Importing a Gray Market Hot Hatch … Volvo?

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Grand Touring Motorsports started as a social group of car enthusiasts, but we’ve expanded into all sorts of motorsports disciplines, and we want to share our stories with you. Years of racing, wrenching, and motorsports experience brings together a top notch collection of knowledge and information through our podcast, Brake Fix.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey everybody, Crew Chief Eric here, and filling in for Brad tonight is my special guest co host, Crutch.

Mike Crutchfield: Hi everyone. Luxury, sophistication, simplicity, and above all, safety. Those are the adjectives you might use to describe our feature vehicle tonight. Mike, what are you on about? What else? Volvos. Excuse me, what?

What if I told you Volvo made a hot hatch? A Volvo only known to a few as the 480. And what’s with us tonight to unpack this mystery car are my friends Emily and Nate.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, a pleasure to meet you both. Welcome to Brake Fix, Emily and [00:01:00] Nate.

Emily Fox: Thanks for having us. Hi

Crew Chief Eric: Eric. Hi Mike. Alright, so let’s get into this.

Let’s talk about your vehicle history. Let’s drive to this Volvo. Let’s not run straight for it yet. So tell us a little bit about your vehicle history.

Nate Burton: It took quite a while for me to become kind of a car head. So in high school, my parents had an old 1985 Toyota Tercel hatchback.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m sorry.

Nate Burton: Baby

Crew Chief Eric: blue.

Nate Burton: Uh, it was a really crappy car, but it was six shift.

So I learned, learned on a six shift, which was nice. All my friends used to joke that it was, uh, the poke mobile. Cause it’s a big, like tall boxy thing. And the poke vehicles are always like these big boxy bulletproof glass things. And they would joke about that. So I had that and then one day going to high school, the, uh, the front axle broke, um, and, uh, we’re,

Crew Chief Eric: we’re very accustomed to that around here.

Nate Burton: [00:02:00] Um, and so the next car I got after that was a, oh goodness, it probably was a 1993 Ford Escort. Wagon hatchback thing, like the, the teal green Ford Escorts. It’s a very, uh, common color. If you’re familiar with that genre of the Ford Escort. So that was good car. And then going off to college and needed my own car and not just one that I was borrowing from my parents.

I ended up getting a 1990 Acura Legend. Which is pretty cool. Uh, V6 also standard transmission.

Crew Chief Eric: Those cars are very sought after these days. Cause there aren’t very many of them left.

Nate Burton: Yeah. I wish, I wish I still had it. Um, it was nice driving it home from work one day on 95 South and the timing belt went, Oh, so that, that kind of died a death.

After that, I had a really crappy Mazda protege. [00:03:00]

Crew Chief Eric: I’m starting, I’m starting to sense a theme here.

Nate Burton: So my early, my early car history was basically any car that’s like 2, 000 or less that I can just drive into the ground until it dies. And that pretty much describes a lot of them. The protege was interesting in that at some point in my ownership, this was also, again, before I got into maintenance and taking care of cars on my own.

Protege, you see a pretty good gas mileage, about 30 miles per gallon. At some point, what I know now is the water pump started failing and I started losing coolant through the water bump. And it kept getting worse and worse. And at some point I was getting 30 miles per gallon of like water that I would go out to the car, put a gallon of water in the car, drive to work, I’d have to have another jug in the trunk.

To top up to get home. And then at some point it just got so bad it was like falling out as quick as I was pouring it in. Then I had a, [00:04:00] uh, Volkswagen VR6 Passat. I think it was a 90, 95.

Crew Chief Eric: The one that has no grill.

Nate Burton: Yeah, um, it was a really cool car, but I only owned it for seven days. I, I bought it. You are all in Maryland.

So, you know, the Maryland safety inspection process, which is kind of rigorous and nitpicky.

Mike Crutchfield: No, it’s

Nate Burton: not. So, so I, I, I looked at all the nitpicky things that they were going to catch me on. I ended up, this is where I started to get a bit into cars. I ended up going to, uh, Crazy Rays when they were still called Crazy Rays.

Out in Hawkins point one. So I got some parts, was on my way home to go shower before going off to work. And I was going over the key bridge there, I guess on 695 a, uh, a waste management garbage truck, uh, on the crest of the bridge had just blown out its drive shaft and it was sitting [00:05:00] there in the middle of the road in front of me.

And I didn’t see it until I came up over the crest. And there was a car on my left and a K Rail and the water on the right. So I drove right over it, uh, and it caused the airbags to go off and it sheared part of the oil pan off and, uh, basically totaled the car. So that was fun. Um, but that’s kind of where my story with cheap cars ends because of the accident with waste management.

They were at fault. There was an insurance settlement, which gave me, I think I paid about 1400 for the Passats, and then they gave me about 3000 for the car, and then 5000 pain and suffering. So I had a decent chunk of money to get a car, and here’s where I start getting into weird Swedish stuff, aside from like Swedish metal.

You bought a Saab. I bought a Saab. God, how did I

Crew Chief Brad: know? [00:06:00]

Nate Burton: I grew up in New England, uh, in New Hampshire. My parents, uh, were still in New Hampshire at the time I was, I was down here in Maryland. So Saabs were very, were very popular up in New England. I heard you get your driver’s license and keys to a Saab in the same day.

I think they also do a moose test or something. They like crash a, crash a Saab into a moose or something. And as Crutch mentioned, Swedish and Volvos are notoriously safety minded. So yeah, I got a Saab 9 5. Unfortunately it was GM era. It was a 2003 Saab 9 5 ARC. So it was the V6 and it was, it was a turbo, but it was like super underpowered.

Low boost. It was a giant like beast of a, I think old GM engine that they threw in there that had no, no room in the engine bay. That car, I got it with like 100, 000 miles on it. It, it lasted pretty well. Um, I [00:07:00] put like another hundred thousand on it, but it always had like weird electronic issues. Like it wouldn’t want to start up every once in a while.

One point I hit a deer in it being a sob. It survived the deer hit pretty well, but there, there must’ve been like a hairline crack in the radiator that the insurance company never caught when they, they, they replaced like the headlight and things.

Crew Chief Eric: So you were back to a gallon of water every day. So you were used to this.

Nate Burton: Yeah. So I had a friend who was more interested in cars and, uh, had more history than I had, and he and I talked and we’re like, yeah, we should try to fix it. Let’s try to replace the radiator. Which, on a normal car, replacing a radiator is pretty simple. On this Saab, it was a nightmare. The front grille, uh, area has this big metal lip that comes up over it.

And the, the radiator’s tucked way up under there. And then there’s the intake manifold, and like some turbo pipes and stuff all in the way. So you have to like [00:08:00] disassemble half of the front of the engine to be able to get the radiator to be able to pull it towards the engine and up and out. It was, it was a disaster.

It took two days, but I did, I did get it done. That was interesting. Um, and that, that was kind of my real first foray into doing anything other than like an oil change, uh, or, or brakes on a car.

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s pause there as Emily has been patiently waiting, and I hear that you have a history, uh, your family history of being petrolheads.

So let’s, let’s talk about that and unpack a little bit.

Emily Fox: Oh, geez. You’ve been talking to my mom way too much.

Mike Crutchfield: Yes, I have.

Emily Fox: So my parents are both retired Navy and they are very much into muscle cars. So I’ve been around muscle cars for a while. Um, my mom loves them. My dad loves them. Like American muscle has been like what I was.

kind of born and raised with, which is really strange. So my very first car was a 96 Isuzu Rodeo and it was [00:09:00] black and it was lifted and had mudding tires on it. It was, It was a very redneck country, which was fabulous. I mean, like if you come from an American muscle car family, you have to have redneck country cars as well, but I loved it.

It was a wonderful car. It was a stick shift. So I learned how to drive stick. I actually learned how to drive stick in my mom’s. Little tiny blue Nissan truck. And I still remember her yelling at me, don’t squish the shampoo bottle when you shift because we had just come back from the hair salon. So I loved that car.

I was not working on cars myself at that time. I still remember my dad writing in like paint pen on the battery like make sure you’re putting water in the battery so it runs and like this is the positive and this is the negative. I also changed the spark plugs on that, like myself once, that was an accomplishment for me.

I did take it to a place that does oil changes. And being really young and very naive at the time, they were like, Oh, well, you have to change your [00:10:00] transmission fluid. We have to change all this stuff. I’m like, okay. Cause I just had gotten the car. I didn’t know that much about it. They ended up draining all of the oil out of the engine and not putting it back in.

So I was on my way to college on 50 headed to two. Cause I was going to Anne Arundel community college at the time and the entire engine decided to weld itself together on the bridge during rush hour traffic. And then, After that ensued like a four week battle over my poor rodeo about who’s going to get to do work on it because I had it towed to my shop and then that the oil place decided to have it towed overnight to theirs.

And I had it towed back and we went back and forth for a while. Eventually I got a new clutch, I got a new transmission. I got a lot of new stuff and it worked out really great. And then I made a really dumb decision to trade it in. So my significant other at the time could get a new car. And then I inherited my parents Mitsubishi Diamante, [00:11:00] which was a 2001, which are lovely cars, unless you ever have to change the brakes or the rotors on them.

And if you do, you have to do it every six months because they’re crap and it’s very expensive. So I eventually got rid of that car because it was just too much. The value of the car wasn’t in it for every time I had to get new brakes and new rotors. After that, I borrowed a car from someone. It was a horrible little tiny white car, but it drove.

I actually happened to take it to work one day when my house had flooded, so I saved the car from a flood. After that, I got a 2003 Volkswagen Passat, which at the time I didn’t know had significant electrical failures.

