 21:05
  5 liter, even though it was such a pig in its own, right.
• 21:08
  It was overly built.
• 21:09
  You know, everybody said, why did Chrysler overbuild that engine?
• 21:12
  Well, in the back of their mind, they had it as a performance
• 21:15
  engine with a supercharger.
• 21:17
  That was the whole point.
• 21:19
  And then ultimately a typical Chrysler.
• 21:21
  Nah, we don't want to do that anymore.
• 21:22
  And the reason I bring up the Prowler is because there's two offshoots here.
• 21:26
  Chrysler followed up the, let's call it failure of the
• 21:29
  Prowler with the PT Cruiser.
• 21:31
  We are going to make no excuses for that car whatsoever, but Ford in turn
• 21:35
  came back with a concept car you can look up online called the Indigo,
• 21:39
  and it was Even more futuristic than the Prowler, but it's the same idea.
• 21:43
  It was that sort of tea bucket for the late nineties, early two thousands.
• 21:47
  At the same time, they released the GT 90 concept was the super
• 21:51
  futuristic version of the GT 40.
• 21:54
  So there was a little bit of experimentation going on.
• 21:57
  But at least Ford drew the line in the sand and said, we're going to
• 22:00
  keep these as concept cars and not go to production to an audience that
• 22:04
  we don't know is going to buy them.
• 22:06
  You got to think though, too.
• 22:07
  If there's one thing Ford is really, really, really good at doing, it's
• 22:12
  knowing when this ain't going to sell.
• 22:15
  Eric, you and I had this conversation, I think privately about Volkswagen.
• 22:19
  Building stuff and teasing their customers with it.
• 22:22
  And Ford does the same thing.
• 22:23
  They'll build this awesome car, the GT 90.
• 22:26
  Now, ultimately, of course, the GT 90 did turn into the Ford GT, but that
• 22:32
  whole era right there, and you know, now that I'm thinking about it, I wanted
• 22:35
  to give the beetle credit for bringing back that sort of retro design, but
• 22:39
  I'm wondering, did the Prowler beat it?
• 22:42
  To the punch as the retro, I think the prowler was in production before the
• 22:46
  beetle, but the thing is that whole era right there, there was such a
• 22:49
  retro thing going on with everybody.
• 22:51
  GM had the HHR, the heritage high roof, which was basically a spinoff of the PT
• 22:57
  cruiser, you know, which kind of kicked off the whole thing of, Hey, let's
• 23:00
  bring back that retro thirties car.
• 23:02
  These were all concept cars for some reason, they have.
• 23:06
  The gumption to put these things into production, Ford came out with the
• 23:10
  Thunderbird, they came out with the retro Mustang, they came out with all
• 23:14
  kinds of their own sort of formula celebrating their heritage during that
• 23:18
  time, you saw all these weird little retrospectives coming out of the
• 23:22
  woodwork from all the manufacturers.
• 23:24
  It seemed like, I mean, even Audi had their little TT.
• 23:27
  It looks like somebody smashed a beetle, but it was cool.
• 23:31
  Correct me if I'm wrong, Eric.
• 23:33
  But there was no other Audi that looked like that in the past.
• 23:37
  That was sort of its own kid, but it was based on a retro Beetle.
• 23:41
  Originally, the intent was for it to be the Carmeghia.
• 23:44
  They were going to come out side by side.
• 23:46
  There was some politics involved.
• 23:47
  There's all sorts of mythology behind the design of the TT and stuff like that.
• 23:51
  But there's also some NSUs, which are part of the four rings of Audi.
• 23:54
  Or the auto union, like the Prince and things like that, that the
• 23:57
  TT kind of hearkens back to.
• 23:59
  So arguments could be made that there is a predecessor to the TT, but to your
• 24:04
  point, it's the sister of the beetle.
• 24:06
  So it did take design cues from the thirties or forties back with NSU, etc.
• 24:10
  The Bauhaus design, right?
• 24:12
  It's some classic German design from a previous time.
• 24:15
  Before we go too far field, I think it's important to realize.
• 24:19
  How many people loved the PT Cruiser when it came out?
• 24:22
  Yep.
• 24:23
  Oh, people were ravenous.
• 24:24
  They sold that thing at a markup in the first year, and then they were
• 24:28
  selling it for 150, 000 units a year.
• 24:31
  Now, it is kind of hilarious how it went from like 100, 000 units to 20, 000 units.
• 24:35
  Yes.
• 24:35
  In one year.
• 24:36
  It was like overnight, bam.
• 24:37
  Yeah, they hit a wall.
• 24:38
  It aged out.
• 24:39
  I think it's important to realize how popular it was.
• 24:42
  Did we stumble on number five with factory?
• 24:45
  Poser type cars or factory retro, whatever you want to call them with
• 24:49
  the Thunderbird, with the Beetle, with the Mustang, with the PT, et cetera.
• 24:53
  So I think the restomod cars, or as Dan used to write a series on our website
• 24:58
  called retro relativity, where he talked about the mini talked about the new
• 25:01
  Fiat 500 and their origins and things like that, I think the restomod cars.
• 25:06
  Are kind of like the hot rods.
• 25:08
  We need to push them to the side because they're not attempting to be anything
• 25:12
  other than what they used to be.
• 25:14
  It's a nostalgia play.
• 25:15
  You want to buy that Fiat 500.
• 25:16
  You want to buy that mini Cooper.
• 25:18
  You want to buy the modern version of the beetle.
• 25:20
  Again, they're not pretending to be anything that they're not right.
• 25:22
  It's not a beetle comes out and says, I'm a Scirocco.
• 25:24
  And you're like, wait, what?
• 25:26
  You know, it's not that sort of thing.
• 25:27
  So I think they're exempt from this particular discussion.
• 25:30
  Yeah.
• 25:30
  Some of them don't pretend to be what they're named.
• 25:32
  They just fail at being it.
• 25:34
  Oh, there's that too.
• 25:34
  Yes.
• 25:35
  Before we move on and get deeper into replicas and continue our conversation
• 25:39
  about super performances and Beck spiders and things like that, there's another car.
• 25:43
  I found that it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation.
• 25:46
  Is it posing or did the factory copy the poser situation here?
• 25:51
  And that's the CZetta Marauder V16.
• 25:53
  Well, that was nothing more than a Diablo.
• 25:56
  That was the original.
• 25:57
  But it wasn't the Diablo because it was rejected.
• 26:00
  And then they continued to build it.
• 26:01
  Chrysler got together with Lamborghini and built the Diablos.
• 26:04
  If you remember the timeline there.
• 26:07
  Zampolli, he designed that to be the successor to the Countach because
• 26:11
  the Countach was such a radical car.
• 26:13
  Chrysler buys into Lamborghini and says, yeah, you know what?
• 26:16
  That's a really radical car.
• 26:17
  We're going to send this back to Detroit.
• 26:19
  We're going to have our guys at Chrysler kind of refine this, that pissed
• 26:23
  off Zampolli so badly that he took his design and started his own with.
• 26:29
  I don't know what you call that.
• 26:31
  What the heck is that thing?
• 26:34
  Posing is about visuals.
• 26:35
  This just looks like a Diablo with a body kit.
• 26:37
  So we're going more towards the Lamborghini posers.
• 26:40
  I've got one and I think it's modern, but it's the biggest,
• 26:43
  stinkiest turd of the modern ones.
• 26:45
  Have you guys heard of the Vader?
• 26:46
  Oh yes.
• 26:47
  I was going to bring that up.
• 26:49
  Yes.
• 26:49
  Oh my God.
• 26:50
  I don't know how it's popular.
• 26:52
  I cannot stand this thing at all, but it's based.
• 26:55
  On infinity G 35 coupe.
• 26:57
  Yes, exactly.
• 26:58
  And it's supposed to look like a new Lamborghini and they're at car shows
• 27:02
  and people are all excited about them.
• 27:04
  And I just want to kick it.
• 27:05
  I hate it.
• 27:06
  You know, what's funny about that?
• 27:07
  They even featured it on the first season of car masters with Mark
• 27:11
  Towley and his team out in Temecula building one of those things.
• 27:14
  And I was just like, you're doing what?
• 27:16
  And apparently Shaquille O'Neal has a bunch of them.
• 27:18
  So, you know, that makes it cool too.
• 27:20
  That was in a Batman movie too, wasn't it?
• 27:22
  Oh no, Christian Bale was in a real one, not a fake one.
• 27:25
  There was a Middle East supercar that was in a Batman movie that
• 27:28
  never actually made it to production.
• 27:29
  Yeah.
• 27:30
  Greatest product placement ever.
• 27:31
  It was the villain's car driving.
• 27:33
  I can't remember what it was in.
• 27:34
  It looks like the Lexus LF or whatever else, whatever that one is.
• 27:38
  LFA, LFA.
• 27:39
  This is actually the first time I've seen that car.
• 27:42
  Okay.
• 27:42
  You guys are probably going to laugh and say I was typical Don,
• 27:44
  but I actually kind of like it.
• 27:46
  I think it's kind of a cool looking car.
• 27:47
  The proportions are all wrong.
• 27:49
  It's got the cast and camber of the Fast and the Furious guys
• 27:52
  like that are all leaned in.
• 27:55
  It's just terrible.
• 27:56
  I'm glad Jeff went down the route of Lamborghini replicas.
• 28:00
  Because I found one for you, Don, since we've now crossed the threshold.
• 28:03
  Have you heard of a group out of the UK called Prava, which is an
• 28:07
  Italian word for to try or proof?
• 28:10
  Those are the coolest cars ever made.
• 28:12
  Tube frame Lamborghini Countach for 20, 000.
• 28:16
  And it will fool just about anybody.
• 28:18
  Yeah.
• 28:18
  It makes me wonder how they got away with it.
• 28:20
  Don Pagetta didn't stand up with their lawyers and say, excuse me.
• 28:23
  You can't do that.
• 28:24
  Cause you know, if it were a Ferrari, Ferrari would have been all over them.
• 28:26
  And I look at something like that and go, yeah, I could own a
• 28:29
  Lamborghini knockoff for 20 grand.
• 28:32
  Okay, great.
• 28:33
  What am I going to power it with?
• 28:34
  Got to choose an engine.
• 28:35
  Let's say I'm going to go with a Ford motor or even an LS engine at that point.
• 28:38
  Why wouldn't I just buy a De Tomaso Pantera at that point?
• 28:41
  Except is there something to be said about being new versus the De Tomaso?
• 28:45
  You're going back 40.
• 28:46
  Well, I mean, the newest.
• 28:47
  Day Maso you can get your hands on.
• 28:49
  Would've been from what, 1987, I think was the last year.
• 28:52
  92, I thought it was when they built those last, was it 92 GT five, whatever it was,
• 28:56
  T five thunder flares and everything.
• 28:58
  Mm-Hmm.
• 28:58
  and all that.
• 28:58
  Yeah.
• 28:59
  Made it slower.
• 29:00
  Very small quantity, but they had the big GT five kits on 'em and all that stuff.
• 29:04
  My dad was a big Pantera fan.
• 29:06
  I remember listening to a few friendly, heated arguments with his friends who.
• 29:12
  Were Corvette guys.
• 29:13
  Porsche guys, or Ferrari Lamborghini guys.
• 29:16
  I do remember those guys considering the de Tomaso Pantera,
• 29:19
  a poser in the exotic car world.
• 29:22
  At the end of the day, it's powered by Ford.
• 29:24
  That's all it is.
• 29:25
  But it had the body, it had the design, it had the DNA.
• 29:29
  It just happened to have that.
• 29:31
  Ford engine, but what everybody hated talking about was, okay, let's go back
• 29:34
  to 1972, the Pantera was positioned between the Corvette and the Dino.
• 29:39
  That was the price point, or if you want to be a little friendlier
• 29:42
  and a little more accurate, it was the Corvette and the 911 S.
• 29:46
  It was pit right between the two of them.
• 29:48
  The Dino was a little bit more than the 911 S.
• 29:50
  The beautiful thing about any of them, zero to 60, quarter mile, Pantera
• 29:55
  blew them all out of the water.
• 29:56
  Didn't even break a sweat.
• 29:57
  Top end was arguable because they were right about the same with the 911 S, but
• 30:03
  it was still faster, but was it faster than the Dino, which was a V6 car, which
• 30:07
  was pretty incredible unto its own self.
• 30:10
  The point is when you knew what you were doing with the Pantera, you had an
• 30:13
  absolute surgical weapon, but it still had that grassroots blue collar, redneck
• 30:20
  Ford 351 Cleveland under the hood.
