Car Lust

$100,000 Challenge, Take 2: Nathan of Brainfertilizer Fame's Max Cars Edition

After reading Chris Hafner's post, I realized that if I hadn't gone so Mazda-heavy, I could have gotten some great 20- and 30-year-old cars in my garage.

I wanted to try again, with a fresh slate.  I hope you'll indulge me, and I hope you even find it entertaining.

But I've got to change the rules, slightly.  I'll still have limitations, because limitations help channel and inspire creativity.

First change: no "car currently on sale" requirement.  All cars need to be 20 to 30 years old.  Maybe 15, at most.  The point is to get cars that are old enough to be great value, but not so old as to be "classic".  The point is to catch cars near the bottom part of the trough, where the value has declined as much as possible, but not to the point where the value starts to rebound from rarity/coolness.

Second change: I have to have exactly 20 cars.  No more, no less.  The point is to see how close I can get to the $100k total without going over, for exactly 20 cars.

Third change: All car prices will be according to the NADA "clean retail" price, but here's the twist: if you can manage to find a 20-year-old car in "clean retail" condition, it won't really be ready to go.  The coolant system will be having problems, or it will consume oil as lustily as Vikings drank mead, or the paint will be starting to flake off, or a few minor rust points, or the alignment will be horribly off, or...you get the picture.  A 20-year-old car that wasn't lovingly restored to new condition is going to have some issues.  So right off the bat, I will budget $2000 per car to get it up to speed.  That might go to a tune-up, or a paint job, or a replacement door + paint, or an alignment, or a new radiator, etc.  That might be an underestimation, but we are starting with a "clean retail" example, so I think an average of $2000 will work.

That leaves me with $60,000 to get 20 cars.  So I'm looking for cars I can get for averaging just about $3000 each.

That's the rules I have.  Let's see what I come up with.

$100,000 Fantasy Garage Challenge: Chris Hafner

When Cookie the Dog's Owner proposed the $100K Fantasy Garage challenge, I was immediately intrigued. Who among us has not dreamed about which cars we'd purchase if only we had the funds available? This challenge is a license to mentally catalog our old and new favorites, weigh pros and cons, and show our tastes and brand loyalties through the creation of a carefully curated collection.

The genius in this challenge is the $100K value limit. Without that, we wouldn't have anything to keep us tied to reality. After all, why add a Mazda to your list when you could add a Maybach? Why add a CRX when you could add an FXX? But the $100K limit, combined with the requirement to include one brand new car, is almost perfect. A cool hundred grand sounds like a lot of money, but it doesn't go as far as one might imagine. I could easily concoct a scenario in which two very nice but still fairly ordinary vehicles consume the whole budget, so turning this into a true fantasy garage requires some creativity.

I chose to put my own spin on this challenge by laying out a series of tasks that I want the cars in my garage to fulfill, and then picking the cars I thought would best fill those roles. This required a lot of revision, as I shifted resources from one bucket to the next, and leaves me without some of my all-time favorites (omitting the Porsche 928, E28 BMW M5, and GMC Typhoon was pretty painful). Overall, though, I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Since in some cases I'm linking off to listings on Craigslist and eBay there's a chance that those links will be dead fairly quickly. My apologies for that, but I'll try to capture some of the pertinent details in the text so that the story doesn't suffer too much.

$100,000 Fantasy Garage Challenge: Nathan of Brainfertilizer Fame

Let's start off with the cars my family needs:

2014 Mazda6:

This very nearly was a 2010 Mazda6.  I love my current daily driver car.  It has plenty of power, plenty of room for 4 adults on long trips, handles amazingly well, looks nice, and is generally very satisfying to drive in almost any circumstance.  However, the rules state you have to have one brand new car, and after thinking long and hard, I decided my daily driver would be the best choice to select a brand new vehicle.  The main reason for the upgrade is that the brand new Mazda6 looks nice, has plenty of interior room, has plenty of power, and handles just as well as my 2010...but with the SkyActiv technology, its gas mileage improves by nearly 30%.  To have a non-hybrid family sports sedan that gets 38 mpg highway is very exciting to me, because I am not a fan of the massive batteries necessary for hybrids: the environmental impact of creating, storing, and disposing of the battery pack really bothers me, and I don't like the idea of having to spend several thousand dollars to replace the batteries to keep the car in less than 10 years.

So this will be my daily driver.

Test Drive--2013 Chrysler 300

Can a handsome young man with a fondness for light, agile cars and manual transmissions find happiness, or at least contentment, behind the wheel of a luxury battlecruiser with a slushbox? Or is the very proposition madness?

1991/1992 Ford F-150 "Nite"

While on vacation in California in July/August, 2012, I saw this pristine 20-year-old Ford F-150 Nite. It was a rare Styleside model, short wheelbase. Luckily I had the camera with me.

Obviously somebody else appreciates them, as few classic trucks look like this. It looked 100% stock and brand new... even the reflective stripes were shiny and working. And inside the rear wheel well, do we see any dirt? I don't.

Seeing this pristine beauty appear out of nowhere brought back a lot of memories and was the inspiration for this post. I mean... the truck looked as new as the one I had driven back in 1990. Its perfect, reflective black sheen and multi-hued tape stripe made it stand out even among the brand new cars.