Mike Crutchfield: It’s German.

Emily Fox: Remember, young, naive, I’m still kind of young and naive with cars.

Mike Crutchfield: Well, you’re talking to people that the three of us own Volkswagens.

So [00:12:00] we know the Germans have electrical problems. We just don’t.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s a given if the check engine light is not on, there is a problem. It’s

Crew Chief Brad: burned out.

Emily Fox: Well, I took it to a German mechanic who was like, You have a problem with your ECU. It needs to be replaced, but it might not be that. It might be this other thing.

And I’m like, well, I don’t have that kind of money right now. I’ll just get a new car. And as I was on my way to go get the new car in Virginia that I already had a loan for, it was just for this car. The entire power on the vehicle failed on 4. 95 and I was able to get it off onto an exit ramp and it was like 95 degrees outside and I couldn’t get the windows to go down.

It was a very bad experience, so I had to get my parents to get a vehicle, tow that one to a junkyard, get rid of the title, and then figure out how to go buy the car that I was supposed to get. So I ended up getting a 2016 Hyundai Accent because it was affordable, it was [00:13:00] super cheap. And it had a undisclosed front end collision,

Mike Crutchfield: which I’m pretty sure my, my current facade has the same.

Cause there’s overspray all over the place in the front end of that car.

Emily Fox: Well, so it wasn’t the overspray that gave it away. It was the inside wheel liner was missing. So I was like, Oh, that’s a little weird. And then I went to replace it. And then I found a tire rub. And then over time I’ve started to notice other parts.

Problems we actually just did the brakes and the rotors on it and find out the rotors were warped not horribly But bad enough that it would you could feel it pulse when you were braking So I still drive that car Because I was gonna

Crew Chief Eric: say that the indicator for me would have been the white bumper and hood and the rest of the car was fuchsia But you know, hey, whatever

Emily Fox: No, it’s all the same color.

They did a good job painting it. But that’s, that’s kind of my car history. I still like American muscle cars. My parents have a GTO, and my dad used to have a Catalina. Um, I took the Catalina to prom, actually, when I was in high school, [00:14:00] so. A

Nate Burton: convertible

Emily Fox: Catalina. A convertible Catalina. That thing drove like a glorious boat.

It was wonderful.

Crew Chief Eric: But what our listeners may not know is you’re a blogger for Garage Riot, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. So you, I think you’re being a little bit modest in terms of your car aficionado status. I think you’re more of like a secret clandestine car enthusiast, right? So Emily, we mentioned earlier that you blog for Garage Riot and we recently established a partnership with them.

And so in my understanding, you’ve been with them for a very long time and I hear your member number is quite low. So I wanted to get a perspective from you on what it’s like, what it’s about and why you joined.

Emily Fox: Yeah, so I actually joined GarageRide, it was our first time at the Vintage. They usually have like a pre Vintage party, and they, it was Donovan and one of the other guys, Andy.

They had a booth, and nobody was going up to them, and I had just come off of a major recruiting trip. I was [00:15:00] still very friendly and outgoing with people. I approached them and they were like, we’re giving away stuff. I’m like, Oh, you mean you’re just going to give it to me? No, you have to enter and join online.

So I ended up joining online. So I was trying to get into cars at the time. We were still dating and like, I started hanging out in, um, Garage Riot. It was a small social media platform for car enthusiasts. And there was like a couple of members. I think there were less than 20 at the time that I had joined.

It was nice because I got to start reading articles about cars. Like I started learning about cars, learning about Formula One racing. There was a lot of cultural aspects to it. of car ownership. Some of the stuff that I’ve talked to Donovan and the rest of the folks on the channel about is like women in cars and like that aspect of the industry.

And what does that look like? And so they, they’re good at pulling in articles. There’s quite a few female members within Garage Riot that talk about their experience with cars and some of the stuff that they do. Some of them [00:16:00] work on them. Some of them just like staring at them and driving them, which is totally cool as well.

But it’s a community of car enthusiasts, people that either. Just buy cars and take them to shops and get the fixed or do the work themselves. And think of it like not necessarily Facebook for car people, but more like the Facebook and any other social media platform for them. And they’ve got a presence on a couple of other sites, but they allow, uh, members to write articles and share them, have photo galleries, engaging discussions.

There’s vendors on there as well. So if you’re looking for coupons, they have a nice hookup with vendors. I’ll post funds for a couple of those sites. It’s a good community. Uh, the folks on there are very friendly. They’re very open. They ask questions, they’re engaging. We post bad videos of car crashes.

It’s very welcoming. They’re doing a lot of changes to the site. So I had talked to Donovan and company, uh, about a year and a half ago. It feels like about a potential new project that they could embark on. So I’m hoping. [00:17:00] Sometimes soon that they will have it. That should make, uh, managing your mods to your cars a lot easier, but they’ve got a bunch of coming changes and it’s.

It’s a great community to be a part of. Very

Crew Chief Eric: cool. And we’ve enjoyed the time that we’ve been spending with the team from Garage Riot. So we’re looking forward to expanding that partnership and doing some crossover episodes with them as well. So that’s also a discussion, but I think we’ve now gotten to the point where we need to talk about this mystery Volvo that, you know, two people on this planet know about, and we’re talking to them right now.

So how do we get to this Volvo 480? When did this happen and how did it happen and why? Why? Um,

Emily Fox: well, I’ll start. I have the luxury of working in a place that allows me to do travel and learn about new technology that’s going on. So I had the opportunity to go to a conference overseas and he decided to.

Tag along and go explore the Swedish countryside while I was in Denmark. Let’s be fair. He had spent [00:18:00] probably about two months before this trip, researching Volvo for eighties and reminding me every single day, like I’ve always wanted a Volvo. Wait,

Crew Chief Eric: wait. So let’s unpack that. Yeah. How did you find the thing in the first place?

Because, I mean, when Crutch brought it to my attention, I was like, Wait, what? Excuse me? It’s a hatchback? I mean, you think hatchback Volvo, and you’re thinking, You know, C 30. Right? And that’s pretty modern, which they kind of style it after a a couple of Italian cars. That’s the front end of the S 40, stuff like that.

There’s certain Volvos that people know. You know the shit Brown 800 series from the eighties, you know, diesel two forties, you know, those kinds of things. Turbo. Turbo bricks. Yeah. The eight 50 TUR turbo. Turbo bricks. Yeah. The turbo bricks. The eight 50 sedans. The V seventies XC nineties. You know, everybody knows these cars.

And then obviously if you’re an old schooler like I am and you like classic cars. The P 1800 is like the car, it is the Volvo, right? And I happen to be a fan of the C 70 and there’s a whole backstory with Audi on that one, but we’ll save that [00:19:00] for another time. But the four 80, it’s not something that you go, you know, when you’re talking about cars with your friends over a beer, you go, Hey, the four, what?

It’s not a car that comes up in conversation. So how do we get there?

Nate Burton: So, uh, so certainly I’m kind of a quirky person. I mean, I’ve got, I’ve got no, no. No drains and things like that. So I’ve, I’ve always had somewhat quirky tastes to rewind a little bit. After my horrible experience working on a Saab, I was interested in, in working more on cars.

So I’m like, I need a fun car to, to, to learn on my requirements where it needed to be cheap. Like under a thousand bucks. ’cause I didn’t have much money. It needed to be 20 years old or older. So it would be exempt from like Maryland safety and inspection stuff. Uh, so it could qualify as a historic car and it needed to be kind of simple.

So no, no, OBD two, no computers, none of that. So I actually ended up finding a Volvo, Amazon for 750 bucks in Catonsville that didn’t [00:20:00] run, that I bought. And then, uh, got trailered to my house.

Emily Fox: We still have it.

Nate Burton: And has it ever run? It has run. Well, the engine has run.

Emily Fox: It has not moved. It

Nate Burton: has moved on its own power at some, at one point.

But it did not stop on its own power. And then that’s where I got stuck. Cause like, as I dove into the brakes, I found a bunch of rust and then the rear brakes were drum brakes and trying to pop the rear drum brake off when I popped it off, it cracked the hub and it was just one thing after another. And like, they don’t sell parts for some of these things.

So like finding replacement parts became. Problematic. And so instead of replacing the drum, I found a whole nother rear axle, but that’s a, that’s a whole nother story, but getting into the old Volvo Amazons, I started getting that appreciation for cars like the P1800, because I came across those after I got the Volvo, Volvo Amazon.

Um, and was researching more of the history of Volvo’s around that time. I was actually on a work trip in Germany at one point, and [00:21:00] I was walking around the town and came across it, a white 480 in Germany there, and I’m like, Oh, that’s a really cool looking 80s style, like straight lines and everything.

And I remembered it at that point in time. And when Emily and I were going to Denmark and I’m like, okay, well, I should look for cool cars in the area. While, while I’m in Denmark on vacation,

Emily Fox: there was no cool cars. It was, I should look for a Volvo for 80 while we’re on vacation, but wait, let me look at it before we go on vacation.

It was

Nate Burton: always in the back of my mind as a cool car that was never sold in the US.

Emily Fox: Slightly, slightly obsessed. Only, only a little. What do you think about this one, honey? Does this look good? What about this one? I don’t know. I still like this one. That was almost every day for two months. There

Crew Chief Eric: had to have been a conversation in there that goes, Ooh, look, it’s rare in this color.

Emily Fox: No, no, the rarity was not a thing. It was about whether or not the. Finish was good. How the [00:22:00] interior look, did it have the original parts on it? Um, was the interior 1980s enough? I think we had that conversation as well. Do they have

Mike Crutchfield: like pastel stripes in the seats on some of them?