• 30:22
  And it couldn't shake that.
• 30:24
  Is it a poser car or is it a real performance car?
• 30:26
  That makes me think of another.
• 30:28
  Town and build car to American power trains.
• 30:30
  I think it's called a TC.
• 30:35
  That's awesome.
• 30:36
  I think that's what it was called by Maserati.
• 30:38
  Yeah.
• 30:38
  Yeah.
• 30:39
  That one.
• 30:41
  Well, William, so let me throw one at you, Don and I out car week, looking
• 30:45
  at all sorts of fantastic vehicles rolling around and we're in downtown
• 30:49
  Carmel and rolls by this older gentleman in what I thought was a Ferrari 250.
• 30:54
  GTO.
• 30:55
  Oh him.
• 30:56
  And Don goes, no, no, no, no.
• 30:57
  Look at the back hatch.
• 30:58
  Look at that glass.
• 30:59
  It's all wrong.
• 31:00
  The Toyota one?
• 31:01
  It was a Datsun underneath.
• 31:02
  A Datsun one.
• 31:03
  240, right?
• 31:04
  And then we saw it later.
• 31:05
  I took videos of it when the replica shows up to crash the party.
• 31:08
  I'm wondering in your opinion, as a Ferrari guy, what do you think?
• 31:11
  Think of some of those, let's call them replica classic Ferraris.
• 31:15
  You can't fault someone for wanting to have a very small percentage
• 31:18
  can actually afford the real thing.
• 31:20
  Especially from the Enzo era stuff, got the millions of
• 31:23
  dollars to spend on these cars.
• 31:24
  Everyone's going to have their own opinion.
• 31:25
  You know, someone's going to be like, ah, that thing's crap.
• 31:28
  You know, we're going to just a wannabe.
• 31:29
  It's like, well, the guy only makes, you know, 40, 50 grand a year.
• 31:32
  And he, you know, he wants to have some fun and he builds it himself.
• 31:35
  And see, you can't fault him for that.
• 31:37
  I mean, I don't hold anything against those guys.
• 31:39
  You know, obviously trying to have something that they can't get, but in
• 31:42
  essence, isn't that a form of flattery?
• 31:45
  Right.
• 31:45
  Trying to move something.
• 31:46
  I met Afshin Benaya, as you know, Eric, and then he turned me onto a guy.
• 31:51
  I think his name was Peter Jacoby.
• 31:52
  He originally started with a partial kit.
• 31:55
  Car that was then Frankenstein to become what was technically a real Ferrari
• 32:02
  two 50 GT from 1959, he took a partial kit car, got a real Ferrari engine.
• 32:08
  And then the rest of the parts were all real Ferrari source parts
• 32:12
  and he built his own Ferrari.
• 32:14
  And so in that case, it kind of becomes like almost a
• 32:18
  Frankenstein of all of these.
• 32:19
  Thoughts that we're talking about put together, you know, Now, before William
• 32:23
  asks you for that guy's phone number, cause I know that look on William's face
• 32:26
  is like, Hey, I could sell that car.
• 32:28
  I know.
• 32:30
  And here you are talking about basically a salad bar, Ferrari, and maybe
• 32:34
  you'll disagree with me here, William.
• 32:35
  But, you know, I remember back in the eighties and the seventies,
• 32:38
  well, especially the eighties.
• 32:39
  You had the Panari movement, the Pontiac Ferrari, where you
• 32:42
  were turning a Fiero into a 308 and those were kind of fun cars.
• 32:46
  You know, if you knew your 308s, okay.
• 32:48
  The Panari looked a little goofy.
• 32:49
  Like I've personally seen in Fiero F40.
• 32:52
  I don't know, even know what you call that.
• 32:54
  The proportions are completely wrong, but there are some other
• 32:58
  ones that look really cool.
• 32:59
  Like there was a Fiero three.
• 33:01
  48 conversion that I've seen, there's a 512 Berlinetta boxer conversion that
• 33:05
  actually proportionally looks okay.
• 33:08
  But I think who made it okay to have a car like that was Ferris Bueller.
• 33:11
  You know, when that movie came out and they had that California replica, anybody
• 33:15
  who knew their cars and saw that film knew that's not a real Ferrari, but Damn, if
• 33:19
  it's not nice, that is a really nice car.
• 33:22
  They built three of them for the film, except for one.
• 33:24
  One was kind of a basket case.
• 33:25
  That's the one that went out the window.
• 33:27
  But there were two that were really, really nice.
• 33:28
  If you ever spend any time in their presence, they're really nice.
• 33:32
  Oh, they are.
• 33:33
  They really, really are.
• 33:34
  And you talk about a guy who, yeah, making 50, a year.
• 33:38
  He can't have the real thing, but maybe he can swing something like that.
• 33:42
  I drive one of those in a heartbeat.
• 33:43
  You don't got to worry about driving it.
• 33:44
  Got a 10, 12 million real fighter.
• 33:47
  It's like, Hey, screw it.
• 33:48
  I don't care.
• 33:48
  I'm going to have some fun and drive the shit out of it.
• 33:50
  I love that.
• 33:51
  We've targeted it on the guy who makes 50 grand a year.
• 33:53
  This hypothetical reasonable, you can make a million dollars a year
• 33:57
  and not afford the two 50 GT.
• 33:59
  Like I don't give a shit.
• 34:00
  You need intergenerational wealth.
• 34:02
  And you're like.
• 34:03
  F my grandkids.
• 34:04
  I'm getting a GTO a hundred percent real California mint condition.
• 34:08
  What would that sell for?
• 34:09
  William short wheelbase, long wheelbase between the two.
• 34:12
  Cause you're gonna have, you know, open headlight, close headlight.
• 34:14
  You got to have all that little nuances between eight, 10 million
• 34:17
  into your high teens, low twenties.
• 34:20
  You know, it depends.
• 34:20
  So there are a couple of bucks, you know, they didn't make that many in
• 34:22
  the first place, but then they only made so many in that smaller essence
• 34:26
  with like exposed headlights and that.
• 34:27
  So.
• 34:28
  It gets it down.
• 34:29
  So it's like, okay, that's the one you want because that's the
• 34:31
  least amount of the ones they made.
• 34:32
  That's the most desirable.
• 34:34
  So then it jacks the price up.
• 34:35
  Mark is correct.
• 34:36
  Then don't sound surprised on definitely multi generational money.
• 34:40
  And if the grandchildren, I'm getting myself a Ferrari, you
• 34:42
  sounded way too surprised.
• 34:44
  I'm correct.
• 34:44
  Yeah.
• 34:45
  They're not cheap.
• 34:45
  You had me up until about 9, 000 and I lost interest.
• 34:50
  So to be clear, I don't agree on that last assertion though.
• 34:53
  Right.
• 34:54
  As this generation dies off.
• 34:56
  Don't get me wrong.
• 34:56
  They're always going to be really expensive, but the net present value
• 35:01
  of 20 million, I don't think we'll be there as the generations of people who
• 35:06
  covet those cars die off 15, 20 years.
• 35:09
  It's going to be interesting to see how it works out.
• 35:10
  It might still be 20 million, but 20 million, isn't going to
• 35:13
  be 20 million, 20 years from now.
• 35:15
  And that's like tongue twister.
• 35:16
  If there ever was one.
• 35:17
  That's a big thing we need to differentiate is the fact some kids
• 35:20
  out there that are meant to replicate an existing car are done well, but
• 35:24
  there's some of them that try and just fail drastically and those are
• 35:27
  just eyesores no matter what they do.
• 35:30
  But some of them that are done well to the untrained eye, they would
• 35:32
  think it is a Ferrari, Lamborghini or whatever it is driving down the road.
• 35:36
  But you know, if you really get extreme with it, you start going
• 35:38
  full neoclassic Virgil Exner.
• 35:41
  Tried to reintroduce the Stutz and Dusenberg during the 1960s
• 35:46
  and it was a failed attempt.
• 35:47
  It was ridiculous that you had these cars that were overpriced,
• 35:50
  Imperials and Lincolns.
• 35:52
  I think they were.
• 35:52
  Again, here we go with, you know, you got the kit car side with the Myers Mans.
• 35:56
  You take a VW Beetle and you build yourself a dune buggy, and then you
• 36:00
  got the other side, which is Virgil Ner coming out with an Imperial and
• 36:03
  Lincoln saying, I'm building a new stats, or I'm building a new Dusenberg.
• 36:08
  You know, they were 30, 000.
• 36:09
  And then what happens in the late, late sixties, you had a crazy guy who took a
• 36:13
  bunch of Pontiacs and turned them into the Stutz Bearcat, which was actually
• 36:17
  wildly popular, hugely expensive.
• 36:21
  Elvis owned three of them.
• 36:23
  You're hitting some really interesting points here, Don.
• 36:26
  And we have to begin to split hairs because now our definition changes.
• 36:30
  These aren't necessarily posers and they're not necessarily kit cars either.
• 36:33
  What you described there with the Lincoln turning into the
• 36:36
  Duesenberg, that's a replica.
• 36:38
  And then you're talking about the studs.
• 36:40
  That's a custom coach build from Carrozzeria Mia in Italy that built
• 36:46
  them on top of those G bodies.
• 36:48
  So now we've taken an expanded this idea out.
• 36:50
  So we actually have four different swim lanes to operate in the poser.
• 36:55
  It's sort of a catchall.
• 36:56
  Like we're really not sure where it belongs.
• 36:58
  Then you have these replicas.
• 36:59
  Then you have the kit cars, then you have these custom coach builders, right?
• 37:03
  So I think we have opportunity to investigate all of
• 37:06
  them as we go along here.
• 37:07
  What I think is interesting about this particular part of the discussion
• 37:11
  and people are like, man, why are we talking about 20 million cars
• 37:15
  and all this kind of stuff, because there's a juxtaposition here between.
• 37:19
  Different car communities, the Ferrari community.
• 37:22
  I want it as authentic as possible.
• 37:23
  I want the rarest one I could find with the weirdest nuance
• 37:26
  and all this kind of thing.
• 37:27
  But in the Porsche community, replica flies out of people's mouths.
• 37:31
  Like you're ordering a cheeseburger.
• 37:33
  I got a replica 2.
• 37:34
  7 RS.
• 37:35
  I got a replica of this.
• 37:36
  I got a replica of that.
• 37:37
  I got a replica of five 50.
• 37:38
  I got a replica speedster.
• 37:39
  I hear it all the time.
• 37:41
  And I go to a Porsche club event or I go to a Porsche car show, a Porsche Concord.
• 37:44
  Is it real?
• 37:45
  There's a replica and nobody snubs their nose at somebody that built.
• 37:49
  A 89, 911 speedster replica.
• 37:52
  They're like, Oh, that's cool.
• 37:53
  Where'd you find the parts?
• 37:54
  Can I get those too?
• 37:54
  I want to build one.
• 37:55
  The communities are drastically different when you compare these
• 37:59
  upper echelons between the Ferrari world and the Porsche world.
• 38:03
  Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
• 38:04
  I think in car guy terms, we're conflating replica with clone.
• 38:08
  Clone is a specific term, which is I'm taking a base model car and
• 38:13
  I'm making it the up model version.
• 38:16
  It's not a replica.
• 38:17
  Correct.
• 38:18
  And this is why the Porsche community doesn't care.
• 38:21
  Because, I don't care if you swap out the hood and some headlights and get
• 38:24
  rid of the safety bumpers and whatever.
• 38:26
  I can put that shit back on if I want to make it original again.
• 38:28
  You're not doing anything that I can't undo.
• 38:32
  Oh, okay.
• 38:33
  If I want to make it original.
• 38:34
  But it's all bolted and stuff.
• 38:36
  I mean, Singer, obviously.
• 38:37
  Oh, okay.
• 38:37
  The good.
• 38:38
  I'm glad you went there.
• 38:39
  Singer obviously is, but for your average RS clone, it's a clone.
• 38:44
  You can unscrew those parts and put the original parts back on.
• 38:47
  But there's one other weird situation that occurred in the 80s and 90s
• 38:52
  that I was a little bit more intimate being in the five cylinder Audi world.
• 38:56
  And there was a company out of the UK called Dialynx, and they
• 38:59
  would take coupes, regular Audi coupes or Audi Quattros or UR
• 39:03
  Quattros, and they would cut them.
• 39:06
  They would shorten them.