It brought back many other memories as well.

5th Birthday Week--Anthony Cagle's Greatest Hits

I've never met Anthony Cagle, but I think we'd have a lot in common. He's into history by trade; I do it as a hobby, like having spent part of the last four years relocating a magnificent mansion named "The Hillbrook ." This not so humble abode used to stand in Westchester County, New York, and was once owned by the family of a dear late friend of mine.

But where we probably share the most commonality is our admiration (Dare I say love) of the Mustang II. I bought a new one in 1974; presently he is the keeper of a magnificent 1978 Fastback. And if he ever wants to sell it, I hope he lets me know.

So in keeping with this week's theme, I'd like to present a few of my favorite Car Lust posts by Anthony J. Cagle, and a few words about each:

1962: It was a very good year

on December 18, 2008

I take this opportunity to sing the praises of not one car, but many: those from a single year, 1962. Why this particular year? I can almost hear the thoughts of many out there wondering why this year and not some other one that has way more hot cars. What about '69 when we had Super Bees and Boss 302s? Or maybe 1964, which saw both the GTO and the Mustang debut? To these criticisms I can only respond: Hey, this is Car Lust, after all.

Car Lust Classic--Pontiac 6000STE

I have absolutely no idea what to make of the Pontiac 6000STE. At its heart, it is simply a Chevrolet Celebrity clone; which itself was an outgrowth of the much-maligned Chevrolet Citation. I have already described the misery inflicted upon my car enthusiast father by the 6000STE's A-body sibling, the Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. I can't imagine a less promising foundation for a sports sedan than that.

And yet ... and yet, there was a period of time in the early 1980s when the 6000STE was regarded by the leading automotive journalists as the finest sports sedan in America....

Click here to read the rest of the original post by Chris Hafner, and to leave your comments.

May 21 Weekly Open Thread: Pontiac Holden Is Coming BACK!

OK, I was kidding on April 1st when I said that Pontiac was coming back. But by a sheer coincidence I'm sure ( ;) ), GM is bringing the next generation Holden VF Commodore to America, just as was joked about in that article.

"Chevrolet SS" will replace the Commodore's badges, rather than using the "Pontiac G8" of yore. They're also calling it Chevy’s new NASCAR Sprint Cup car, and it will appear in the Daytona 500 next February.

Holden just announced their new export program, saying that the Commodore will return to North America in late 2013. And the best part of this news? This will be the first time in 17 years that Chevrolet has offered a rear wheel drive sedan in the US.

I suppose it could be said that Holden never really left us, witnessed by today's Camaro. But the Chevrolet SS seems more "Aussie" that the Camaro, at least to me.

So how do you feel about the upcoming return of Holden's Commodore? Do you think there are or should be more Holdens to come?

And of course, this is the place to yack about anything else that even remotely concerns the cars. The whole cars. And nothing but the cars.

--That Car Guy (Chuck)

Image Credits: The cleverly covered, camouflaged Chevrolet SS image is from Edmunds-Media.com.

Show Cars Week--The 2012 New York International Auto Show (And Some Other Stuff)

I had not been to New York City for 32 years, and things there have changed quite a bit since 1980. But the weekend of April 13-15, 2012, was full of events like the 100th Anniversary of Titanic's sinking, the 2012 New York International Auto Show was wrapping up, and I could barely get tickets to the 9/11 Memorial in time. So when the invitation and other events fell into place, plane tickets were bought and bags were packed.

The only non-stop flights from Nashville to New York I could find were on a smaller jet. I had never been on one before, and expected treatment such as the old Southern Airways ad. But I was amazed and surprised at what a smaller aircraft offered, like being able to immediately get off of the plane when we arrived at the gate, and I'll gladly fly on one again.

The Auto Show was held at the Jacob J. Javits Convention Center on the west side of Manhattan from April 6-15. Of course, the weekend was packed with many other things, like seeing where Titanic would have docked, reflecting at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, visiting the Empire State Building, meeting Rupert Jee at Hello Deli, and watching the sun rise on Manhattan.

2006+ Dodge Charger

Okay, let's get this out of the way right off the bat: As Motor Trend put it, Enough about the four doors, already. While the so-called "purists" are still bellyaching that the latest incarnation of the Dodge Charger doesn't look almost exactly like the original, Dodge has moved past that and isn't going to look back. And frankly, I don't think they need to: they've created a good-selling, profitable vehicle that has improved over time and has established itself as a really good performance sedan in a traditional American mold. 

There, I said it.

The Charger was always something of an oddity for the retro trend, eschewing the temptation to hew closely to the original "look and feel" of a classic car, and instead performing an almost complete reimagining. Hard to tell if it was a risky proposition or not at the time. The Prowler hadn't, arguably, met with resounding success, and neither had the new Ford Thunderbird. The new retro-styled Ford Mustang was only in its first year or so of sales, and the new GTO, itself a not-terribly-faithful rendition of the original was also meeting with disappointing sales. So, what to do with a classic muscle car from the past: make something of a modernized clone or go off in a totally new direction? Either way had its pitfalls.

Well, I for one think they got it right.