Nate Burton: Yeah, mine has like, it’s, it’s like a velour cloth interior.

It reminds you of a Greyhound

Crew Chief Eric: bus. With like rainbow, rainbow like stripes.

Emily Fox: Greyhound bus. You

Crew Chief Eric: know, you just, you just put a thought in my head. You know, when you say, is it eighties enough? I mean, you went all the way to Denmark to find this car when you could have probably gone down to a used car lot in B.

C. and picked yourself up an IROC Camaro, which screams 1984, right? He has the wrong hair.

Nate Burton: So unlike Emily, I don’t have any sort of love for American muscle cars. My parents were not car heads, so I didn’t get anything from, I didn’t inherit any of that from them. I’ve always just had, like, European cars.

Mike Crutchfield: And 80s Aeroth is not a muscle car. It’s a Malaysia Aeroth. [00:23:00] It’s not a muscle car. It’s

Nate Burton: just, it’s

Crew Chief Eric: just a car.

Nate Burton: I guess maybe the clarification

Crew Chief Eric: is I’ve never really liked American cars. All right. This one’s special too. So for our listeners out there, here we are, picture yourself. Denmark 2000 something, right?

I feel 18. I feel like we’re having a golden girls moment here, but what people don’t realize Volvo has changed hands over the years, right? It’s original ownership being built based in Sweden, et cetera. Ford bought them. Now they’re on by Tata. They’ve changed hands a couple of times in between there, but a lot of cars were built in Sweden for the general EU market.

Except for the 480, which was built in Holland and is comprised of a lot of French parts, which has its own issues and in its own right. So here we are, we’re lusting after this 480. You’re in Denmark and black is best, which I’ve, I’ve seen pictures of this car. So how do you get it back?

Nate Burton: So I have done a lot of research.

I found one online looking at all the European [00:24:00] car sites. And I arranged to meet this guy who was selling it. He owned a, a small little classic car shop in Sweden. So it was about two hours away from Denmark. So she went off to her conference in the morning. I get on a train. I go up to the Across the water and go to a small little town up there, then have to get on a bus to get to the car shop and then have to walk about half a mile, but eventually get there.

And this guy’s got this really eclectic. Collection of old European cars. He’s got an old Mercedes Benz. He’s got a Renault, like four CV. He’s got a Morris or an Austin minor 1100 or something like that. He’s got an old BMW and then he’s got this Volvo 480 turbo. He didn’t speak very much English, but he had a friend who did.

Uh, so he called his friend over. His friend drove over and then his friend and I got in the car, went for a test drive, drove it around for uh, 20 minutes or so, brought it [00:25:00] back. He had a lift in his shop, so I was able to actually get it up on a lift to take a look at the underside of the car, which was nice.

Check out the quality of the

Crew Chief Eric: condition of rust and things like that. Are those bodies galvanized? Are you, are you have to worry about rust a lot on those? I, I think so. I

Nate Burton: think I need to worry about rust. Okay. Especially being a Swedish car and, and having snow and stuff up there. It checked out and the, the price was pretty good.

It was about, it was only about 4, 000 American, uh, after, after the You are breaking that budget, aren’t you? But there was a few problems. So I was there in May of 2018. Yeah. In Sweden, yet the car was produced

Emily Fox: in

Nate Burton: November of 1993. And so it wasn’t yet 25 years old to be able to be imported based on the 25 year D O T import loss.

Crew Chief Eric: And that’s at the tail end of the four eighties production run. If I remember [00:26:00] correctly,

Nate Burton: so this was manufactured November, 1993, I was there in May. So it wasn’t 25 years old until November. Until November. So

Crew Chief Eric: billed in 93. Was it sold as a 94?

Nate Burton: No, it was sold as a 93. Okay. But the problem is the DOT laws for the 25 year rule are based on the production date, not the model year.

So I agreed to buy it, and thankfully, uh, the, the seller said he could just hold onto it for, for six months. So I agreed to buy it, uh, we signed a contract, I wired him the money through a cool app called TransferWise, which does kind of foreign currency conversion and easy money transfers.

Emily Fox: And then we came home and had to figure out how to get in here.

And then I had

Nate Burton: six months to try to figure out how the hell am I going to get a car that I bought in Sweden to the U. S. because I’ve never done that before. And like none of this process is really all that well documented anywhere.

Emily Fox: We spent probably like four months researching like vehicle import [00:27:00] services.

We got to a point where we were talking about, well, maybe we can buy another car and put them both in a container and have, have the entire container come over, how many cars can we fit in a container to bring it over to get the most value

Crew Chief Eric: when you say cars, you mean another four 80 for spare parts.

That was actually in my mind because

Nate Burton: like

Emily Fox: getting,

Nate Burton: getting parts is awful. And like, it’d be nice to have, like, a parts car I could just steal off of if I needed it.

Emily Fox: Or my own, but okay.

Mike Crutchfield: No, no.

Nate Burton: We’ll get to that, though. So it would be nice to have one to, like, keep. Original and period. Correct. And then one to like

Emily Fox: play with

Nate Burton: modify and play with,

Emily Fox: but so we spent like four months trying to find places and the quotes that we were getting were ridiculously astronomical and he’s a part of, and I think I’m a part of the group now, um, uh, BMW group on Facebook, right?

It was BMW and

Nate Burton: it was the vintage.

Emily Fox: Yeah. The vintage. Um, and he just [00:28:00] decided to push in the question, how do I get it to the state? And like, what were all the responses? It was like one person. This is the person that you go to.

Nate Burton: Like half a dozen or more people all replied with the same person. So they’ve all, they’ve all used this guy in the past.

Hans Gruber. Yeah. We know a guy. It was, it was essentially that we know a guy, everybody knew a guy. They’ve all in the BMW community used him. Um, well known in, uh, importing like E, uh, E28s. And things like that. And, uh, so I contacted that guy and he seemed, uh, really reasonable to work with. Uh, it was a little touch and go shady at the beginning.

It was

Emily Fox: shady the whole way. It was super shady because like between contacting him and like occasionally hearing back from him, there was no conversation of costs. We were just moving full on full steam ahead with getting this car. No conversation about costs.

Nate Burton: Well, I, I brought up costs in every [00:29:00] single interaction with him.

It’s just, he never answered those questions. You are in good Hans with Hans, right? But like, he’s like, yeah, I can do that. And like, he sent a guy with a tow truck all the way. So this guy, this importer base in Netherlands, the car is out in Sweden. He sent a guy with a tow truck all the way out to Sweden to pick up the car on my behalf.

To tow truck it like a thousand kilometers back to the Netherlands. The battery was dead when they got it. He replaced the battery for me. He did all the cleaning and everything you need to do to ship a car.

Emily Fox: Sent pictures of the whole thing.

Nate Burton: Sent pictures of all the stuff. Right, right before I was about to get on a ship he emailed me the bill which was Thankfully, very reasonable.

I was, I was worried because up to that point he had gone all the way to get my car. He had the car in his possession. He had all the paperwork about the car.

Emily Fox: We were starting to worry whether or not there would be white powder in the vehicle when we got it out of port

Nate Burton: or if he would try to hold the car [00:30:00] ransom.

Yeah. Um, no, he was completely professional at the end. Very reasonable in terms of costs. And then, uh, uh, he, he put it on a boat in the Netherlands. It shipped to the Baltimore port. I think it shipped at the end of November or beginning of December of 2018. And it showed up like the day before new year’s took about a month.

When I got the actual notification from the shipping company in the U S that it was ready for pickup,

Crew Chief Eric: then you’re faced with another challenge. So you’ve got this car now in the port of Baltimore, and it’s a car that won’t be in Maryland’s DMV database. Because it was not a car that was built nor manufactured for the U S.

So where do you go from here? I’m birdie.

Emily Fox: Like Nate said, the process for bringing in cars like this are, is very much undocumented, not really much of anywhere. And there, even when you go through, like we got it to the port, there’s no documentation for how you get it out of port. Really. You kind of have to like call around and ask questions.

Crew Chief Eric: So there’s another guy that knows a guy. Yeah.

Nate Burton: Yeah. I mean, another guy that was, that was [00:31:00] interesting. To get it off of port, you can’t just drive on there with a normal tow truck or, uh, with a trailer or anything like that. Now, in my benefit, I did have a, uh, a CAT card being a former government employee.

So I, I was able to get on base with my CAT card. Otherwise you need to be escorted while you’re on the port grounds. Otherwise, you need to be escorted by somebody with a TWIC card, a Transport Worker Identification Card. Uh, normal civilians, normal people can’t just drive onto the port by themselves.

They have to be escorted, except in my case, uh, having a government ID. The shipping company just said, go to trailer number whatever. And so I, I find that trailer on the, on the port property, I drive up there, apparently I was supposed to have been wearing like a high vis vest because they have all these signs that say you must wear a high vis vest and I wasn’t.

Your hair

Mike Crutchfield: wasn’t enough?

Nate Burton: Maybe that’s how I got away with it, I don’t know. But I went up there, I had, the [00:32:00] shipper had emailed me copies of the import certification and some of those forms that were necessary. I showed them to the folks at the trailer and they said, give me five minutes, I’ll have somebody drive it out.

And then they drove the car out of their, uh, of their lots. And, and then I had the car, but then I needed to get the car home, uh, cause I can’t just drive it cause it’s got no plates or anything like that. And not just any tow truck driver can just drive onto the, onto the port property and, and tow it home.