• 39:07
  They would change the rake of the windshield by cutting a 4000 roof
• 39:11
  off and putting it on top and making this Frankenstein Audi Sport Quattro.
• 39:15
  Between you, me, and the fence post, couldn't tell the difference.
• 39:18
  By the time they were all done, everything was seam welded.
• 39:20
  Everything was beautiful.
• 39:21
  They had replacement glass.
• 39:22
  They had all this stuff.
• 39:23
  It's almost to the point where it's the opposite of building a stretch limousine
• 39:27
  where you take a Cadillac, cut it in half, and then add 90 feet of additional body.
• 39:31
  They went the other way and crushed the tin can.
• 39:34
  So what category does that type of vehicle fit in?
• 39:37
  Would that fall in along with all the guys back in the fifties that would
• 39:41
  chop the tops of their vehicles?
• 39:43
  I mean, that's the same concept they were doing to short.
• 39:44
  Yeah, but they were making another vehicle from that vehicle.
• 39:48
  In this case.
• 39:49
  They're shortening it to make something the factory actually built that way.
• 39:53
  So is it a replica?
• 39:54
  Is it a clone?
• 39:54
  Is it a Frankenstein?
• 39:55
  What the heck is it?
• 39:56
  But I don't think there's any other community more interested in or guilty
• 40:01
  of cloning than the Mopar community.
• 40:04
  I had a 72 satellite that was dressed up like a roadrunner and that
• 40:07
  thing could fool a lot of people.
• 40:10
  But it was back in the early 90s.
• 40:12
  Which if you go back to the early nineties in your mind, you'll remember
• 40:15
  that clones were very, very shunned.
• 40:18
  Nobody wanted to talk about clones.
• 40:20
  What was the great writer said about the original Ferrari GTO
• 40:24
  of which they built 32 of which 3000 are still in existence today.
• 40:28
  Well, that was the way it was with the Hemi's for the longest time.
• 40:31
  You had all these guys falling out of the woodwork with their Hemi
• 40:34
  Cooters, their Hemi Coronets, their, my God, everything had a Hemi in it.
• 40:38
  They only built so many of those back in the day.
• 40:40
  And yet everyone had one.
• 40:41
  As you say, there were all these clones and I agree.
• 40:44
  They're not really replicas.
• 40:45
  They're clones.
• 40:46
  They're tribute cars.
• 40:48
  There's a fine line there too, because in some cases, yes, you can build a clone.
• 40:53
  You can build an M3 clone by doing some bolt ons.
• 40:56
  What's the difference between an E36 325 and an E36.
• 40:59
  And three, not a whole heck of a lot at the end of the day, the things that
• 41:03
  make it special are suspension and yes, the engine is slightly bigger.
• 41:06
  My point is to build a 911 RS replica and you have a base 911 T, let's say
• 41:13
  long nose car and all this kind of stuff.
• 41:16
  Yeah.
• 41:16
  It's the same basic shell.
• 41:17
  I got to source an engine.
• 41:19
  I got to source this.
• 41:19
  I got to source that.
• 41:20
  I got to do the other thing.
• 41:21
  If I build a wide body turbo quote unquote clone, that's not a clone.
• 41:25
  That's a replica.
• 41:26
  I have to physically manipulate the car to build that out.
• 41:30
  We had one of those.
• 41:31
  We bought a 70 T that looked like a 78, nine 30.
• 41:34
  And by all intents and purposes, it would have fooled everybody.
• 41:38
  But it had a 2.
• 41:39
  2 and then a 2.
• 41:40
  7 later.
• 41:41
  It never had a 3.
• 41:41
  3.
• 41:41
  So everybody who put flared 911 made a replica?
• 41:45
  I mean, cause that's the only real body difference is you put some flares on it.
• 41:49
  Come on.
• 41:50
  Flares do not a replica make.
• 41:52
  No, but you need the power plant too.
• 41:54
  You need the transmission.
• 41:55
  All that stuff was different in a 930.
• 41:57
  Yeah.
• 41:57
  If you're going to source an actual 2.
• 41:59
  7 liter.
• 41:59
  Yes.
• 42:00
  Cause a real RS.
• 42:01
  I mean, the motor costs three times as much as your 911T at that point.
• 42:05
  I think there's a fine line between a Xerox copy and a replica.
• 42:08
  Phones don't typically source a rare motor that is so much more
• 42:14
  expensive than the actual car.
• 42:16
  They would build up the motor But then again, I can build a 2.
• 42:19
  7 with the right jugs and the right stroke and all that kind of stuff out of a 2.
• 42:23
  2 or a 2.
• 42:23
  5 or another motor, right?
• 42:25
  So what makes the 2.
• 42:26
  7 RS special.
• 42:27
  It's not the cams.
• 42:28
  It's not this.
• 42:29
  It's not that.
• 42:29
  What is it?
• 42:30
  It's an appearance package and it came with a 2.
• 42:32
  7 liters.
• 42:32
  The first one to come with it.
• 42:34
  They made it so arrested really easily and that's like 75 pounds.
• 42:38
  Keep in mind here, we're splitting hair, splitting hair, splitting hair, and now
• 42:42
  we're splitting hair and over semantics.
• 42:43
  And I think that's where this.
• 42:45
  specific topic, Posers and Clones, or whatever the title of this thing was,
• 42:49
  really can get ugly because if you really think about the words Replica and Clone.
• 42:55
  Replica comes from the term Replicate, which is to copy.
• 43:00
  Clone is a much more scientific term, but again, it is a
• 43:04
  clone Of an exact duplicate.
• 43:07
  That's why in science, we say we're going to go clone a sheep
• 43:10
  or we're going to go clone a dog.
• 43:11
  But we don't say we're going to replicate them.
• 43:13
  A replicate is a mechanical copy.
• 43:15
  So we're starting to get tangled up.
• 43:17
  But when you look at the popularity of the terminology, the Plymouths that I
• 43:21
  talked about when I was in high school, I was getting kicked out of cars and
• 43:24
  coffees left, right, and center because the snobbery was so high, they didn't
• 43:28
  want some, as they called them back then they called them tribute cars.
• 43:32
  That was what they were calling them.
• 43:33
  Clone was just starting to itch its way through the terminology.
• 43:38
  And I usually had older guy telling me, we don't want tribute cars here.
• 43:42
  We don't want tribute cars here.
• 43:43
  So I had to go park on the street.
• 43:44
  Mark brought us something really important.
• 43:45
  He mentioned Singer vehicle design.
• 43:47
  What are they building?
• 43:49
  Are they building replicas?
• 43:50
  Are they building clones?
• 43:51
  Are they a custom coach builder?
• 43:52
  What are they doing other than bastardizing 964s and 993s at this point?
• 43:58
  You know, in harvesting these cars, they're not building
• 44:00
  their own car from scratch.
• 44:01
  They are creating works of art.
• 44:03
  Nobody can argue that the build quality isn't amazing on a singer,
• 44:07
  but what exactly are they doing?
• 44:09
  They've redefined what cloning or replicating or whatever verb
• 44:14
  you want to use at this point is.
• 44:16
  I don't think we can faithfully argue that Singer Vehicle Design is building any
• 44:20
  sort of a clone or replica or anything.
• 44:22
  They are doing their own coach derived situation.
• 44:26
  Look at Celine.
• 44:27
  Look at Shelby with his Mustangs.
• 44:29
  They were more modified Mustangs.
• 44:33
  Singer Vehicle Design takes it to a whole other level.
• 44:36
  And they're doing their own thing.
• 44:37
  They have bespoke interiors, they have bespoke paint, they have bespoke little
• 44:42
  air dams, uh, body kits, et cetera.
• 44:44
  So I think really it goes to more of a custom coach situation, not to throw
• 44:49
  them in the category of Klinay, but it's a much more dedicated effort.
• 44:54
  Like a Klinay was, a Klinay was the neoclassic vehicle that kind of
• 44:59
  redefined how a neoclassic should be.
• 45:01
  It wasn't a mess.
• 45:02
  It was a consorted effort of trying to put together.
• 45:06
  Yes, pieces from factory cars, but bring them together and create
• 45:10
  their own unique situation that will set you back 80, 000 in 1977.
• 45:16
  Oh, Singer, though.
• 45:17
  And similarly, we brought up Stutz, the ones that Elvis had.
• 45:20
  It's a very similar situation.
• 45:22
  You send them to Italy, Italy removes the Pontiac body, removes that
• 45:25
  interior, does all this magic, and they turn it into a very, very bespoke.
• 45:30
  Is that what we're calling magic?
• 45:31
  They were never trying to be bespoke Pontiacs or bespoke anything.
• 45:35
  Singer Vehicle Design, who I understand has been forbidden to use the word
• 45:39
  Porsche in any of their marketing.
• 45:40
  They can't call themselves That is very frowned upon.
• 45:46
  They take it to a whole other level.
• 45:47
  They will come after you, trust me.
• 45:49
  I'm well aware of it.
• 45:51
  Singer's in its own category, doing these hero cars, heritage cars, tribute cars.
• 45:57
  There's your number five, Eric.
• 45:58
  These re imaginations, right?
• 46:00
  We're seeing a lot of those these days too.
• 46:02
  A clone is not a replica.
• 46:03
  A clone is a clone.
• 46:04
  You're moving up the skew.
• 46:06
  You're moving up the sales scale.
• 46:08
  So William, back at you, what do you think about Porsche replicas?
• 46:11
  Fetchment have done right.
• 46:12
  I mean, they look great.
• 46:13
  Again, it goes back to the fact that it's, look what 2.
• 46:15
  7s go for.
• 46:16
  Who wants it?
• 46:17
  And again, do you want to drive it?
• 46:18
  I mean, guy insurance is going to be out crazy.
• 46:20
  Hey, I'll build a replica.
• 46:21
  Say, 99 percent of the people out there really won't know the difference.
• 46:25
  Right.
• 46:25
  I mean, and especially going down the road.
• 46:27
  It's like, unless you really know your stuff and it's parked sitting there and
• 46:30
  you start scrutinizing the shit out of it.
• 46:32
  You're not going to know.
• 46:33
  And who cares if you're enjoying the car?
• 46:34
  Do it.
• 46:35
  I mean, for a fraction of the cost, you have gorgeous looking car and
• 46:38
  you can make those changes to it and update it, you know, do what you do.
• 46:42
  I mean, you got the ones where you could take your mid seventies,
• 46:44
  nine, 11, make it look like the 2.
• 46:47
  7.
• 46:47
  You got the ones where you're backdating them.
• 46:48
  They say you got more modern technology in the car, but Hey,
• 46:51
  it's looking like the old car.
• 46:52
  So you have all these different avenues.
• 46:54
  You can go with it.
• 46:55
  I have no issue with it whatsoever.
• 46:56
  I mean, I think it's fantastic getting a lot of different choices out there
• 46:59
  for people and gets people working on their cars and having fun with them.
• 47:03
  I'm wondering if at some point.
• 47:04
  Going into Mark's point that the generations are going to start backing
• 47:09
  off a little bit of these original cars.
• 47:10
  Cause they're just so expensive.
• 47:11
  They're too hoity toity and let's face it.
• 47:13
  There are cars out there from the nineties and the new millennium that
• 47:16
  offer more performance, more creature comforts, blah, blah, blah, that all
• 47:20
  of a sudden a real Ferris Bueller Ferrari, or even one of the Ferris
• 47:24
  Bueller replicas, why would I want that?
• 47:26
  You know, it offers none of the creature comforts of this car.
• 47:30
  Replicas, you can add power steering, power brakes, et cetera,
• 47:33
  cup holders, air conditioning, and nobody cares because it's a replica.
• 47:37
  I guess what my point is, I'm starting to wonder if the younger generation who
• 47:41
  seems much more comfort and performance inclined than originality, will these
• 47:46
  replicas be the neoclassics, be them 356s, be them Cobras, will they start to go up?
• 47:53
  drastically, because this younger generation will start getting
• 47:56
  its disposable income, and they might want a car that's a lot
• 47:59
  more drivable than a real one.
• 48:02
  It makes 100 percent sense, and it's right in line with something I was
• 48:04
  thinking, which is to begin to split hairs on what we talked about at
• 48:08
  the beginning of the conversation, which is a factory five Cobra.
• 48:11
  Somebody mentioned it as a kit car.
• 48:14
  But in reality, it's a replica that you assemble yourself.
• 48:17
  So is it really a kit car at that point?
