Last fall, in fairly rapid succession, I brought home two cars—the FrankenThirty (my salvage-titled 1988 BMW E30 325is) and the 1969 Lotus Elan +2. Their purchases happened so quickly and so naturally that I began thinking about the way that many of us buy enthusiast cars.
If you’re the kind of person who has the means and the cojones to seek out the best possible example of a car online, click-and-buy it sight-unseen at market value, and have it shipped to your door, hats off to you. Once market appreciation does its thing and you sell it, you’ll probably come out better than those of us who bottom-feed and hand-wring about risk. I once asked a friend of mine who routinely clicks and buys mid-five-figure cars, and he said, “Some are better than you expect, some are worse. It kind of averages out.” If I had his money (and his cojones), maybe I’d shrug it off the same way.
But for many of us, there’s a triangle of circumstances that leads us to buying cars that fall into a comfort zone of price, convenience, and risk. If a car is offered at a price point that intersects with our financial reality, and is near enough that we can easily go see it and bring it home, we simply drop everything and go check it out. This is the way that I wind up buying most cars.
I refer to these as “crimes of opportunity.” The Lotus was an hour north of me in New Hampshire. I shot up there to have a look, came home, negotiated with the seller, wired the money, and returned a few days later with the trailer. The FrankenThirty was near Albany, about two and a half hours from Boston (more like four when you factor in the U-Haul auto transporter rental and drop-off). The drive was long enough that I only wanted to do it once, so I went out with the truck and trailer and did the bag-tag-and-drag thing. In both cases, I was looking for a particular model, saw one advertised at an appealing price point and at an easily drivable distance, and acted.
The risk part of the triangle is a little murkier. If a car you want isn’t within easy driving distance, the calculus becomes more challenging. Do you buy it sight-unseen? Many people do, trading off increased convenience for higher cost and higher risk. Reputable auction sites strongly advise sellers to fully disclose a car’s condition in order to minimize risk to the buyer. That risk takes several forms. If you’re having a car shipped home, the risk is that, when it arrives, you find that it’s not in the condition you thought it was—the paint is worse, the interior is shabbier, there’s rust that the seller didn’t disclose, etc. But if you’re flying out and driving the car home, the risk is more visceral—will the car break down on the drive?
I keep my eye open for a unicorn BMW E91 wagon (rear-wheel-drive, six-speed stick, sport package). One of my readers emailed me that he has such a car, a 2007 328i, and is interested in moving it along to the next owner. His price didn’t make me do the Frye-shut-up-and-take-my-money thing, but it did make me think that buying it was well inside the envelope of possibility. But the car is out West.
I got a shipping quote from a reliable guy I’ve used a few times before. It was $1700. Thinking that I could pay down the cost with a lower level of convenience, I estimated the cost of flying out and driving the car home. It turned out to be about the same. As the total purchase cost edged toward five figures, I thought, “I’d probably buy it if I saw the car, drove it, and loved it” (e.g., if I’d driven down the risk by seeing the car), but there’s no easy way to make that happen. Should I look for a reasonably priced round-trip ticket so I can fly out there prepared to either walk away from the car and get back on the plane, or buy it and eat the ticket home? Or should I pay for a pre-purchase inspection (PPI) first to reduce risk, make the assumption that I’m going to buy it, purchase a one-way, and hope that I don’t see or feel something that makes me say “no” and have to scramble for a flight home?
I’ve dipped a toe into these waters twice. Years back I bought a Mazda MPV minivan for the family. It didn’t meet its reserve on eBay, so I negotiated an off-eBay purchase with the seller. It was just down in Philadelphia, and because flights from Boston are frequent and cheap, there was no real discount on a round-trip. I bought a one-way ticket, and the seller met me at the airport. I did a lap in the car, bought it, and drove it home.
The other time, I had a car (my ’72 BMW 2002tii “Louie,” the Ran When Parked car) going into a 10-month-long display at the BMW CCA Foundation Museum in Greer, South Carolina. I planned to drive the car down, but needed to get back home somehow. “Hmmmmn,” I thought, “is there anything I can buy from this rust-free part of the country while I’m down here and drive home?”
I found a silver ’79 BMW 733i five-speed with a red leather interior that looked good in the photographs. The seller said that its main issue was that it needed an exhaust. I’ve road-tripped cars with exhaust issues before — a muffler seam that yawned open, or a flange ring or gasket that failed — and am familiar with the moment when the sound goes from throaty to Dale Earnhardt, so this didn’t seem like a deal-breaker. I erred on the side of thinking that I’d buy it while also keeping an eye on one-way tickets home, which were in the $300 range. But when I checked out the car, it turned out to have a cracked exhaust manifold. Its volume in a short test drive was deafening. Driving it a thousand miles was out of the question, due to concerns about both my hearing and damage to the car’s head. Plus, although I liked the car, I didn’t love it. So I one-way’d myself home. It was a ticket I needed to buy anyway. If there was a small incidental cost because I bought the ticket at the last moment, it was minor. It’s not as if I had to pay hundreds of dollars simply because I’d said no to the car.