So I needed somebody with a TWIC license who was also a tow driver. Thankfully, one of the, uh, companies that I called had somebody who didn’t work for them. Who was a friend of theirs who had a twit card who happened to have a trailer. So that guy eventually showed up like an hour later.

Emily Fox: We got it loaded and it came home and we drove it down the driveway and it sat for what almost a month, two weeks to a month before we, we got the

Nate Burton: paper.

No, I, I had the paperwork right away. I think like the next day [00:33:00] or later that week we went to the MVA.

Emily Fox: So later that week or the next day comment is we had to spend several hours translating Swedish to English and finding the right parts of the form that Maryland would care about because you can’t just go to the NBA like you said with this car that’s not going to be in their records.

You have to, you basically have to do their job for them and just make it as easy as possible so they could just like type in or punch in the right information. So we,

Nate Burton: it was certainly like government bureaucracy at its finest. Um, so leading up to all this, we had done a lot of research about the process.

So I felt like I knew the process fairly well about what the steps were and what I needed to do. The Maryland import process says that if you have a title or registration. That’s in another foreign language. Oh yeah. That you need to have it trans. You can’t just translate it on your own. Yeah. You need to have it translated

Emily Fox: by the embassy.

By an

Nate Burton: embassy from [00:34:00] the country of origin. So I call the Swedish Embassy in DC . I’m like, Hey, I have a car title that’s from Sweden that I would like you toran, uh, translate for me. And like on official, like embassy letterhead or whatever. Is they like, it needed to be official from the embassy and they’re like, no, we don’t do that.

Call somebody else. We don’t, we don’t do that. So I was stuck with, okay, what the heck? Maryland law says you got to do this. And then the embassy says, no, they don’t do that. So we essentially did our best. We went to Google translate, looked at all the fields and said, oh, that’s, that’s odometer. That’s like make and model.

And we kind of like translated it ourselves on a separate document.

Emily Fox: To be clear, we both have, like, some exposure to foreign languages, so, like, it was slightly easier in that we, we can understand based off of other languages we know what they were getting at, but it was still painful. We’re talking about, like, Small text fields [00:35:00] with mobile phones trying to scan and figure out what it’s actually saying.

But eventually we got it, and he had all the paperwork, and he went to the MBA, and you were there, what, almost two hours?

Nate Burton: Two or three hours. Two or

Emily Fox: three hours walking through the person at the desk. This is where I need you to put this in your database, and this is the next form that you need to fill out, and I put them in order for you.

Nate Burton: The wait time wasn’t three hours of telling them that it was the normal, like two and a half hour wait at the MBA. Plus 30 minutes of doing the actual thing. But of course they don’t get this often. They don’t get somebody who walks in with a weird Volvo with a weird title that’s in Swedish.

Mike Crutchfield: But they have a desk devoted to it.

I’ve been to the Lombardi MBA. I’ve seen the, the, the. The gray market title desk that’s like off in the corner. Yeah, but he

Crew Chief Eric: had all the boxes checked. Swedish. Imported. Historic tags. That haircut. I mean, it was just like, they didn’t know what to [00:36:00] do with them.

Nate Burton: So I think because I went in there kind of knowledgeable of the process, kind of like determined and sure of myself, I really felt like I knew way more about the Maryland import process than the poor lady behind the counter did because she kept telling me like, Oh, well, we.

Uh, we need a title and in my case, I didn’t actually have a title because Sweden doesn’t have titles. They just have registration certificates. And so there’s somewhere in the Maryland policies that says if you have a foreign vehicle and it doesn’t have a title Then you need registration and something else and so or bill of sale and registration certificate or something like that So I had those I knew the law I was able to explain to her what she needed to do and we were able to eventually get through it all.

And she, she didn’t trip up on the, uh, not having a official translation from the Swedish embassy thing. So she was very patient with me walking through [00:37:00] my Google translated version of the registration certificate.

Crew Chief Eric: Did you also find it a challenge to get this card insured? So are you going through normal insurance?

Are you doing like a Hagerty specialty car insurance? What do you, what do you have to do there for what we would consider a gray market car? Yeah. So I, I didn’t

Nate Burton: even try to go through normal insurance cause I didn’t know of one, how they would handle it at all. And two, like certainly if they were to handle it, I don’t think they would give it much value in terms of replacement or, or damage or repair or anything like that.

So given the number of cars that we have at the time, uh, I’ve looked into Hagerty. Um, and we’re going, we, we have Hagerty now and I have the E30 on the Hagerty plan as well as the 480. Nice. So I’ve got those two with Hagerty and I’ve got the rest of the cars that we kind of more daily drive on, on just normal.

Emily Fox: Yeah, it worked out well. We got it licensed and well, we got it tagged. But yeah, three,

Nate Burton: three nervous hours sitting at the MVA wondering if I’m going to be able to leave with Maryland plates. [00:38:00] And a Maryland title, and I did, and it was, it was a very happy, successful thing. Until

Emily Fox: he brought it home and decided to try to put plates on it, and then found out that the U.

S. tags are ugly on European cars, and we clearly needed to have a European style plate on our car.

Nate Burton: I really like in Europe how, um, you can get American sized plates if you’re in Europe for American cars. Like they have kind of that dual size thing, but we don’t do that in the U. S.

Mike Crutchfield: So, so I have to ask, did you do what all the Stansbros do and buy the stretched out Maryland tag that has the Maryland tag printed on it, but it’s changed?

Into the European format.

Emily Fox: About it. I,

Mike Crutchfield: I, I really

Nate Burton: considered that.

Emily Fox: But decided if you were going to spend the money on a Euro sized tag, we should make it fun. Which is why it doesn’t have that.

Nate Burton: Yeah, so we, we ended up going to a few car [00:39:00] shows with the stupid Maryland tags on the front, uh, poking out like a

Emily Fox: And took them off.

Like a,

Nate Burton: like a buck tooth on, on like a Beaver or something. That’s exactly

Emily Fox: what it looks like. Like a

Mike Crutchfield: BMW M4.

Nate Burton: And then I decided what I really need is like show plates. So I ended up getting some fake Euro plates that say, uh, daft punk

Emily Fox: or daft

Nate Burton: punk, sorry. Oh crap.

Emily Fox: You’ve ruined it.

Nate Burton: So, so I got some fake European plates that say daft punk because, uh, as you mentioned about the, a bit about the history 80, it was built in Holland in the Netherlands.

At what was previously the old DAF factory.

Crew Chief Eric: We actually talked about DAF vans on another episode. They were actually quite familiar. So it’s

Nate Burton: kind of this Volvo car that’s built in the Netherlands. So it’s kind of a punk. And then Daft Punk being a French band. Kind of gives it’s ties to it’s French roots.

with the [00:40:00] Renault engine and the Renault drivetrain.

Crew Chief Eric: We’ve talked about some of your early challenges with the car. And you kind of dabbled a little bit here in the tech specs. Let’s deeper dive into the tech specs of the car, because most people aren’t going to know really what it is. And you’ve alluded to some of it, but let’s explore that a little bit.

Nate Burton: It was a, uh, unique car for Volvo in a, in a few regards, it was. It’s their first front wheel drive car. It’s a front wheel drive 1. 7 liter inline four turbo, in my case, it’s a 1993. Transverse,

Crew Chief Eric: correct?

Nate Burton: Yes. It’s in there sideways. Yep. And, uh, it’s, it’s a fairly light car. It weighs about 2200 pounds. The 1. 7 liter turbo gets about 120 horsepower at the crank.

Stock, uh, 129 pound feet of torque. So rumor was that when it was being developed, cause it’s kind of this weird mishmash of Volvo and Renault parts, they actually supposedly sent [00:41:00] the engine and the car to Porsche to do tuning. It actually has like a Porsche throttle body on it. And supposedly the rumor is that Porsche tuned it up to about 170 horsepower.

And then when they gave it back to Volvo, Volvo was like, Oh, wait a minute. We’re, we’re kind of a safety family company here. Can you detune it a little? So that’s how it ended up rumor, uh, at least, uh, down at about 120 horsepower. But that meant that the engine, uh, and, and boosts and things were capable of getting up to that higher horsepower.

So there’s actually, uh, some folks still in the, in the Volvo four 80 community that I found on, on Facebook and, and European forums that do modifications of the ECU to actually restore some of that original kind of fuel map and things. And up the boost. Supposedly, that’s supposed to give you about 150 horsepower, um, at the wheels, but I have not dyno’d it or anything like that.

And I’m pretty sure my clutch is at its last legs because, uh, when I do get high on [00:42:00] boost, I can, I can feel and smell the clutch slipping.

Crew Chief Eric: High on boost. That’s like five pounds at Volvo speed, right? I

Nate Burton: think the stock boost is about seven or eight pounds with the modified ECU that I actually have. I actually ordered, I got one from one of the folks on one of the forums.

It goes all the way up to 14. Oh, wow.

Mike Crutchfield: And what are we running on workforce?

Nate Burton: Pretty big difference.

Mike Crutchfield: 19, 20.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, something like that when they’re modded, but, you know, stock boost on the original KO3s is like eight or nine pounds. It’s nothing.

Nate Burton: Yeah, so being a fairly light car with that kind of power, it’s actually a really fun peppy car to drive.

Crew Chief Eric: Nice. Well, yeah, and the power to weight ratio is what really comes into play there. And that’s normal for cars of that era, right? They didn’t really start getting heavy. Until the late nineties, when they started introducing things like pro content, a lot more of the airbags and all of these more, you know, advanced crush zones and things like that.