• 48:19
  Because the end result of it is not like a Kellmark GT, which is
• 48:23
  a kit you put on top of a beetle to make it look like a 904, right?
• 48:27
  That's a kit car or even the Caterham for that matter.
• 48:31
  You're building it like Legos.
• 48:33
  You build a factory five, you have a Cobra or you have a Daytona coupe
• 48:36
  replica when it's all said and done.
• 48:38
  So I think there's a major distinction there to your point,
• 48:40
  Don, in the modern way of thinking about a kit car, quote unquote.
• 48:45
  I'm remembering specifically one of our old subscribers from back in the day, Ken
• 48:49
  Miles was his hero when he was in college.
• 48:51
  Ken Miles was the man running around with the GT40s and the Cobras, et
• 48:55
  cetera, kicking everybody's butt.
• 48:56
  So that was his big hero.
• 48:57
  So here he is now, millionaire, self made, and he bought himself a factory
• 49:02
  five GT40 in the Gulf livery colors, the blue and the, and the orange.
• 49:07
  And I mean, that thing was gorgeous.
• 49:09
  And so I asked him, I said, you know, you're probably rich enough.
• 49:12
  You could have afforded a real golf GT 40.
• 49:15
  Did you ever think about doing that?
• 49:17
  And he goes, you know, yes, not to sound unhumble, but I could afford a real one.
• 49:20
  But he said, Don, when you drive one of those cars and you drive
• 49:24
  one of these factory fives.
• 49:26
  You see why I would never buy an original one.
• 49:29
  First off, the original ones are much more valuable.
• 49:31
  They're much harder to insure.
• 49:33
  And if you get a scratch on one of those things, you're
• 49:35
  going to go straight to hell.
• 49:36
  But with my replica, I can show up at Cars and Coffee.
• 49:39
  I can drive up and down PCH all day long.
• 49:41
  My insurance company doesn't care because it's a modern car.
• 49:45
  So right there, there's 70 years old.
• 49:50
  But you see my point.
• 49:51
  He's a 70 year old who decided, Yeah, you know what?
• 49:54
  I could have the original.
• 49:55
  But I'm going to have a lot more fun with a factory five.
• 49:58
  Maybe this is a crystal ball thing for William.
• 50:00
  Do we ever think the originals will start to lose their luster because
• 50:03
  the next generation's thinking, eh, why bother too much work?
• 50:07
  Cause a lot of it too, is you can go back, find those older cars.
• 50:09
  Like it's the historical aspect up to it.
• 50:11
  You know, the story behind it, what made them create that car, you know, and the
• 50:15
  racing history and everything like that.
• 50:16
  So it's got all those tangibles to it that really draw you to that car.
• 50:19
  But I think a lot of these newer kids coming in there, they're not
• 50:22
  so much concerned about the past.
• 50:24
  You know, they're more concerned about creature comfort.
• 50:25
  Hey, how fast can the guard go?
• 50:27
  How cool does it look?
• 50:27
  Everything like that.
• 50:28
  What do people think?
• 50:29
  I think the biggest issue you're going to have going forward though, with those
• 50:32
  older cars, who's going to work on them and fix them because as those things get
• 50:35
  older, those people start falling away.
• 50:37
  It's like, well, okay, I can afford and buy that car for whatever dollars.
• 50:40
  I live over in Ohio, but the guy to fix it's out in Southern California.
• 50:44
  So every time something goes wrong, I got to pay three grand to ship it each way.
• 50:48
  I think that's going to be the biggest drawback.
• 50:49
  Cause people would say, why do I spend all the money that you
• 50:51
  all the headache when doing that?
• 50:52
  So why not buy a recreation?
• 50:54
  That's got all the newer running gear and like that.
• 50:57
  And Hey, I can work on it myself, or I can take it up to the guy
• 50:59
  around the corner and work on it.
• 51:01
  You know, what's fun about this conversation here.
• 51:02
  We are kind of at the midpoint of it.
• 51:04
  We're all in this sort of lazy river talking about posers and kit
• 51:08
  cars originally, and now there's suddenly all these tributaries that
• 51:11
  have emerged from this particular conversation, avenues of vehicles
• 51:14
  that we haven't investigated before.
• 51:16
  The picture I have behind me is actually a 308 converted into a 288.
• 51:21
  That's the Porsche equivalent to me of taking a 911 and trying to, but
• 51:25
  even the 911s are more similar, right?
• 51:28
  It's the same shell.
• 51:29
  Maybe they didn't spray it with winterization and they did some
• 51:32
  other things to lighten it up.
• 51:33
  It's so similar, you know, we can't conflict.
• 51:35
  Clone conversation.
• 51:36
  Mark has found the thumb in our hand here, the fifth swim lane.
• 51:40
  And I want to get to this.
• 51:41
  These are the re imagined vehicles taking a modern car.
• 51:44
  They're not necessarily replicas.
• 51:46
  We're rebuilding old cars from scratch, but they're not the rest of mods like the
• 51:49
  mini and the beetle and things like that.
• 51:50
  There's a couple other things we need to touch on here.
• 51:52
  And I think.
• 51:53
  A few of these hit close to home for a lot of us, movie replicas.
• 51:57
  We're going to talk about DeLorean time machines here in a minute, Don.
• 52:00
  So get prepared.
• 52:01
  We still need to talk a little bit deeper on proper kit cars
• 52:04
  and then custom coach builders.
• 52:06
  So let's kind of dive into those topics throughout the
• 52:08
  rest of the conversation here.
• 52:09
  So let's start with the Hollywood hoser cars.
• 52:12
  Don, what are your feelings on the time machines as a DeLorean owner?
• 52:16
  Yeah, that's a loaded question in DeLorean community.
• 52:20
  That is such a lightning rod of a conversation.
• 52:24
  Me personally, I think there are too many of them out there
• 52:26
  and I think they need to stop.
• 52:27
  I do now, you know, I get it.
• 52:29
  It's a cool car.
• 52:30
  It made a great movie and I will always love it.
• 52:34
  For giving the DeLorean a sort of modern cleansing because of that movie,
• 52:39
  all of a sudden there was a whole new generation who was interested in DeLorean,
• 52:43
  who didn't think about the potential ripoff of the British government.
• 52:47
  They didn't think about all the drug crap.
• 52:49
  They didn't think about all the drama that surrounded the DeLorean
• 52:52
  motor company when it was fresh.
• 52:54
  Is that Marty?
• 52:55
  Holy, that's a hell of a tattoo.
• 52:57
  I had to show Marty in front of a DeLorean.
• 53:00
  You have a tattoo of him on your chest.
• 53:03
  I do with that.
• 53:04
  Wow.
• 53:05
  He is fun at parties, Don.
• 53:06
  Let me tell you.
• 53:08
  Oh my gosh.
• 53:09
  Wow.
• 53:10
  Okay.
• 53:11
  So on that note.
• 53:12
  Things we would have learned at Cart Week.
• 53:15
  All I'm saying.
• 53:17
  Wow.
• 53:18
  So you must be a major Back to the Future fan.
• 53:21
  I can't even begin to describe.
• 53:23
  Wow.
• 53:23
  Why is that?
• 53:24
  It was my favorite movie.
• 53:25
  It was, I think, one of the quintessential movies of the eighties
• 53:29
  and then the trilogy into the nineties.
• 53:31
  There's a lot of car movies, obviously.
• 53:33
  And I hopefully be able to touch on the 928.
• 53:35
  Tom Cruise drove into the lake.
• 53:37
  Risky business.
• 53:38
  Weird sign.
• 53:39
  Yes.
• 53:39
  That's what I was coming back to.
• 53:41
  Kind of like William was talking about.
• 53:43
  Like, first of all, who cares if it's real, if it's fake or not?
• 53:47
  Because a lot of times people can't tell anyways.
• 53:49
  Look at how many DeLoreans there are out there.
• 53:50
  People lose their minds when they see these DeLoreans with any sort of
• 53:54
  anything on them that looks like it's from the movie, let alone one by itself.
• 53:58
  The value of those is not necessarily just strictly monetary value, but
• 54:03
  rather kind of more nostalgic.
• 54:05
  And that's sometimes what takes the value up.
• 54:07
  Not necessarily like, you know, what the build quality is, if that makes sense.
• 54:11
  I think that Don's point, even though he reaps the benefit of every
• 54:14
  time machine that's made a basic DeLorean's value goes up, right?
• 54:18
  Because it's almost like losing one of the herd at that point in their own right.
• 54:22
  They're creating their own subculture, and that's fine, but we don't make
• 54:25
  the same argument about every 82 to 84 TransAm that gets turned into kit.
• 54:30
  Well, I bet.
• 54:31
  Well, how many of them did they make?
• 54:32
  ? I mean, they were pumping them out like Twinkies.
• 54:35
  The funny thing about the 82, which of course that's what Kit was, Kit was
• 54:38
  an 82 Trans Am, but of course to make that show last through 1986 when the
• 54:43
  show was canceled, they were gathering up every Trans Am they could, every
• 54:47
  third gen they could get their hands on, and turning them into 82s to
• 54:51
  act like, you know, an 82 Trans Am.
• 54:53
  The funny thing is, 1982 Firebird.
• 54:56
  All of them, the whole family, there were something like 82,
• 54:59
  000 of them built that year.
• 55:00
  For 1983, there were 53, 000 of them built.
• 55:03
  A lot less were built in 83.
• 55:05
  In 84, it dropped just a little bit more than that.
• 55:08
  According to DMV records and the insurance something or
• 55:12
  other, there are still more 83s.
• 55:15
  Registered and insured on the road, then there are 80 twos.
• 55:19
  And the theory is NBC Knight Rider destroyed so many of
• 55:23
  them that they're just gone.
• 55:26
  Case in point, their brethren to the 69, 68 and 70 Dodge Charger.
• 55:31
  There was something to the, uh.
• 55:32
  Toon of 13, 000 of them destroyed Dukes of Hazzard.
• 55:36
  Yeah.
• 55:37
  I had a hard time actually comprehending that number.
• 55:40
  13, 000 chargers were murdered for that show.
• 55:44
  I don't know about you, but yeah, it was one of the little 10 year old
• 55:46
  brats watching it, cheering it on as it was getting jumped over the river,
• 55:50
  jumped over the police car, whatever.
• 55:51
  Hollywood doesn't look at cars as historical or anything.
• 55:55
  They are props.
• 55:56
  Pure, plain, and simple.
• 55:58
  Mount Mandan.
• 55:59
  How many Fall Guy trucks were destroyed in the making of Fall?
• 56:03
  I mean, that truck was jumping something every episode.
• 56:06
  It was just like Kit.
• 56:07
  Just the amount of height they were doing on the jumps without proper,
• 56:10
  like, landing and stuff like that.
• 56:11
  It was just...
• 56:12
  Destroying chassis.
• 56:13
  And they had to modify so many of the chassis to be able to make the jump.
• 56:15
  So they didn't tumble in the air.
• 56:17
  It's insane.
• 56:18
  I mean, you were mentioning with the chargers, the amount that were destroyed.
• 56:21
  I'm the type of person being a car guy.
• 56:23
  My daughter thinks it's crazy.
• 56:24
  I'll be watching modern movies and I see a car, older car get destroyed in it.
• 56:27
  And I'll tear up a little bit sometimes and she's like,
• 56:29
  dad, what is wrong with you?
• 56:30
  I'm like, you don't understand.
• 56:32
  That hurts me to see that.
• 56:33
  They should have just used the same Mustang they used in the
• 56:36
  original gone in 60 seconds.
• 56:37
  Cause they did that whole movie with one car and that car lived
• 56:40
  on well beyond that movie too.
• 56:42
  Right?
• 56:42
  So there's something that he said about that Ford, but here we are
• 56:45
  back at replicas and Hollywood cars.
• 56:47
  We take the Nicholas cage version of gone in 60 seconds.
• 56:51
  Everybody wants that GT500 Eleanor.
• 56:53
  You know, that car was mispainted.
• 56:55
  It was painted incorrectly.
• 56:56
  You ever hear that story?
• 56:57
  You've told me, but tell it for the audience.
• 56:59
  Jeff Bruckheimer, the producer of Gone in 60 Seconds V2, wanted Eleanor to be
• 57:04
  glossy jet black with metallic silver.
• 57:08
  Racing stripes and trim on the side.
• 57:11
  And the painter misunderstood the instructions.
• 57:13
  And he painted the car that I think is called pepper gray.
• 57:17
  I think it's the actual color of the car.