The “automotive triangle” issue was thrust into the forefront of my mind recently by several conversations with a close friend. He has a similar jones for BMW rear-wheel-drive, standard-transmission wagons, though he’s always looking at E46 3 Series wagons built from 1999 through 2005. He found one, advertised by a dealer outside Chicago on Facebook Marketplace as a rust-free car, for two grand. He wanted it and was willing to put a deposit down prior to flying out, seeing the car, and completing the deal. The dealer, though, said that they don’t “hold” cars and that if he wanted it, he’d need to buy it. Further, the dealer said that Illinois state law requires a dealer sale to include registration in the buyer’s home state (this is apparently true). When loaded with Massachusetts’ registration, title, and sales tax fees, that two-grand price turned into more like $2500, not including the cost of the plane ticket out there.
My friend didn’t want to lose the car, and figured that with the low price, the risk was minimal, so he agreed. However, when he arrived, he found that the car did not have a five-speed stick; it was an automatic. The dealer apologized for the listing error, and my friend had to admit that he hadn’t looked at the photos in the ad carefully enough to see the automatic shift lever or the indicator on the dashboard. But the car car did appear to be rust-free, and he generally liked its vibe, so given the choice between driving off in what still appeared to be a well-priced, rust-free E46 RWD wagon and trying to get a refund from both the dealer and the state of Massachusetts, he opted for the former, and began thinking about a manual-transmission swap.
He made it home to Boston, but the car seemed low on power and ran rough. Unfortunately, he found that it has zero compression in one cylinder, and he feels like the dealer fleeced him. Now, like a gambler who’s in the hole and trying to double-or-nothing his way out, he’s looking for a drivable car that could donate its manual transmission and its engine. He called me last night to get my opinion about an E46 convertible in Virginia Beach for $1200. He loves the idea of driving the ‘vert through the summer and then swapping the drivetrain over the winter, but the seller says the car has an overheating issue. It wasn’t solved by a water pump and thermostat replacement, and the seller just wants it gone.
Even with close friends, one is careful not to say, “Are you freaking nuts?” I launched into my whole “triangle of price, convenience, and risk” thing, and pointed out that, while this car did have its low price going for it, it was 600 miles away. That was certainly inconvenient. The car also had a massive amount of risk—not only was it overheating, it’s still overheating, and the issue wasn’t solved by swapping the most likely culprit parts. What did he think he was going to do—fly down there, drive it home, and keep it cool with his mind?
My friend thanked me for being a sounding board and said he’d probably look for something else. “Oh, thank god,” I thought. (Actually, I thought, “I am thankful for my friend because he helps my wife see how rational I am, at least in comparison.”)
The conversation made me reflect on the risk factor of my two recent purchases. Even though the cars were both “crimes of opportunity”—close enough that I could go have a look at them, and thus not especially risky purchases—both bit me in surprising ways. As I wrote about here, I knew from running the Carfax that the FrankenThirty had a salvage title, but I didn’t expect it to be the rear two-thirds of one car and the front third of another. Nor did I expect it to be mouse-contaminated. And I didn’t expect the Lotus Elan +2 to come up “marked as stolen” when I tried to register it in Massachusetts (the issue eventually got resolved). The pie-in-the-face with the FrankenThirty was largely due to my having seen the car in the rain and my desire to buy it, get it loaded on the trailer, and be on my way. In contrast, the potential un-register-ability of the Lotus was a bolt from the blue. There was no way to know about the risk, and thus no way to assess and mitigate it in advance. The experience makes me try to be all the more vigilant about the risks that are knowable and controllable in car purchases.
May your visit to the automotive triangle be cost-effective, convenient, and low-risk. Not one where you, you know, vanish.
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Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.
Am going to big Iola Car Show in WI this week. Always a considerable chance of landing in The Triangle. Maybe that 71 Riv will be there for sale… Thanks for the Monday morning refresher Rob! Forewarned is forearmed.
I buy nothing without investigation.
Even then it is up on a rack and I go over every little thing.
I have dodged some major issues by doing this.
My present triangle is framed by a Pontiac that this August I bought new. A Corvette I purchased 3 years ago after two visits with 3 Corvette friends looking it over.
Then this year I was gifted a Porsche. It had been in the family for 38 years. I had not really done a deep dive on it before taking it home but good records showed great compression, oil pressure is as good or better than most and the transmission had been rebuilt 40k ago.
So in was nervous on the Porsche but it is proving to be a prime example.
But I have a friends buy on the web snd have issues with the cars being a mess. They also had trouble getting titles and even delivery due to brokers not paying drivers.
I want to test drive everything. I might do an auction like Hagerty’s without driving first but I’m not super comfortable.
Rob—this brings to mind the old saying we had at Boeing: you can have it done right, done fast, or done cheap. Pick any two. (This was the old Boeing, which I left in 2001, due to the company’s choice to concentrate solely on the last two.)