The cars of the [00:43:00] eighties and early nineties were still built the old way. You know, they’re economical, they’re super lightweight in comparison. That’s heavier than a Scirocco, but it’s still lighter than an Audi coupe, which weighed in at about 2, 400 pounds. And it’s a much larger car, but all those cars of that era, it’s like, man, if you were above 2, 500 pounds, it was a tank.

Yeah. Cars, like you

Nate Burton: said back then, you could see out of them so much more easily, like the, the A pillars and everything were smaller, thinner,

Mike Crutchfield: which is great until you roll over.

Nate Burton: Yeah, I think my, my year is actually the last year before they added airbags. I think they added airbags in, in 94.

Emily Fox: Which I often have to remind him about whenever we go have fun in the country with the 480.

Mike Crutchfield: I mean, you know, our track cars, most of us, for those of us who even keep them street legal, the airbags are gone.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, for the most

Mike Crutchfield: part. Because, you know, especially the Volkswagens, the stock steering wheel is like a ship wheel. Well,

Crew Chief Eric: that and if they were made by Takata, they didn’t work in the first place.

So it doesn’t really matter. [00:44:00] Well,

Mike Crutchfield: then they’re Claymores,

Crew Chief Eric: not airbags. So, you know, the 480 styling wise, it’s definitely an acquired taste. It reminds me of a couple of Dustbuster. Well, yeah, it reminds me of a couple of other cars, but I got to give it Matt props for having pop up headlights because that is period appropriate.

You know, you look at some of the design cues, it really still looks pretty modern. I like the fact, you know, we have one here in the background. It’s got that little, you know, kind of weighing up over the hatchback glass. And this one in particular has wheels on and whatever. It also reminds me of some of the Mitsubishis of the period.

Like if I look at it with one eye crossed and I’m half drunk, it reminds me of the Starion a little bit, like, like a miniature version of it. So I can see design cues from other cars, but the question is who actually designed it? Did Volvo design it or did like Bertone have their, their hands involved?

Who was involved in designing the, the 480? I’m

Nate Burton: going to kick myself. Cause I, I do know the person’s name and I can’t remember it. Um, I believe it was somebody from Volvo. I [00:45:00] think it’s John DeVries. Is the stylist who did it back to, uh, the pop up headlights. That was, that was another, uh, unique characteristic of the 480, especially for Volvo.

It was the first and only Volvo to ever have pop up headlights. And, and the interesting thing about that is they did that to meet American safety laws at the time in the eighties, because headlights had to be a certain height off the ground. And they were planning on actually selling the 480 in the US to compete with all the other hatchbacks and hot hatches starting around that time in the late 80s.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the economy and kind of exchange rate with the US didn’t work out in Volvo’s favor and they scrapped plans to bring it to the US.

Crew Chief Eric: How big is the 480? Let’s talk about like wheelbase and overall length.

Emily Fox: It’s not big. It’s tiny. It’s so small.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s,

Mike Crutchfield: it’s really small. How’s it compared to your E30?

Because E30 is something a lot. Exactly.

Emily Fox: It’s smaller than the E30.

Nate Burton: It’s definitely shorter [00:46:00] in length than the E30. It’s

Emily Fox: narrower too. By a

Nate Burton: good distance.

Emily Fox: I would say it’s narrower by like what? Six inches? It’s not much. It’s just enough.

Mike Crutchfield: So, so you’re saying it’s not a car for Brad or I?

Nate Burton: Nope. Um. I don’t know.

It’s actually quite roomy. There’s a lot of leg room. I’ve been told that it’s actually a very good car for tall people.

Emily Fox: It’s because of how, how the seats are. They’re what bucket seats in the front, right? They’re

Nate Burton: bucket, yeah. It’s a two

Emily Fox: by two. And so they’re, it is got bucket seats. But the way that the seats are positioned is it, it’s very much that you’re very lean back.

It reminds me of probably closer to like a, a modern race car where you’re, you’re lean back, you’re kind of stretched out a little bit, and then, so there’s a, there’s a lot of room and you don’t have a lot of the obstructions that you get with modern cars. Um, like you don’t have this big console in the middle taking up a ton of space.

You don’t have a huge armrest in the door. The armrest is very narrow. There’s a lot of good room on the inside of [00:47:00] the car.

Nate Burton: The 2 plus 2 layout is really interesting because the back seats are also bucket seats. And they’re really comfortable.

Emily Fox: It’s still pretty tight in the back. It’s,

Nate Burton: it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a coop, so the back is kind of small, but it’s, it’s much more rear leg room.

Yeah. I, I could comfortably sit back there, probably not for a long, a, a really long time, but Doug, Doug Demaro could certainly do his, get in the back seat test and probably fits.

Crew Chief Eric: So it begs the question then. What’s it like to drive?

Emily Fox: I wouldn’t know because I’m not allowed to drive it yet.

Crew Chief Eric: You’ve had it for two years and yet you can’t drive it yet.

Shots fired. Shots fired.

Emily Fox: The only car of his, besides the XC90 that I’ve been allowed to drive was the E30. And the first time I drove, that was the first time I drove a stick in almost 15 years and we were on a mountain in the dark in a huge fog bank while it was, what, raining?

Nate Burton: Uh, [00:48:00] it was certainly

Emily Fox: 80 percent fog.

Mike Crutchfield: I will say you actually blogged about that experience. I know you blogged about that one

Emily Fox: because I’ve actually read

Mike Crutchfield: that post.

Emily Fox: Yeah, the photo is scary. You have not seen it. There’s nothing but clouds. Is that Skyline Drive? That was Skyline Drive. Oh, that’s a wonderful road. You could see their beady little eyes along the side of the road waiting to jump out at you.

Nate Burton: Well, I had driven, we had gone down to North Carolina and Asheville for the BMW show. Vintage. Vintage. And I had driven all the way down and I had promised her that I’d let her drive on the way back. And then on the way back, it happened to be super shitty weather. We had like almost complete fog. But

Emily Fox: I drove really well.

And I didn’t ruin the clutch. That was the first time I learned about engine braking. I didn’t know that was a thing at the time. I was all proud of myself and I still haven’t driven the 480 yet.

Mike Crutchfield: I will say the other reason you haven’t driven most of Nate’s cars is cause a lot of them don’t move.

Emily Fox: That’s true.[00:49:00]

Also true. I have probably pushed his cars. It was further by myself than I would have driven them. But the 480, that’s got some fun stories too.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, well, yeah, so go ahead.

Nate Burton: So, oh gosh, where were we? We had mentioned the E34,

Crew Chief Eric: the Crutchet Help Me trailer. Right. So I had, I had posed the question because I was kind of following my, my, my train of thought here.

What’s it like to drive, right? That was, that was my question. We kind of segued from there, you know, went to New Jersey and back. So now we’re back. So what’s the 480 like to drive?

Emily Fox: Fun?

Crew Chief Eric: Of, of all the cars that I

Nate Burton: currently own, and we haven’t gotten through all of them yet, but all the cars I currently own, I think the four 80 is actually one of the best cars, if not the funnest car to drive because it’s just so light and nimble.

And

Emily Fox: handles well.

Nate Burton: Handles well. Like the steering is, is responsive, really responsive.

Crew Chief Eric: And that would [00:50:00] be a car with no nannies and no assist. Like you said, it’s probably an OBD one car. If not, it’s a Medtronic car. It’s somewhere on the border there. Yeah,

Nate Burton: it’s, it’s, it’s Medtronic. Okay. Um. Definitely doesn’t have any OBD ports or anything like that.

Emily Fox: It helps the road really well, especially around the corners.

Nate Burton: No ABS,

Crew Chief Eric: it should have power

Nate Burton: steering. Actually, it does have ABS. Really? It does have ABS and power steering. Oh, nice. But no, no airbags, no traction control or anything like that. I

Emily Fox: will say that it drives better now than it did when we got it.

We’ve done Chuckle. It drove like a boat when we got it. To the point where we had it at the compound and we got in, he’s like, I want you to tell me if you think it’s like a boat. And we drove down the end of the driveway and hit the brakes. I think

Nate Burton: boat’s the wrong analogy. I think it was like, is it like an airplane?

Emily Fox: Because

Nate Burton: when you got on boost, like the front nose would just lift up because the front shocks were completely blown. And it would just like lift [00:51:00] the car up by almost a foot

Emily Fox: because

Nate Burton: of how, how bad the shocks were.

Emily Fox: So we, we ended up replacing the shocks. We ended up putting new springs on it. We found, which

Nate Burton: was a huge surprise because when I went to take the shocks off one, I found out how blown they are.

Cause I could just extend and collapse them by hand. Um, as if I was using like a

Emily Fox: slinky.

Nate Burton: It was like a

Emily Fox: slinky. That’s how bad they were.

Nate Burton: What was worse was on the driver’s side. The spring was like two coils longer than on the passenger side. So somebody had gone in there at some point and it also had a aftermarket shock in it.

And replace the shock and spring on the left hand side. So, what

Emily Fox: we think happened is that at some point in its history that it must have been in a front end collision because the bumper doesn’t quite align correctly. And there’s been modifications to where the bumper and the nose cone mounts. To the vehicle.

And

Nate Burton: you can see some slight blending of the paint. Yeah, the

Emily Fox: paint is blended. Um, the mounting points for the [00:52:00] bumper, one of them is almost two inches higher than the other. Maybe not too much. It’s more like an inch. It’s definitely not right. And we’ve, it looks like somebody has been in there already. But for the driver’s side, when we were doing all that work, we found what the axle was.

Nate Burton: To take the front suspension off, you kind of have to pull the half shaft out of the transmission to be able to get enough room to like free the, free the suspension components. And what I think happened It was probably prior to me when somebody did these shenanigans of installing an aftermarket shock on just one side of the car and a different size spring on that one side of the car.