• 57:18
  And he painted the whole car that pepper gray and use the jet gloss black striping.
• 57:23
  And the story is when Bruckheimer and his team showed up to see the car.
• 57:28
  Brookheimer got real quiet.
• 57:30
  He was just looking at it and everybody around him was,
• 57:33
  Oh no, this is not what Mr.
• 57:36
  B wanted.
• 57:37
  We are all going to lose our jobs, but I guess he was looking at it and he realized
• 57:42
  sometimes in mistakes, we find perfection.
• 57:45
  He decided, no, Eleanor looks absolutely exquisite.
• 57:49
  In this gray.
• 57:50
  And then he realized too, the new gone in 60 seconds was filmed in a
• 57:53
  lot of dark places at nighttime in long beach with very weird lighting.
• 57:58
  Oh, that pepper gray showed up beautifully.
• 58:01
  If you remember when they first went to meet her in the parking garage
• 58:04
  of the international towers in long beach, it was a dimly lit garage.
• 58:08
  And there she was in this glimmering gray, every car guy in the theater,
• 58:13
  like Ford or not, I think they saw that.
• 58:15
  And there's like.
• 58:16
  Ooh, mama.
• 58:17
  I mean, that is just, wow, that is something else.
• 58:19
  So yeah, that's the story behind where she got her color from.
• 58:23
  What I was always amazed with was the level of customization
• 58:26
  they did to that car.
• 58:27
  You know, the original Eleanor was a bone stock 73 Mach one in
• 58:31
  mustard yellow with black trim.
• 58:33
  It didn't get much more seventies.
• 58:35
  It didn't get much more benign than that mock one.
• 58:38
  And yet it's almost like Bruckheimer said, you know what?
• 58:41
  She is the queen of the show.
• 58:43
  She is the star of the show.
• 58:44
  We have got to make her dress up, put on some lipstick, do her hair.
• 58:48
  Bam.
• 58:48
  There it is.
• 58:49
  The GT 500.
• 58:50
  Yeah.
• 58:50
  I mean, that car has been a lightning rod too, because Halicki, his
• 58:54
  wife, basically sues everybody who tries to make an Eleanor replica.
• 58:58
  I understand she'd actually gone after private people who have taken their own.
• 59:02
  67 Mustangs and done their own kit and their own version of that Eleanor.
• 59:07
  She's actually tried going after them.
• 59:09
  Pretty scary.
• 59:10
  So talk about a lightning rod car, but yeah, an amazing car.
• 59:12
  Nonetheless, everybody wanted one.
• 59:14
  Everybody had to have one.
• 59:15
  I think still today, those cars are very popular.
• 59:17
  I want to ask you guys.
• 59:18
  Is there a movie car or Hollywood car or a TV show car that you would own?
• 59:22
  You know, one of these poser cars?
• 59:24
  The Batmobile.
• 59:25
  Which one?
• 59:27
  The original.
• 59:27
  Okay, the 60s, the Futura.
• 59:29
  There's actually a company that builds kits of those.
• 59:32
  Spike's Car Radio, he did an interview with that guy who
• 59:34
  Builds those as kit cars.
• 59:36
  And he actually got sued by somebody for some reason.
• 59:40
  And there was some big thing about it.
• 59:41
  Yeah.
• 59:42
  That's a whole subculture unto itself is those Batman kit cars.
• 59:46
  Funny about the guy that builds those, at least the one company I looked up.
• 59:49
  So they built the Batman one.
• 59:50
  They do the green Hornet as well.
• 59:52
  So they got a couple of things and it's interesting the fact they sell these kids.
• 59:55
  It's basically a fiberglass shell that he sells for you to mold onto your vehicle.
• 1:00:00
  Mark, would you own a Hollywood car?
• 1:00:01
  The one that pops up to me when the Viper launched in the nineties, they
• 1:00:05
  created a car show to go along with it.
• 1:00:07
  Yes, my man.
• 1:00:08
  They made an off road version of that.
• 1:00:10
  I feel like the whole Baja movement, like they've got the
• 1:00:13
  Baja 911 and everything else.
• 1:00:16
  Like, they made an off road, so it was, you know, whatever he told
• 1:00:19
  the Viper to go to off road mode.
• 1:00:21
  Obviously, that was a different car.
• 1:00:22
  I would own the off road Hollywood first gen Viper.
• 1:00:26
  That would be badass.
• 1:00:27
  What you're saying is you need to source a Viper body and I'll find you a
• 1:00:31
  four wheel drive chassis to sit it on.
• 1:00:33
  First of all, he's referring to the Defender, which I have referenced
• 1:00:37
  many times in this show, one of my favorite Hollywood cars of
• 1:00:39
  all time, in a reimagination.
• 1:00:42
  NBC's Viper, as Mark mentioned, which was Knight Rider.
• 1:00:45
  Sponsored by the Chrysler Corporation.
• 1:00:47
  The Defender is awesome.
• 1:00:48
  I'm right there with you, Mark.
• 1:00:49
  I would have the street version of the Defender, right?
• 1:00:51
  With the three spoke wheels and all things.
• 1:00:53
  Gotta go Baja.
• 1:00:54
  You remember there's a hovercraft mode for the Viper Defender as well.
• 1:00:58
  So there's different variants, you know, depending on what you want to do with it.
• 1:01:01
  I mean, I was like 13 years old when that show was on.
• 1:01:05
  I don't recall specifically.
• 1:01:06
  I do remember when that offered.
• 1:01:08
  I own the box set.
• 1:01:09
  I watched it during COVID and I wrote an article about it.
• 1:01:12
  So there you go.
• 1:01:12
  Oh my God.
• 1:01:13
  Don, what would you own?
• 1:01:14
  I have a guess.
• 1:01:15
  I think I know which one would you do the coyote.
• 1:01:18
  I love the coyote.
• 1:01:19
  I think the coyote is the coolest little replica or whatever you want to call it.
• 1:01:23
  I know, Eric, you're running around redefining everything.
• 1:01:25
  So I don't know what to call it anymore.
• 1:01:27
  But let's face it.
• 1:01:28
  It was a knockoff of the McLaren M8.
• 1:01:31
  I did like that car.
• 1:01:32
  Yeah, I wouldn't mind having one, especially in a modern version
• 1:01:35
  where it's not built on a VW Beetle chassis, but maybe it's built on
• 1:01:38
  something a little bit more robust.
• 1:01:40
  You know, honestly, there are so many Hollywood cars that I love.
• 1:01:44
  It's really hard to pick just one, you know, from the heart to heart
• 1:01:47
  Mercedes, as benign as that is.
• 1:01:49
  God, it just goes on and on.
• 1:01:51
  The A Team van was really cool.
• 1:01:52
  The Fall Guys truck was really cool.
• 1:01:54
  The little boy in me that is still absolutely enamored.
• 1:01:58
  There's still got to be Kit.
• 1:01:59
  The original kit.
• 1:02:00
  I mean, it's a Trans Am.
• 1:02:01
  We all know I love Trans Ams, but the original kit was just so slick.
• 1:02:07
  I mean, here was a car who wasn't obnoxious.
• 1:02:09
  It was just a basic black Trans Am.
• 1:02:11
  There was no striping.
• 1:02:12
  It was just sliding through traffic.
• 1:02:16
  And it, you know, could do 364 miles per hour.
• 1:02:19
  And I mean, that's pretty cool, you know, and it had an injector seat in it.
• 1:02:22
  I don't think it would do hover mode.
• 1:02:24
  If I could live in fantasy land, I would love to have kit.
• 1:02:26
  What was it they said in a Corvette summer about the van Nessa
• 1:02:30
  special cars for special people.
• 1:02:32
  I knew mountain man bands would like that one.
• 1:02:35
  And that's a great Hollywood van.
• 1:02:37
  And so is that Corvette and I'm sorry, I'm in the minority with that
• 1:02:40
  Corvette, but I liked it better in the gold than in that ridiculous red.
• 1:02:45
  Luke Skywalker did well.
• 1:02:46
  He did.
• 1:02:46
  That was a terrible Dotson.
• 1:02:48
  That's all I'm going to say.
• 1:02:51
  You'd think it'd at least be a Cadillac.
• 1:02:53
  Now we're going to cross that threshold into custom coach building,
• 1:02:56
  which is not a new concept by any stretch of the imagination.
• 1:02:59
  I mean, this was happening back in the days, 1920s on the Packards.
• 1:03:03
  The company LeBaron was rebodying Packards way back then.
• 1:03:06
  And many other coach builders after that, where they would take chassis or
• 1:03:10
  reimagine or do all these kinds of things.
• 1:03:12
  And so that has lasted the test of time.
• 1:03:14
  And we're, we're going to talk about some of the brands that were prolific,
• 1:03:17
  especially in the eighties and nineties here in a moment, part of the reason
• 1:03:20
  this also hits a little close to home for me is I don't even know how
• 1:03:23
  to classify one of my own vehicles.
• 1:03:25
  It was built when I was a kid by my dad and it's a Shallon 914.
• 1:03:30
  It's a wide body slant nose.
• 1:03:32
  So the question I've always had, is it a poser or was it just an opportunity
• 1:03:36
  to stuff a lot of rubber under a 914?
• 1:03:39
  I'm gonna make a nuanced statement.
• 1:03:40
  The time it was built, it was a poser mobile.
• 1:03:42
  I'm sorry, I hate to say that.
• 1:03:45
  In no way, shape, or form is that kit designed to make the 914 look like a 944.
• 1:03:51
  No way was it ever marketed to replace a 911 and say, Oh, you can buy a
• 1:03:55
  slant nose 914 to be a slant nose 911.
• 1:03:58
  It doesn't make any sense.
• 1:03:59
  I always felt like the car was sort of ambiguous and I understood
• 1:04:02
  why my dad built it because of what he wanted to do with the car
• 1:04:05
  from a performance perspective.
• 1:04:07
  It was wider than a 914 6GT replica or clone, because those you can only stuff
• 1:04:12
  a certain amount of tire under there.
• 1:04:14
  So he went for the biggest, widest kit he could find.
• 1:04:16
  And that's what I ended up with.
• 1:04:18
  So what is it?
• 1:04:18
  Is that a custom coach field then where all the original panels are gone, except
• 1:04:22
  for the doors and one of the hoods, having said that it was built for the right
• 1:04:26
  reasons, they wanted the performance.
• 1:04:28
  They wanted to do something with a platform.
• 1:04:30
  They knew they could get a lot out of, and they didn't give a
• 1:04:32
  shit what people thought about it.
• 1:04:33
  But your general car guy at the time.
• 1:04:36
  Seeing a flared fendered slant nose 914.
• 1:04:39
  So that guy bought the cheapest Porsche he could find and then spent a ton
• 1:04:43
  of money on it to make it look cool.
• 1:04:45
  You know that he didn't do that.
• 1:04:46
  He bought the best mid engine German platform he could find to
• 1:04:50
  make a fast sports car that had.
• 1:04:53
  A ton of gripping would be amazing at low speed, but that's what the
• 1:04:56
  perception not being reality in this instance, I think as it's aged,
• 1:05:01
  like a fine wine, it's just cool.
• 1:05:03
  Well, that's good.
• 1:05:04
  Cause when I show up in cars and coffee with it, when it's done, that's what
• 1:05:06
  I'm hoping for is that first they're going to go, what the hell is that?
• 1:05:10
  But on the same token, they won't turn their nose to it because at
• 1:05:13
  one point I did consider selling it.
• 1:05:15
  For $5.
• 1:05:16
  I mean, you, you can't sell that yet.
• 1:05:17
  You gotta finish it.
• 1:05:18
  Well, exactly.
• 1:05:19
  But Don, to your point about snobbery, I approached the nine 14 community and
• 1:05:23
  they're like, nobody wants that thing.
• 1:05:24
  Why would I bother with a wide body slant nose nine 14?
• 1:05:27
  And I'm like, uh.
• 1:05:28
  'cause it exists.
• 1:05:29
  I've seen other people on Instagram that have done really cool things with them
• 1:05:32
  and made modifications on top of the mods.
• 1:05:34
  They're already made.
• 1:05:35
  And you know, that's inspiring.
• 1:05:36
  That's pretty cool.
• 1:05:36
  So I fall into that small section of this particular conversation.
• 1:05:40
  You know, like I said, it hits close to home.
• 1:05:42
  What is that?
• 1:05:43
  What hell is that Don?
• 1:05:44
  That is the Cadillac Seville Opera for 1978.
• 1:05:47
  Ladies and gentlemen, this is the opulent car that you pay 25, 000 on top of the
• 1:05:54
  cost of the Seville itself to create a bespoke, it's just funny because you
• 1:05:58
  talked about, you know, shortening the car and that's exactly what these guys did.
• 1:06:02
  They took a Seville, they cut it in half.
• 1:06:04
  They turned it into a two door and literally a two seater.
• 1:06:07
  And they had this crazy Seville.
• 1:06:09
  Now, the funny thing about these.
• 1:06:10
  Those cars actually sell for a lot of money.
• 1:06:12
  I'm blown away by what those operas actually bring in.
• 1:06:15
  I saw one a while ago, this one right here, the black one I just showed you.
• 1:06:19
  It's a Schmidt.
• 1:06:20
  I think the one that I last saw was like 43, 000.
• 1:06:23
  And I thought really 43 grand for that.
• 1:06:25
  So somebody is actually paying pretty good sized money, but compared
• 1:06:28
  to some of the other cars we've talked about, or what should I buy?
• 1:06:31
  43 grand is still below our initial threshold of 50 K because most cars
• 1:06:36
  nowadays, if you're not paying 50 grand to get into them, what are you doing?
• 1:06:39
  Right.
• 1:06:40
  Yeah.
• 1:06:40
  If you want to show with something different, a shortened caddy,
• 1:06:43
  that could be kind of fun.
• 1:06:44
  Although those doors look like they're off a Chevette.
• 1:06:46
  That looks hard to get in and out of.
• 1:06:47
  I just want you to see my favorite one of the group is this one here.
• 1:06:51
  This is the Pimp Daddy Special.
• 1:06:53
  Oh yeah.
• 1:06:54
  That's got a studs front end.
• 1:06:55
  Your upper lights, your two tone paint.
• 1:06:57
  You got like Mercedes tri bar headlights.
• 1:06:59
  I don't know about you, but I definitely hear the theme song to Shaft in my head.
• 1:07:04
  I feel like going disco dancing.
• 1:07:06
  I'm going to put my collar up for that one.
• 1:07:08
  That is my collar up car right there.
• 1:07:11
  See when they bought that Cadillac, they sent it off to another company to do it.
• 1:07:14
  Certain companies would do that.
• 1:07:16
  So the manufacturer wouldn't honor a warranty, but I know with GM,
• 1:07:19
  they had agreements with like choo choo customers with one of
• 1:07:21
  the companies out of Tennessee.
• 1:07:23
  And there were a couple of other ones that worked out some agreement with
• 1:07:25
  the manufacturer where they would keep the factory warranty, choose your
• 1:07:28
  customers a lot in the trucks and the vans and stuff like that, where like
• 1:07:31
  the vans, they would extend the top to be higher, add the TVs into them.
• 1:07:35
  And then even with the trucks, crew cabs for the square bodies,
• 1:07:38
  they did a fold down back seat that became a bed and things like that.
• 1:07:41
  There were many other companies that did that, but does that
• 1:07:43
  make them kit or something?
• 1:07:45
  I think those are still in the realm of conversion van and conversion truck.
• 1:07:49
  Mm-Hmm.
• 1:07:49
  and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:07:50
  But those are cool and they're sought after.
• 1:07:52
  Yeah.
• 1:07:52
  Yeah.
• 1:07:52
  And I think honestly, your conversion van, I think your Audi in this
• 1:07:55
  Cadillac, I mean, they kind of fall in that same category 'cause
• 1:07:58
  you're severely customizing it.
• 1:08:00
  It's a company that is focusing its efforts on creating this Audi or
• 1:08:05
  creating this Cadillac or creating this.
• 1:08:07
  Pickup truck.
• 1:08:07
  It is a custom conversion.
• 1:08:09
  It's just, you know, you got a lot more flexibility with a pickup or
• 1:08:11
  a van because they're so damn big.
• 1:08:13
  You can do almost anything you want with those things.
• 1:08:15
  Again, look at Vanessa.
• 1:08:17
  You know, Vanessa was a really cool van.
• 1:08:20
  It really was, and that was right there at the kind of the zenith of the
• 1:08:23
  custom van era that that 1970s era, right around 78, it started to kind of
• 1:08:28
  peak out, and then toward the eighties it started kind of going downhill.
• 1:08:31
  But yeah, it, it is a custom situation and again.
• 1:08:35
  Does it kind of overlap with what we're talking about with those guys
• 1:08:39
  building the Dynacore Broncos, Dynacore, whatever, and Singer, who is obviously
• 1:08:44
  the apex of the entire movement.
• 1:08:46
  The company is like choo choo.
• 1:08:48
  They focus on like the creature comfort type things.
• 1:08:50
  Carroll Shebby, he focused on the performance side of things.
• 1:08:54
  So I'm sure there are other companies that focus on other aspects, but
• 1:08:57
  there were the two key ones like performance or creature comforts.
• 1:08:59
  And then enter 1984 through like the two thousands.
• 1:09:04
  And you have companies like Don has mentioned before, Trasco and Zbarro
• 1:09:08
  on the, on the Mercedes side, you've got Gemballa on the Porsche side.
• 1:09:11
  You've got all these other companies that are taking a road
• 1:09:14
  car and turning it into something.
• 1:09:16
  Else you saw all sorts of kits from all sorts of people.
• 1:09:19
  And I'm not talking bolting on Testa, Rosa flares on a Fiero.
• 1:09:23
  I'm talking about taking a nine 11 and making it look like a nine 28.
• 1:09:27
  You know, those were some of the Gambala designs that I never understood.
• 1:09:31
  But looking back now, you're kind of like, well, that's just different
• 1:09:34
  enough that it's interesting, but it's not what singer's doing.
• 1:09:38
  Singer saying, I'm going to make you the best 1972 nine 11 S.
• 1:09:43
  ever created, period, full stop.
• 1:09:45
  And then you've got Tut Hill and you got a couple other folks trying to
• 1:09:47
  do the same thing and that's fine.
• 1:09:49
  They're all kind of playing from the same sheet music.
• 1:09:51
  But these extremists, do they still exist in the modern times?
• 1:09:54
  Are we seeing the next Chisetta or the next Vector or the next whatever built
• 1:09:59
  on something else just crazy out of the box like we saw in the 80s and 90s?
• 1:10:03
  And what do we think about some of these 80s and 90s cars?
• 1:10:06
  Mark that have now become very collectible.
• 1:10:08
  So keeping thematically along, you know, this poser mobile theme of the show, I
• 1:10:13
  think there are some eighties examples.
• 1:10:15
  I struggle more with the nineties examples that may be my own 40 year old
• 1:10:19
  man prejudice for our 30 year old buyer.
• 1:10:22
  I might think some of that stuff was just cool because they didn't live that decade.
• 1:10:26
  Like I did.
• 1:10:27
  I struggle to get there.
• 1:10:28
  AMG, Gumbella, I mean...
• 1:10:30
  All of that's just cool.
• 1:10:31
  It's just cool.
• 1:10:33
  It's all low volume and...
• 1:10:34
  That's a wide body Benz, baby.
• 1:10:36
  That's awesome.
• 1:10:37
  Low volume and cool.
• 1:10:39
  Come on, the 80s.
• 1:10:40
  Wall Street, lots of cocaine, Miami.
• 1:10:42
  And Jackknife flares.
• 1:10:44
  I mean...
• 1:10:44
  The people who bought it weren't cool.
• 1:10:46
  The people who bought it were lame.
• 1:10:48
  The car was cool.
• 1:10:51
  Mark, by the way, had one of my dream cars behind him.
• 1:10:54
  I know, right?
• 1:10:54
  But for a long time, that was a poser mobile.
• 1:10:57
  The six series?
• 1:10:58
  Because it depreciated a lot, and a lot of people picked it up, and
• 1:11:01
  they didn't take care of them.
• 1:11:02
  It's not one today, but in 2000, it was.
• 1:11:05
  Mark brings up a good point.
• 1:11:06
  Is the Lincoln Mark 8, the banker's hot rod posing to be an M6 or is
• 1:11:11
  the M6 trying to be the Lincoln?
• 1:11:12
  No, no, because the M6 came out way before Mark 8.
• 1:11:17
  If you want to pit the 6 series with any Lincoln, it's got
• 1:11:20
  to go up against the Mark 7.
• 1:11:22
  And if you read the advertising from the day, Mark 7 made no bones about it.
• 1:11:26
  It had one target in mind, the 500 and the 560 SEC.
• 1:11:31
  They were going after that car hardcore.
• 1:11:33
  And when you compare the two, holy cow, I mean, it was really funny to read the
• 1:11:37
  advertising, but they were neck and neck.
• 1:11:39
  The 500, for example, you had the five liter engine.
• 1:11:41
  Well, so too did the Mark 7.
• 1:11:43
  There was something about the way the doors sealed into the roof of the Mark 7.
• 1:11:47
  The 560 had the window, the glass that sealed up into the rubber.
• 1:11:51
  There were all these comparisons.
• 1:11:53
  You had four bucket seats, you had power, everything.
• 1:11:56
  They were really, really neck and neck, but yeah, Mark VII,
• 1:12:00
  that would be your target.
• 1:12:01
  I think that's kind of why I always liked the 6 Series because obviously
• 1:12:04
  it's the grandson of chassis E3, and that would have been the 2800 CSI and the 3.
• 1:12:11
  0 and the Batmobile cars, et cetera.
• 1:12:13
  And I always looked at those cars as so inimitable.
• 1:12:17
  They were their own animal.
• 1:12:18
  There was nothing else like them on the road.
• 1:12:20
  Yes, you had Mercedes with their SE coupes, et cetera, but those
• 1:12:24
  were big, grand touring coupes.
• 1:12:26
  You didn't fantasize about cutting through a Swiss Canyon in one of those.
• 1:12:30
  But the E3, you did, they were sporty, they handled, and
• 1:12:33
  yet, they were still elegant.
• 1:12:35
  You had no problem pulling into any casino in Monaco and having
• 1:12:38
  a good time and looking the part.
• 1:12:40
  I can internalize the dichotomy.
• 1:12:42
  I am lame, I have a cool car.
• 1:12:44
  Well, just like the Benz that Don showed us, that is a symbol of the 80s.
• 1:12:48
  If you could put jackknife flares on a square bodied car with round headlights.
• 1:12:53
  That was the way to go.
• 1:12:54
  I mean, you can count them all.
• 1:12:55
  The UR Quattro, 944, the M3, the 190E, that Benz that he just
• 1:13:00
  showed us there, which is a, like a 460SEC or something like that.
• 1:13:04
  I mean, there were countless cars.
• 1:13:05
  It's like, if you could bolt on a wide body kit in the eighties.
• 1:13:08
  That was legit.
• 1:13:09
  That was awesome.
• 1:13:10
  But the question becomes, is that the tuner world or is
• 1:13:13
  that custom coach building?
• 1:13:15
  Oh, listen, pal, you want to sit there and talk about custom Mercedes.
• 1:13:20
  That's fine.
• 1:13:21
  But you're in my town now, Miami baby.
• 1:13:23
  And there ain't nothing better than a white Testerosa flying up your butt.
• 1:13:27
  You understand what I'm saying?
• 1:13:28
  So you want to come here and deal drugs.
• 1:13:30
  I'm the guy to talk to.
• 1:13:31
  Okay.
• 1:13:33
  Bring it.
• 1:13:34
  Kembala.
• 1:13:34
  AMG.
• 1:13:35
  I got them all right here.
• 1:13:36
  See, and I feel like companies like Zender and Rieger and Kamei and others
• 1:13:41
  that we've mentioned before, they sold those kits, quote unquote, so
• 1:13:45
  you could take your stock Scirocco or take your Benz or take your BMW
• 1:13:50
  and make it look like something else.
• 1:13:51
  That was sort of take it to your local body guy, or you were doing the body work,
• 1:13:54
  Bondo and everything in your driveway to realize this vision that you saw in
• 1:13:58
  a catalog, but that to me, isn't custom coach building like Gambala was doing
• 1:14:03
  and some of the other people like singers doing now, where they're taking the car
• 1:14:06
  apart and saying, this is what I think it should look like maybe the last person to
• 1:14:11
  do that sort of stuff and correct me if I'm wrong, Dan might've been chip foos.
• 1:14:15
  Where he was really taking cars apart in the 2000s and saying, this is what
• 1:14:19
  I feel like they should look like.