They probably screwed with the, the inner roller bearing that’s on the inside of that half shaft that goes into the transmission. That then is the bearing that that whole axle rides on inside the transmission. And they knocked one of the cups off. So when I, when I did this, I found out [00:53:00] that that cup was actually sitting inside and all the bearing needles were sitting inside there.

Uh, but not all of them.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s a tripod axle then. The way it’s a tripod. For most of us, that’s a really common part. We run down to, you know, advanced auto and go pick one up for, you know, 60 bucks and call it a day. And then that’s another challenge of owning an imported car. So where are you getting parts for the 480?

Yeah. So, um,

Emily Fox: Netherlands,

Nate Burton: Florida, Florida. Yeah. So, um, Because, uh, Volvos are us shares a whole bunch of parts with the Renault.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s funny you keep saying the Renault, like there’s only one in existence, so , is there a particular one like the R five or the R 21, or, or, or is it It shares a lot of parts with. I think the second

Nate Burton: generation Clio.

Crew Chief Eric: Okay. I could

Nate Burton: see that. And yeah, I had done, uh, when we first got the car, like did it, took a test drive, found the horrible suspension liftoff [00:54:00] problem. I did a survey of all the stuff that I wanted to do maintenance on and replace and made a big parts order from two or three different places in Europe.

Scandix is a, uh, a parts company in Germany that makes and remanufactures a whole bunch of, uh, Polo and. saw car parts. So I got some stuff from them. And then, um, there’s, there’s a handful of just big superstore car parts places in the, in the, uh, Europe. Uh, so like auto, auto dock, I don’t know if you’re familiar with them.

Uh, I think I made a big parts order with them and then found, uh, The suspension bits that I needed, like the, the strut bearing on the top for the front struts, the, the bilstein struts and lowering springs all in, um, either the UK or Netherlands. I placed a bunch of orders from, from Europe. They arrived from three or four different places.

I did all that work in preparation of going to Radwood. [00:55:00] And in New Jersey in 2019, so the story of me replacing the front suspension, finding all these weird suspension problems that were there, finding this inner, inner roller bearing, uh, tripod bearing, uh, on the axle was six days before I was supposed to go to Radwood.

So I’m like, Oh shit, I’m not going to be able to take the 480 to Radwood. I’ve already emailed them and said, Hey, I’ve got this Volvo 480 that I want to bring to Radwood. Can I get into, uh, Is it royalty? There’s some like higher tier of Radware where you can bring in special cars and pay more money to bring in special cars.

They were all excited for me to bring the 480 to them. And then 6. 8 for Radware and I found this problem. I’m like, oh crap. I’m not gonna be able to bring it because I’m not gonna be able to get it on the road because I’m not gonna be able to find the part. So I spent like a day. Doing parts interchange and cross reference search and found that somebody on eBay in Florida was like the North American and South American [00:56:00] distributor and reseller, reseller for Renault parts in kind of this region.

And he just happened to have one that like cross matched to the Volvo 480. So I ordered that and thankfully was able to get the car back together and uh, make it to Radwood.

Emily Fox: It was an interesting experience putting that back together. We still have part of it. It’s actually on the key ring, isn’t it?

Nate Burton: Yes, I use one of the outer bearing races from that tripod bearing as a key ring for the Volvo 480.

Crew Chief Eric: Very cool. So other than car shows and whatnot, what have you guys done with the 480? Have you done any sorts of, you know, let’s say motor sports events with maybe done an autocross, maybe a D E. I mean, outside of the, you know, the standard cars and coffee, maybe some touring, as you guys mentioned, have you done anything?

Emily Fox: That’s, that’s about it. I think he’s probably slightly too paranoid about his cars, doing some racing stuff with them. I mean, like, we, we are very much a house that there are no garage queens at all allowed, but I think he’s still a little sensitive to some of these [00:57:00] things, especially for the 480, because it’s so hard to get parts that if something bad were to happen, we would be in a weird spot.

spot, trying to get pieces for it to get it back together and get it up and running, especially when it’s just fun to drive around, like the weather here is glorious right now. We don’t need to have air conditioning so we can drive through the country and see all the fall leaves right now. We’ve got all the hills and there’s.

The roads out here are just so nice, and we don’t exactly have a lot of really good performance cars. I think the 480 Turbo is the closest thing that we have to one that could potentially do good on a track.

Nate Burton: I think it’d be fun to drive somewhere where you could kind of test it out and put it, put it at its limits a bit.

I don’t know if I would do autocross.

Crew Chief Eric: But well, I mean, I always bring up D. E. And Mike and Brad and I, you know, we’re coaches, so you’re never, you’re not out there alone. It’s not door to door. There’s no bumping and grinding. So it’s always a good experience and summit points not very far from us. And, you know, it’s a true way to really open it up, clear out the carbon, as [00:58:00] we say.

Say and what it’s made of. Right. But you know, you’re, again, you’re not alone. You have somebody parroting in your ear what to do and, and you know, it’s a note, it’s a non-contact sport. So something to think about and, and for, and, and in terms of cost, you know, we talk about this on, on previous episodes, it’s cheap and affordable.

Right? It’s an easy way to get in. I mean, for. Five, six hours of track time. If you want to use all of it, it’s a couple hundred bucks, right? Why not? It’s probably the most fun you’re going to have for that kind of money. Right. And

Nate Burton: you don’t have to put a roll cages and things for those.

Mike Crutchfield: You know, for your E 30, you would need a roll bar.

Nate Burton: Oh, cause it’s a

Crew Chief Eric: convertible. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Crutchfield: But, and you’d have to pass the broomstick test.

Crew Chief Eric: And just as an aside, we were talking about the track stuff. There is so locked in another insurance company, actually one of the largest insurance companies, probably in North America, you know, locked in affinity.

It has a very large reach, but they also have a division called locked in motorsports, and they’re going to be on a subsequent episode here, uh, in the near future and they offer track insurance. [00:59:00] And it’s kind of a, no questions asked full value declared value policy. So if you walk up and say, based on my mods, based on this, based on rarity, that Volvo is worth 50 grand, they’ll insure it for 50 grand.

And if something happens, they’ll cut you a check. That’s pretty good. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. So

Mike Crutchfield: it’s a X percent deductible, depending on how much you pay. 10

Crew Chief Eric: percent with a minimum deductible of 2, 000. So we, I just went through that. It’s all fresh in my head still. But if you guys want to learn more about that, I mean, this is totally an aside.

It’ll, it’s going to be on a episode coming up very soon. Did you, did you learn that because you had to go through it? Actually, actually, one of our members did go through it. We wrote an article about it back in 2018, right about the time you got your, your Volvo. And he went through it with a Mustang that he hadn’t had for very long.

And his significant other ended up having a really good off. We’ll call it that kiss the cement barrier and crunched up the left front of the car and he had track insurance on it. They took care of everything. It was no questions asked. Unlike dealing with a standard [01:00:00] insurance company, they’re used to dealing with track incidents and track cars and things like that.

And, you know, if you walked up to John’s car today, you wouldn’t know the difference. Very cool.

Emily Fox: Very cool.

Crew Chief Eric: So my next question for you guys is, you know, outside of that, what are the plans for the car? Because, you know, as we all have these special cars in our garages, there’s like calibers of Like, is it done?

Is it done done? Or is there just something more on the list to check off? What’s the future?

Emily Fox: There’s always more, so like So the Volvo Parade came with two interiors. It came with a leather interior and then it came with that lovely 1980s pristine, uh, bus fabric interior. Which, which is what we have in it and you just can’t beat that feeling with it.

But the door cards Don’t laugh that loudly. This is a painful experience for us both. The door cards The original vinyl that covers them is vacuum formed onto it, which they’re very, um, modern cards that are plastic door cards. Even in [01:01:00] BMWs, the cards don’t have as significant of a profile. As the 480 does, it’s got some deep pockets in there.

So when they vacuum formed it, the glue over time naturally breaks down. So you get these bubbles of air and you ruin the form and the shape of the door card because you’ve got that pocket underneath it. Well, on the driver’s side, the door was. really bad to the point of you couldn’t use part of where the door handle was.

Nate Burton: Like you go to grab the door handle and like, there should be a gap there for you to wrap around the handle, but the vinyl had come up and you would just hit this bubble of vinyl every time you check.

Emily Fox: So we had made the decision that we did a lot of research. We watched a bunch of videos, um, that we were going to pull the vinyl off and put a new vinyl leather look covering on top of it.

So I am a, uh, I do a lot of sewing. I do a lot of craft work. I do a lot of building stuff, and I do custom patterning. So I had created a custom pattern for the door card with nice [01:02:00] stitching detail to piece in that, that high profile that the door had. But we did not have the. Expertise in laying down the glue or stretching the material correctly.

Nate Burton: Upholstery is hard, especially if you’ve never done it before

Emily Fox: and only

Nate Burton: watched YouTube videos.

Emily Fox: Yeah. So it was one of those. So I had, I had it mocked out in muslin and I had it fitted and it, and it laid well, it was just a matter of the vinyl that we got was a

two way. It was a two

Emily Fox: way stretch, not a four way.

So two way stretch vinyl means it only moves. side to side or up and down and not both. So you have to pay attention to how you’re cutting and stitching your pieces together to make sure that it stretches in the orientation that you want it to. So I spent all this time making sure that it could stretch and form to that high profile door card.