• 1:14:20
  Yeah, he did a lot of rendering with his drawings of what he
• 1:14:22
  imagined it should have looked like.
• 1:14:24
  But also building some of those cars, too, to say, here they are.
• 1:14:28
  Look at the rear fenders on that thing.
• 1:14:29
  Gull winged Mercedes.
• 1:14:31
  The original E Class.
• 1:14:32
  Look at the rear wing.
• 1:14:34
  You got the gull wing doors.
• 1:14:35
  This is the ultimate in, I have more money than God and I'm willing
• 1:14:38
  to spend it to prove it to you.
• 1:14:40
  They wouldn't have started with an E Class if they had more money.
• 1:14:43
  That's a pose mobile.
• 1:14:44
  Right there.
• 1:14:45
  But AMG never would have made that.
• 1:14:48
  No, AMG didn't make that.
• 1:14:49
  And actually the funny thing about those cars, they were so bent on themselves
• 1:14:54
  building the best of the best of the best.
• 1:14:55
  They were really the singer before they were singers.
• 1:14:58
  I would venture to say these are the cars that inspired the guy who founded Singer.
• 1:15:03
  Because here you got this Gullwing creation.
• 1:15:06
  And whether we're talking about the Coupe Gullwing or we're just talking about.
• 1:15:09
  Their standard issue sedan, what they would do is in the day of the 500
• 1:15:13
  SEL and the 500 SEC, they doubled it.
• 1:15:16
  They had their own badge and they called it the 1000 SEL and the 1000 SEC.
• 1:15:21
  These cars had televisions, they had phones, they had wine chillers.
• 1:15:24
  You let your wildest imagination go crazy, and that's what these
• 1:15:28
  guys would do for that car.
• 1:15:30
  And literally you're talking 150 to $200,000.
• 1:15:35
  Above the price of the standard Mercedes.
• 1:15:38
  What did a 500 SEL cost in 1985?
• 1:15:42
  We've got to be talking 60, 000.
• 1:15:45
  I would venture to say 60 to 70 grand.
• 1:15:47
  So let's say 60, and now you're going to send it off to this guy.
• 1:15:51
  Who's going to hack it up, do all this crazy stuff to it.
• 1:15:54
  And you're going to go pay him 150, 000 to 200, 000 more on top of that.
• 1:16:00
  Mercedes wanted nothing to do with them.
• 1:16:02
  When that guy got through with it, you had no warranty.
• 1:16:04
  You had nobody in the neighborhood who could fix this thing because
• 1:16:07
  it was a modern Mercedes and nobody was really working on those things.
• 1:16:10
  Why don't you take it to the dealer?
• 1:16:11
  So the dealer would fix the mechanicals if he didn't mess with that stuff.
• 1:16:15
  But all the electrical stuff, that TV you just put in there, that stereo
• 1:16:19
  system, the telephone, I mean, all that stuff rendered that car almost useless.
• 1:16:24
  I've told you, Eric, we got to have them on your show.
• 1:16:26
  That friend of mine, Sean, he restores these things.
• 1:16:29
  He has.
• 1:16:30
  16 or 17 or something like that all to himself.
• 1:16:34
  And now he's sourcing them and building them for people.
• 1:16:38
  He says that the people who love these are not only guys in their forties
• 1:16:41
  like us, but the younger kids who maybe they saw that old TV show, Miami Vice
• 1:16:46
  with dad, and they thought, man, that drug dealer's Mercedes is really cool.
• 1:16:49
  I'd love to have one of those someday.
• 1:16:50
  Well, we're in the same boat because, you know, we grew up watching Miami
• 1:16:53
  Vice and we either fell in love with the Ferrari or we fell in love with the
• 1:16:56
  Mercedes or we fell in love with both.
• 1:16:57
  And now you got guys like Sean who are out there actually
• 1:17:00
  making this dream come true.
• 1:17:02
  And now you got the 20 something year olds who are seeing the same thing.
• 1:17:05
  And it's almost like a rebirth of interest in that car.
• 1:17:09
  Mark said it's hard to kind of identify some of these maybe more.
• 1:17:13
  Custom coach builders in the later times kind of thinking past the eighties.
• 1:17:16
  And to your point, Don, they were sort of at their apex or at their Zenith
• 1:17:20
  there in the eighties, everybody seemed to be coming up with a new way
• 1:17:23
  to reimagine these vehicles, whether it was bolt on body kits or like
• 1:17:27
  that Mercedes, where it's chopped up and changed and wide bodied and goal
• 1:17:30
  winged and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:17:31
  As I was searching through this stuff, there's a name that popped up, and
• 1:17:34
  I know Dan's familiar with these.
• 1:17:36
  Based out of the Northeast, the Smith Ute conversions for the Volkswagen
• 1:17:40
  Mark IV platforms and Audis, where you can turn a beetle into a pickup truck.
• 1:17:44
  Yep.
• 1:17:44
  And it's not for everybody, but if you want something different...
• 1:17:48
  I disagree with the not pretty, because done properly, they look good.
• 1:17:52
  What planet are you on?
• 1:17:53
  He's on the mountain, man.
• 1:17:55
  Which you will, but maybe it's because I grew up riding around in an El Camino.
• 1:17:58
  I don't know.
• 1:18:00
  Well, I get the whole like Jetta wagon conversion because it sort
• 1:18:03
  of looks like the rabbit caddy.
• 1:18:05
  Like that's the one that makes the most sense.
• 1:18:07
  Then again, I've seen a couple up close and you're just sort of like, you know,
• 1:18:11
  to Jeff's point earlier about the Vader, like some of the stuff is just slightly
• 1:18:15
  off and you're like, what S 10 did they borrow this from to make the mold?
• 1:18:19
  It doesn't really follow the body lines.
• 1:18:21
  The other one that I think Don might be familiar with, And
• 1:18:24
  they're still in business today.
• 1:18:25
  It's a Dutch company called Burton.
• 1:18:27
  We actually talked about them.
• 1:18:28
  Many drive thrus ago because one of their cars came up for sale
• 1:18:32
  and RM Sotheby's auction, and they make these 1920s and 1930s inspired
• 1:18:38
  roadsters on top of all things.
• 1:18:40
  A Citroen Deux Chevaux.
• 1:18:42
  Every one of them I've seen, they're all the cream family of color.
• 1:18:46
  Tan, beige, tacky, whatever you want to call it.
• 1:18:48
  You know, it makes it a little less attractive.
• 1:18:50
  I'd love to see them in different colors.
• 1:18:51
  Are they changing the motor on that thing?
• 1:18:53
  Ah, that I don't know.
• 1:18:55
  It didn't look that hard because I just read Deux Chevaux and
• 1:18:57
  I couldn't stop laughing.
• 1:18:58
  I mean, it wasn't Deux Chevaux that got 25 horsepower?
• 1:19:01
  30?
• 1:19:02
  Who's CV?
• 1:19:03
  Two horses.
• 1:19:04
  Two horsepower.
• 1:19:05
  I guess if there's a market, there's people out there buying them, right?
• 1:19:08
  Now the one at Sotheby's sold for quite a bit, which I was kind of shocked, I
• 1:19:12
  mean, to see it in the five figures, but they don't make that many of them.
• 1:19:15
  So I guess it's unique enough there's an audience for it.
• 1:19:18
  Can't see myself driving one though, that's for sure.
• 1:19:20
  No, I, no, no.
• 1:19:22
  There's always a mark for something.
• 1:19:23
  Someone's going to buy it.
• 1:19:23
  It just depends on how many, and what are you going to do with it?
• 1:19:25
  It kind of goes back to, I think it was Dara saying, you know, about the prowlers.
• 1:19:29
  The guy was just a car person, but he just thought it was weird.
• 1:19:32
  So he bought it, probably didn't drive it hardly at all.
• 1:19:34
  Just sat there, looked at it and got rid of it a couple of years later
• 1:19:37
  because he got what he wanted out of it.
• 1:19:38
  That's kind of those things like you buy just, Hey, it's weird.
• 1:19:41
  I think it's kind of cool.
• 1:19:42
  At that moment, year or two later, like, why the hell did I buy this?
• 1:19:45
  And you get rid of it.
• 1:19:46
  Let's wrap out our thought here on kit cars a little bit.
• 1:19:49
  And I want to throw a couple at you that I was surprised were kit cars.
• 1:19:53
  And another one, many of you might have forgotten about,
• 1:19:56
  but was reviewed on Motor Week.
• 1:19:59
  So I'm going to start with that one.
• 1:20:00
  Something known as the Maxton roller skate.
• 1:20:02
  You guys remember that?
• 1:20:04
  So that was built on top of a Miata, which at the time was brand new.
• 1:20:08
  NA and NB Miata's were the hot thing then as they are today.
• 1:20:11
  So the Maxton roller skate was designed to basically be a modern Austin Healy.
• 1:20:16
  I thought those were super cool.
• 1:20:17
  And I remember John Davis talking about them and then testing
• 1:20:20
  them on the show and showing how great of a performer they were.
• 1:20:23
  I don't know how you could be disappointed with anything that was.
• 1:20:25
  built on a Miata chassis, which made me wonder why aren't there more
• 1:20:29
  kit or replicas or conversions or clones or whatever we're calling
• 1:20:33
  them built on top of Miata's.
• 1:20:35
  And the only thing that I could find was something called the Bower
• 1:20:38
  catfish based on an Miata, but there's not much else out there.
• 1:20:42
  I hate to say it's kind of weird looking, but I like the idea at the end of the day,
• 1:20:46
  another one that we've seen at track days.
• 1:20:48
  More than once.
• 1:20:49
  And it's not the Aerial Atom, which you would think is a kit car.
• 1:20:53
  Those are actually produced and you can buy and you can rent and
• 1:20:55
  all that, is the ExoMotive ExoSet.
• 1:20:58
  It's actually sold and distributed as a kit car.
• 1:21:01
  Pick your power plant, whether it's Mazda, Honda, or otherwise, and you've got this
• 1:21:05
  Aerial Atom like vehicle that you can then tool around with, make road legal,
• 1:21:10
  and it's similar to a Caterham Super 7.
• 1:21:12
  And the last one, the one that was really surprising is probably my top pick for, if
• 1:21:16
  I had to buy a pick car, which we'll do a lightning round later is the Ultima GTR.
• 1:21:21
  That was sold as a kit car.
• 1:21:23
  Don and I actually just saw one recently at car week.
• 1:21:25
  It was for sale at the Mecum auction at Monterey Motorsports Festival.
• 1:21:28
  And again, seeing that it's like street legal kind of miniature 962 LMP1
• 1:21:34
  prototype race car with an American power plant, you know, whether it's
• 1:21:37
  Chevy Buick or otherwise in the back.
• 1:21:39
  Why not?
• 1:21:40
  I think they're super cool.
• 1:21:41
  And they're actually quite affordable at less than 30, 000.
• 1:21:45
  If I remember correctly.
• 1:21:46
  I mean, granted you got a source of PowerPoint, but that's still pretty
• 1:21:48
  good for something that's basically a full blown race car, you know, how
• 1:21:51
  to set your car up and build it right with the right suspension, everything
• 1:21:54
  on it, build it up, those things are actually really fast and handle.
• 1:21:57
  Phenomenal structure itself.
• 1:21:58
  The chassis is very, very well construction and the engineering into
• 1:22:02
  it just bodes well for putting all the right parts on there and I've never
• 1:22:05
  driven one, been in one, but everything I've read about it, it's done right.
• 1:22:08
  They're phenomenal cars.
• 1:22:09
  And to your point, very inexpensive.
• 1:22:11
  Did anybody else come across any, what they thought were kind of cool kit
• 1:22:14
  cars, things that maybe people should research, dive into a little bit more.
• 1:22:17
  I mean, all of the cars that we've mentioned so far that are kits, I
• 1:22:20
  found none of them really topple the scale past maybe 40, 000, even
• 1:22:25
  the Raider, some of the other stuff, they're all very inexpensive now,
• 1:22:28
  granted, in some cases, you have to source the donor vehicle to start with.
• 1:22:32
  But how much is a Nissan 350Z these days?
• 1:22:34
  It's 20 years old.
• 1:22:35
  You have to come down to the simple fact.
• 1:22:37
  Are you going to go buy the car like we were talking about earlier?
• 1:22:39
  That's 10 million and have a museum piece that you get to look at, but you
• 1:22:43
  don't get to take out and enjoy, or are you going to buy that kid car for
• 1:22:46
  a fraction of the price and take it out and run it down them windy roads,
• 1:22:49
  let the wind blow through your hair and enjoy it for what it's meant to be.