And even that with the glue that we got, wasn’t enough. To get it to fit. We got most of the wrinkles out, but it just, the look wasn’t quite right. It was hell of a lot better than the air bubble that [01:03:00] was originally there. But now that we had pulled the vinyl off of one door card and we had the other one in place, by the way, this was what, two weeks before Radwood when we,

Nate Burton: it was, it

Emily Fox: was Radwood.

Cause it, yes, it was Radwood. So it was like two weeks before Radwood where we had found out that none of this was going to work. So we ended up pulling the vinyl off of both of the door cards, including the one that I had made, scrubbing as much of the glue off as we can, and experimenting with different paint and texture compounds.

So the Volvo does not have vinyl door cards on it. It looks like it does. until you touch it. And it’s because this guy with the paint master skills of spray paint and texturizer, it looks like vinyl. It’s got the texture of vinyl. As long as you don’t touch it, that’s the only thing that that would let you know that it’s not it.

Nate Burton: So from about a foot away, the door cards look pretty original, but if you touch them, you’ll know that they’re not original. Especially I use like two [01:04:00] different types of truck bed liner and then Color match the spray, spray paint to get the right color to try to match it to the interior. It’s really, really close, but it’s not final.

So that’s one of the things I’d like to get fixed. I think the only real way to get it fixed is to actually get somebody in the Netherlands who has spare door cards to mail me some. And I’ve found some people who have some. We

Emily Fox: also had it priced out how to do the vacuum form on the door cards and it was astronomical.

Because it would, it would have been custom for it. We also looked at pricing up custom up poultry for the door cards. And that was like way, way, way too much. Fixing the door cards on the interior is one of the things that we definitely want to do

Nate Burton: with the upgraded ECU that I got that updates the fuel map and ups the boost to 14 PSI have certainly noticed that the clutch slips when it’s really on high boosts.

So, uh, unfortunately Volvo, this is actually, uh, On top of parts being really [01:05:00] hard to find for the 480 because they’re never sold here, a lot of the parts aren’t even made anymore because there were never really all that popular cars. The parts are even hard to find for folks in Europe who have them, of which the turbo was produced in much fewer numbers than some of the other models of the 480.

Uh, they had a naturally aspirated 1. 7 liter and they also had a 2. 0 liter, uh, also naturally aspirated. But, uh, so the turbo was produced in fewer numbers. So there’s. Fewer parts for them. And it uses a different size flywheel and clutch this, uh, than the other ones. And they don’t make it anymore. And none of the aftermarket parts suppliers make it.

So I spent a good part of my quarantine time during, uh, during COVID. cross referencing and researching SACS and SACS parts and Renault parts and finally finding a part number that I think is going to work as a replacement uprated clutch that won’t, that hopefully won’t slip, but I have no idea if it’s going to fit.

So it

Crew Chief Eric: sounds to me like in this case, [01:06:00] And don’t take this the wrong way. It sounds like you’re a bit of a purist, right? Because we come at it from the motor sports world and getting a custom clutch made is not really a big deal. You take your stock clutch, you send it out and somebody makes you one. Like there’s companies like center force and Kennedy and a lot of others that’ll do that.

So I guess it depends on your level, but I respect it. Right. Because I look at it from the perspective of. You know, this is a really interesting like concourse car where you want to keep it period appropriate. You want to keep it as original as possible. You want to do all these kinds of things that somebody doesn’t come back and say, wow, you have this other thing in there, but.

For those of us on the other side of the fence for like blow up a clutch, whatever, we’ll get another one. We’ll get one made, you know, that kind of, it’s not a big deal. It’s kind of the same with the axles too. It’s like, well, those inner bearings probably the same as a Volkswagen. It’s like, just go swap them from something else.

But, you know, I understand it’s part of that. I don’t want to call it the obsession, but it’s part of the passion around this car. And I really. I really appreciate that. And I really sympathize with it because I’ve been through it [01:07:00] with some other cars myself. I mean, I had an original Audi Quattro and I nerded out on that thing forever.

And I had a coupe Quattro, not a, not a 4, 000, right? So those cars extremely rare, only 627 and brought to North America, not just the U S but North America. So talk about finding rare parts and stuff like that. But, you know, we’ve talked about this on other episodes. We have members in GTM with, uh, We have a Renault R5 turbo too.

We’ve got some Packards, we’ve got all these other cars. And it’s like, you know, we talk about scarcity and rarity of parts. And a lot of people have come to the conclusion that no, you’re not going to find a part for 1927, you know, super eight, you’re going to have to have somebody make it for you. It’s just, it’s gotten to that point.

Right. But, but there’s some allowances there. Right. And if you are a hardcore concourse person, they they’re allowing that nowadays, and it’s stuff that you can’t visually see. But it helps the operation of the vehicle. Right? So, but I get it. It’s a struggle overall. It’s super interesting. It’s so unique. I mean, so by [01:08:00] your research, are there any other four eighties in the United States, or are you kind of in a, in a group by yourself?

I, I know of at least

Nate Burton: one. Maybe two. I think in early days of bring a trailer, there was a white one listed before they started the auction site on bring a trailer a while back. That was somewhere down in Florida, but that’s all I’ve ever seen of that one. And then I did, I did come across somebody on one of the European Volvo 480 forums, who I think is involved with like the Volvo club of America.

Who’s out in California who actually has one. He has a earlier, I think it’s an 88. Naturally aspirated, and I think he was in one of the Volvo Club magazines with his P1800ES hatchback from the 70s next to the 480 Turbo hatchback. And so there’s some styling cues there shared between the P1800ES. And the, the four 80 [01:09:00] as kind of the, the follow on to that.

And then the C 30 is kind of a follow on to the four 80. Absolutely. I could definitely see that. So

Mike Crutchfield: I wanna ask, and the C 30 always looked fun, ,

Crew Chief Eric: except for that back. Except for

Mike Crutchfield: that big window. Yeah. Well that

Crew Chief Eric: back, that back glass they borrowed from launcher. But you know, we won’t, we’ll leave that alone.

But any rate, because the, the Y 10 or the ypsilon dhi as they called it in Italian, the, uh, they had that same rear trunk. And obviously those rear lights are from the SUV. I mean, that’s kind of, it had a weird backend to it. It’s very strange, but I wanted to ask, you know, because this is still kind of fresh for you guys.

I mean, we’re talking 2018 timeframe. We’re only two years, let’s call it three. As we, as we move into 21, would you go back and do it all over again? Or would you slap yourself silly if you had a time machine? I would go back and do it all over

Nate Burton: again in a heartbeat and maybe buy two, two more of them.

Emily Fox: I was going to say for the 480, yes, we would do it all over again.

Probably definitely get a second one if we could, maybe three [01:10:00] depending. Like, we were in a weird situation where we had like one extra parking space at the compound so we could have, Had the extra car. If we were in a better situation, we would have had more spots, probably could have bought over more cars.

We looked at other cars. We talked about buying more than just the 480, but that was the one that we brought back.

Mike Crutchfield: At one point you even asked me if I had anything I wanted to add to your trailer or add

Crew Chief Eric: to your

Emily Fox: shipment. We did, yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: Wow. So I think we covered a lot of interesting stuff here. This is a very unique car.

I think you guys are in a really unique position, but it’s also interesting to hear all these things. And as I said, kind of in the pre show, there’s so many different types of car enthusiasts out there. And there’s so many different stories that just aren’t shared. And when you walk by a car like yours at a car show, you look at it and you go, huh?

What’s that? But you know, you got to take that extra step to get the story out. So I thank you guys so much. I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show and sharing this with everybody and getting us to know a little bit more about something as [01:11:00] unique as the Volvo 480, and for all of our listeners out there, we’re going to post some pictures and extra information about the car, specifically Nate’s car on our website.

So gtmotorsports. org, and we’ll probably repost that on Garage Riot. And that way you guys can go. See the visuals as you’re going through this particular episode. So again, Nate and Emily, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Emily Fox: Thanks for having us.

Nate Burton: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for letting me talk about the 480.

Um, it’s really fun, uh, taking it out and letting people, uh, see it as, as we’ve talked about, it’s a bit quirky and most people just kind of pass it by. But for that one person who’s like a weird Volvo head. that sees it and is able to see it in the U. S. It’s like it makes me so happy.

Crew Chief Eric: So I’m gonna I’m gonna put this out there and I know it’s gonna make Emily mad, but I gotta get a chance to drive it.

That way can write a test drive article on it. What do you think?

Emily Fox: I that would be fine. I will eventually get to drive it. Let’s be clear one way or another, it’s going to happen. It’s going to have to move [01:12:00] across the parking lot or move across something. And he’s going to be in a boot or unable to do it.

Crew Chief Eric: You’ll spike his drink,

Nate Burton: injured

Crew Chief Eric: myself working on

Nate Burton: the

Crew Chief Eric: Mercedes again.

Nate Burton: Well,

Crew Chief Eric: on that note, thank you again.

Nate Burton: Yeah, thanks. Thanks

Crew Chief Brad: If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about gtm be sure to check us out on www. gtmotorsports. org You can also find us on instagram at grand tory motorsports Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call or text us at 202 630 1770 or send us an email at crewchief at gtmotorsports.

org. We’d love to hear from you.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey listeners, Crew Chief Eric here. Do you like what you’ve seen, heard, and read? Great, so do we, and we have a lot of fun doing it, but please remember, we’re fueled by volunteers and remain a no annual fee organization, but we still need help to keep the momentum going so that we can continue to [01:13:00] record, write, edit, and broadcast all of your favorite content.

So be sure to visit www. patreon. com forward slash GT Motorsports or visit our website. And click in the top right corner on the support and donate to learn how you can help.