• 1:22:53
  Cars are not supposed to be museum pieces.
• 1:22:55
  They're supposed to be driven and enjoyed.
• 1:22:57
  So that's the most important thing to me is it can be something I look
• 1:23:01
  at and don't understand at all, but if you enjoy driving it, have at it.
• 1:23:04
  There's a lot of cool cars out there.
• 1:23:05
  You can copy or replicate or clone.
• 1:23:07
  Do it.
• 1:23:08
  You know, you go back into the twenties, thirties, forties.
• 1:23:10
  There are a lot of cool things you can do.
• 1:23:11
  It's all personal choice, I guess.
• 1:23:13
  And I think they're putting it on a cheap ass chassis.
• 1:23:15
  And that's why it always started with the Beatles because it was a cheap car.
• 1:23:18
  It's a cheap thing to start with.
• 1:23:20
  The premise basis behind a kit car is to have something that
• 1:23:23
  you can build very inexpensively.
• 1:23:26
  What's inexpensive?
• 1:23:27
  I can start with, it's my base, my frame and that, my chassis.
• 1:23:30
  Okay, what can I slap on top of that?
• 1:23:32
  You know, without having to get serious about stretching the frame and doing
• 1:23:35
  anything like that, getting really nuts.
• 1:23:37
  I would say cost prohibitive in regards to what you want to be able to do.
• 1:23:40
  And you know, William, I think you just stitched up this whole episode for us.
• 1:23:44
  Realistically, if you're trying to have your fantasy car, your supercar, your
• 1:23:48
  hypercar, and you want to go out there and be carefree about somebody putting a
• 1:23:52
  dent in it or whatever, maybe a kit car is the option because they are inexpensive.
• 1:23:56
  They're built on a car that you can maintain yourself.
• 1:23:58
  Maybe it's something you can put together for yourself.
• 1:24:01
  Our initial question of, would you rather have the real one?
• 1:24:04
  Goes back to what you've been saying all along is, what do
• 1:24:06
  you want to do with this thing?
• 1:24:08
  And how much do you really want to spend at the end of the day?
• 1:24:10
  I don't know about everyone else, but the one thing, when I go to cars and coffees,
• 1:24:14
  you know, car shows and that, and I see one there, my first question though
• 1:24:17
  is, the owner says, did you build this?
• 1:24:19
  Oh yeah, I built it, like that.
• 1:24:20
  Then you have the appreciation for it, but then it says, Oh, I bought it.
• 1:24:23
  And it's kind of like, eh, all right.
• 1:24:25
  I appreciate it more if the person that has it, they're the one that built it.
• 1:24:28
  They put their blood, sweat and tears and their money and everything into it.
• 1:24:31
  And they built it how they wanted it.
• 1:24:32
  And that way, when they die, they have no one to blame but themselves.
• 1:24:36
  Exactly.
• 1:24:38
  Well on that bombshell mark, normally we would do a lightning round and
• 1:24:41
  choose from this plethora of cars that we've thrown out for our audience.
• 1:24:44
  I think in this case We're probably going to leave them with some food
• 1:24:47
  for thought some things to chew on some additional cars to look at in
• 1:24:50
  our show Notes, but from a financial perspective, why don't you take us home?
• 1:24:53
  Why don't you tell us?
• 1:24:54
  Is this a feasible route for people to go if they're not
• 1:24:57
  really willing to break the bank?
• 1:24:58
  Yeah.
• 1:24:58
  I mean, my personal take on it would be to do something that falls into the category
• 1:25:03
  of something that is just unrealistic in no way attainable for you in your
• 1:25:07
  lifetime, that's my own take on it, right?
• 1:25:09
  So if you're doing the factory five.
• 1:25:11
  Clone of the GT 40 Cooper, even a Cobra, obviously an original
• 1:25:15
  Cobra's worth of fortunes.
• 1:25:16
  So that makes sense.
• 1:25:17
  It's like, don't do a Volkswagen bug version of a nine 11 or the nine 12.
• 1:25:25
  But at the flip side of this, I would say is given electrification and, you
• 1:25:29
  know, the rate at which kids are getting driver's licenses and how few of them
• 1:25:34
  actually get them and how old they are by the time they get driver's licenses.
• 1:25:38
  And all those statistics are well published and on it's.
• 1:25:40
  completely tanked.
• 1:25:41
  Anybody that likes cars, I don't care if you're the douchiest
• 1:25:44
  Gallardo driver on the planet.
• 1:25:46
  You like cars.
• 1:25:47
  I like cars.
• 1:25:48
  We like cars together.
• 1:25:49
  Great.
• 1:25:50
  Cool.
• 1:25:50
  You can drive whatever you want.
• 1:25:52
  If it makes you happy.
• 1:25:53
  I almost think if I could put a pin on this episode, I don't think
• 1:25:57
  poser exists anymore because the car itself is under such threat
• 1:26:01
  that if you enjoy your vehicle, it makes you feel good to drive it.
• 1:26:05
  Then I like you cool.
• 1:26:07
  You have a vehicle and you enjoy driving it.
• 1:26:09
  It's a hobby You have a hobby with four tires and I have a hobby with four
• 1:26:12
  tires and I like that guy here here.
• 1:26:15
  Amen Yeah, I 100 second mark's idea there I think if you're into any cars
• 1:26:22
  whether you got it as a hand me down Or if you paid 60 grand for something
• 1:26:27
  that someone else did, we all have our opinions on stuff, but at the end of the
• 1:26:30
  day, it's all, like Mark said, part of the same love part of the same community.
• 1:26:35
  And yeah, there are niche little clubs and different things like that.
• 1:26:38
  Just like he was saying, I have respect for you.
• 1:26:41
  If you're in the game at all, not just in the car world, but I've noticed
• 1:26:44
  a lot in the motorcycle community.
• 1:26:45
  So where years ago it was like Harley guys, you just look down
• 1:26:48
  on guys that didn't ride Harley's.
• 1:26:50
  And now it's like, if you're on two wheels, come ride with us.
• 1:26:52
  It doesn't matter anymore.
• 1:26:53
  Because it's trying to keep the community of motorsports alive.
• 1:26:57
  And it's growing across the spectrum with all shapes and forms.
• 1:27:01
  Yeah.
• 1:27:01
  I chime in with everybody else here.
• 1:27:03
  If you're enjoying it, you're having fun.
• 1:27:05
  Jeff said it well, we all have our opinions.
• 1:27:07
  We tend to side with those opinions.
• 1:27:09
  Chrysler TC is the best.
• 1:27:10
  Uh, then, Hey, you know, that's, that's all you got to say right there.
• 1:27:13
  You know, Chrysler TC rules and that's the end of it.
• 1:27:16
  I'm thinking to myself, an old movie, 1985.
• 1:27:18
  485, 83, Revenge of the Nerds.
• 1:27:21
  Think about it back then, the nerds were the computer geeks and they
• 1:27:24
  were outcasts and they were morons.
• 1:27:27
  And, you know, if you wanted to be somebody while you were a football
• 1:27:30
  jock or you were a baseball star, you were something like that.
• 1:27:32
  My how times have changed because the computer guys have
• 1:27:36
  become the mainstream very much.
• 1:27:38
  So similarly in the car community, Dan said it well with
• 1:27:41
  the motorcycle community, man, if you didn't have a Harley.
• 1:27:44
  God, if you had a Japanese bike, you better just run for cover because
• 1:27:48
  that doesn't sell around here.
• 1:27:50
  Those days are gone.
• 1:27:51
  Just different generations have grown up with different, you know, we were
• 1:27:54
  exposed to the Honda generation.
• 1:27:56
  So we grew up actually admiring what Honda put out there and holy cow,
• 1:28:01
  they're putting out 145 horsepower in 1.
• 1:28:04
  5 liters.
• 1:28:05
  That's absolute insanity.
• 1:28:07
  So we began to appreciate those cars.
• 1:28:09
  Yeah, I think the poser mantra, I think it's pretty well dead now,
• 1:28:14
  but it doesn't mean we can't have fun and dress up like posers and
• 1:28:17
  don't make outcasts of ourselves.
• 1:28:19
  Right?
• 1:28:20
  So Brad, did we fulfill the agenda?
• 1:28:23
  Do you feel better about hit cars, replicas, clones, insert
• 1:28:27
  your favorite adjective here?
• 1:28:28
  Well, first I want to say, I'm going to take an opposite take.
• 1:28:31
  Then everybody here, if you are doing a kid card, you can't afford the original.
• 1:28:34
  You suck.
• 1:28:35
  I hate you.
• 1:28:36
  I don't want to be your friend.
• 1:28:37
  It's the original or nothing at all.
• 1:28:40
  Wow.
• 1:28:40
  The gauntlet thrown down.
• 1:28:42
  I mean that, that of course I'm kidding.
• 1:28:44
  No, I second everything.
• 1:28:46
  That everybody said.
• 1:28:47
  I say, though, that there are still posers, but the
• 1:28:50
  posers aren't who you think.
• 1:28:52
  The posers aren't the drivers.
• 1:28:53
  The posers are the manufacturers themselves.
• 1:28:55
  The M Sport, the S Line, the AMG Inspired, the Lexus F Sport, all that shit.
• 1:29:03
  The badge engineering that we've talked about before, and ad nauseam
• 1:29:06
  in other episodes, that's posing.
• 1:29:08
  It's the manufacturers that are enabling the posers.
• 1:29:10
  And then as far as kit cars and stuff, I'm not big on the ones.
• 1:29:14
  where you cut up another car to make it be something else, especially the old
• 1:29:20
  kit cars that are built on beetles and things like that, or the old Fierro's.
• 1:29:23
  I'm now trying to do mental math to see if I fit in a Prova Countach
• 1:29:29
  because I'm ready to buy one.
• 1:29:31
  At 20 grand, it's a bargain.
• 1:29:33
  20 grand, you source an LS motor for less than a thousand bucks,
• 1:29:36
  and then you're off to the races.
• 1:29:38
  Literally, and a car that's going to turn heads and people aren't going to know
• 1:29:41
  the difference, and that's the beauty.
• 1:29:43
  With some of this stuff.
• 1:29:44
  And if you don't stop, you don't have to answer any questions.
• 1:29:46
  I saw a kootosh today on the highway.
• 1:29:49
  It was amazing.
• 1:29:50
  You just made that kid's day.
• 1:29:52
  Yeah.
• 1:29:52
  You're all over Instagram.
• 1:29:53
  And with that one, you can drive all over and you don't have to worry about
• 1:29:57
  breaking down after like 50 miles.
• 1:29:59
  True.
• 1:30:02
  Bring your garage or collection to the next level with Don
• 1:30:05
  over at GarageStyleMagazine.
• 1:30:06
  com If you want to add a classic Ferrari or Porsche to your collection,
• 1:30:10
  reach out to William at www.
• 1:30:12
  exoticcarmarketplace.
• 1:30:14
  com You can touch base with Jeff at DarkSideSmiling on Instagram,
• 1:30:18
  and you're guaranteed to catch Mark and Mountain Man Dan on another
• 1:30:21
  upcoming episode of BreakFix.
• 1:30:23
  Thanks again to our panel for another great What Should I Buy debate.
• 1:30:26
  We often joke that we never come to a consensus on any of these
• 1:30:30
  What Should I Buy debates, but this one was extremely challenging.
• 1:30:33
  So my vote is, if you're into these, whether it's kit cars, clones,
• 1:30:37
  replicas, recreations, custom coach builds, or otherwise, I wouldn't
• 1:30:41
  turn my nose at any of them.
• 1:30:42
  Go for a drive in them, see how they Feel that experience, it might
• 1:30:46
  change your opinion about what they are compared to what they look like.
• 1:30:50
  This is an untapped part of the market that I think needs to be brought under
• 1:30:55
  the microscope a little bit more closely to investigate some of the jewels that
• 1:30:59
  are hidden out there, maybe buried in someone's garage, belong to your dad.
• 1:31:03
  been sitting around.
• 1:31:04
  You don't really know what to do with it.
• 1:31:05
  Get these kit cars out there to everybody's point and drive
• 1:31:08
  them and enjoy them for what they were intended to be cars.
• 1:31:11
  And if they turn a head or two, or they spark a conversation with the
• 1:31:14
  next cars and coffee, well, why not?
• 1:31:23
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• 1:31:27
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