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00 Introduction to Gran Touring Motorsports
• 00:22 Meet the Hosts and Guests
• 01:05 Diving into Vehicle Histories
• 08:18 Emily’s Car Journey
• 14:23 Garage Riot and Car Enthusiast Community
• 17:19 The Mystery of the Volvo 480
• 23:54 The Quest to Import a Volvo 480
• 37:10 Navigating Gray Market Car Insurance
• 38:06 The Struggle with License Plates
• 40:01 Volvo 480 Tech Specs Deep Dive
• 42:35 Driving Experience and Handling
• 50:26 Challenges with Parts and Repairs
• 01:00:09 Future Plans and Modifications
• 01:10:25 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] We always have a blast chatting with our guests about all sorts of different topics, but sometimes we go off the rails and dig deeper into their automotive and motorsports pasts. As a bonus, let’s go behind the scenes with this pit stop mini sode for some extra content that didn’t quite fit in the main episode.

Sit back and enjoy. Enjoy, and remember to like, subscribe, and support Brake Fix on Patreon.

So I heard y’all had a great time without me talking about imported cars and whatnot, but I want to know a little more about your car history and something Crutch called The Compound, which actually sounds very similar to The Mountain.

Nate Burton: Uh, do you want me to go first or Emily? Whichever one!

Emily Fox: Why don’t you go first?

We could

Nate Burton: get out a 20 sided die if you like and do it. Yeah, uh, yeah, I can go. Um Do you want me to, like, recount, like, how I got into cars? Yeah, that would be fun. Or the cars I started with? Sure! Like, what,

Mike Crutchfield: which, uh, so I want to segue real quick. Because, [00:01:00] when I say this, everyone, you know, you’ll understand what I’m saying, but no one else will.

Let’s talk about the compound.

Emily Fox: Oh. Oh. We’re out of the compound, officially. I know, I know, you’re out of the We’re out of the cars! Oh, you

Mike Crutchfield: got all the cars out!

Emily Fox: All the cars are out! It, it was, it was touch and go there for a bit. All the cars are officially out of the compound.

Nate Burton: So I think part of my becoming a gearhead story involves the fact that I

Emily Fox: had an enabler.

Mike Crutchfield: I

Nate Burton: read how many

Mike Crutchfield: Ford Falcons does he own? Sorry, galaxies, galaxies,

Nate Burton: he’s got a shit ton of. So he probably has a handful of Falcons.

Emily Fox: We used to live so Nate rented a property. from somebody that he used to work with who loved cars and loved collecting cars and all matter of decay because that’s what most of them were at the time.

Nate Burton: These were mostly non running

Emily Fox: cars. I said decay, didn’t I? [00:02:00] Highly

Nate Burton: valued replacement parts. Wait, so did you, did you Did you live in a junkyard? Basically, yes. From Google Satellite View, it definitely kind of looks like that. Well,

Emily Fox: if you could see all the cars in Google Satellite View, then yes. But most of them were under makeshift cover or had metal on top of them to protect, you know, the convertible components of them because the fabric had rotted away and had been sitting for so long.

Mike Crutchfield: He didn’t want the patina to change.

Emily Fox: Oh, that’s true. The patina on some of the cars is gorgeous, but still. So there’s, so the compound is a loving place where, uh, most American cars, specifically Cadillacs.

Nate Burton: Ford, Ford and Lincoln.

Emily Fox: Ford and Lincoln, sorry. Ford and Lincolns go to rest to be parted out. Some Mercurys.

And some Mercurys go to be parted out and they go there and they stay. More cars come in than leave. And we lived there for a while. For a long while. Nate lives there a lot longer and it was a, it [00:03:00] was a nice experience to like, make sure that you were up on your tetanus whenever you walked around the property.

Mike Crutchfield: Been there. We

Emily Fox: certainly had access to lots of equipment to work on cars, which was nice if we could get to the equipment cause there were often cars in the way.

Nate Burton: Yeah. The problem, the problem was he, well, he had like this giant,

Emily Fox: Compound

Nate Burton: shop that had like a seven bay car garage and a paint booth and a paint booth and all this stuff.

And a, uh, transmission tunnel ramp. Mostly all that stuff was covered with shit boxes that were rusting apart

Emily Fox: and boxes of parts for those cars. But so at one point, I think we had, how many cars? 10. We owned 10 cars at one point.

Nate Burton: We, yes, we had 10 at one point.

Emily Fox: We had 10 cars while we were living at the compound.

And we’ve, we’ve slowly gotten rid of a lot of them. Um, well a lot of them meaning we got rid of the one that was, like, I don’t even know why you really bought it. [00:04:00] The parts car? The parts car. The one

Nate Burton: that Crutch actually helped, helped me get to my house.

Mike Crutchfield: Towed it from Delaware to Central Maryland.

Nate Burton: Yeah.

Mike Crutchfield: It had to be loaded on my trailer with a forklift. Yeah.

Nate Burton: So that was, that was an E34 that I got for 300 bucks.

Emily Fox: For the engine.

Nate Burton: So that I could take the engine out of it because it’s the M30B35.

Emily Fox: But we kept the whole car rather than just pulling the engine because you know we can make money off of the parts, uh huh.

And it sat. And we never made money off of the parts. This is starting to

Nate Burton: sound, this is starting to sound a lot like the mountain. This is

Crew Chief Brad: what the mountain aspires to be.

Nate Burton: No, no. What is, what

Mike Crutchfield: is the mountain? We have, we have another member. Mountain Man Dan.

Nate Burton: Mountain Man Dan.

Mike Crutchfield: He has, uh, over under 150 Jeddas on his property, it seems.

And Volkswagen Golfs. Holy cow! [00:05:00] I’m exaggerating, obviously. But. He, uh, he has

Nate Burton: There’s 10,

Mike Crutchfield: 20 square body trucks.

Nate Burton: There’s definitely north of 30 cars on the property. Yeah, there’s one Volkswagen. No, no, there’s the domestic section. There’s the import section. There are two and I like, I have to, I have to specify there is a Mercury Sable wagon and a Taurus wagon.

Do not confuse the two because if you talk about them, he gets upset. Also,

Crew Chief Brad: if you call them donor cars, he gets upset.

Mike Crutchfield: He gets really upset when you show up and take parts from his cars when he’s not there.

Nate Burton: That’s very true. That’s very true. Brad and I didn’t do that once overnight. Now, not at all.

Crew Chief Brad: No,

Nate Burton: not at all.

So yeah. So it, the ratio right now is like one car per acre. So, you know, Hey, whatever, but you know, we’re getting there. So, yeah, the compound, uh, uh, my, my landlord’s hoarding habits, uh, [00:06:00] rubbed off on me a bit. And I started with my, uh, Saab 9 5 and then I got the Volvo Amazon. And then when I found out that the Volvo Amazon that I bought was so rusty and the rear axle needed to be replaced and all that.

I ended up finding another Volvo Amazon out in Tucson, Arizona. That was rust free that I got shipped across country using Uship. And then, uh, it showed up with, uh, with no, uh, with no, no running gear. So just, just the body, no front or rear suspension, but thankfully my landlord on the compound has a forklift.

And of course this car was on a, what is that? Like one of those big. Uh, mobile parking garage trailers. The one with all the weird angles that can tilt and double decker, double decker car trailer thing. We had a

Emily Fox: forklift. It came off,

Nate Burton: but it was, how did they get it off? They had a forklift. [00:07:00] The car was put on a big homemade wooden pallet and then.

Forklifted onto the top of this, uh, car moving trailer thing. Then my landlord had a forklift and I used the forklift to forklift it off and then, uh, got it on the property on the compound.

Emily Fox: That one we were actually able to keep undercover for a while. So that, that one was nice and protected and remained rust free.

But the compound certainly contributed to other habits because That you had those two cars plus your other car. So you want to talk about the Mercedes?

Mike Crutchfield: Oh, no, not yet. Oh, do you still have the Mercedes? I do. Well,

Emily Fox: technically not right now That’s it. That’s another fun one. So why don’t we just talk about the Mercedes?

Well,

Mike Crutchfield: let me set this up first. It was a Mercedes station wagon

Emily Fox: No, no, no, we’ll come back to that.

Mike Crutchfield: With rear facing back seats

Emily Fox: All of your dirty laundry for cars is coming out because I have to live with [00:08:00] you. So, this is about the time when we started living together. And I have two kids and he has two kids, so that’s six people.

That’s a lot of people if you want to go some place as a family together. So, this is This gentleman over here decided, well, we should get a vehicle that can seat all of us. Okay, cool. Well, I’ve been looking at this Mercedes W124 station wagon for a while and I think that’s it. And then, hey, I found one for sale on eBay.

What do you think? I don’t know why we’re buying a car right now. Well, there’s this one and it’s only like,

Nate Burton: I don’t even think we were talking about buying a car. I think I was just showing you the car. What do you think of this? That’s the way it looks.

Emily Fox: I did not at all

Nate Burton: allude to buying a car.

Emily Fox: That’s where it gets even worse.

Is he showed it to me and said, what do you think about it? And I said, it was fine. But I was not under the impression that we were buying a car. We took the kids to a park that day. And then the next words out of his mouth as we were sitting on the bench together was, oh shit. I’m like, what do you mean?

[00:09:00] Oh shit. I bought a car. What the fuck are you talking about? You bought a car. Remember that Mercedes wagon I showed you? I bought it. Can we go to New Jersey and pick it up on Thursday?

Nate Burton: So this car was listed on eBay and when I saw it, it was a fairly low price. I think it was like, I don’t know, like high, high, like 1, 800, 2, 000.

Uh, and I’m like, oh, that’s pretty cheap, so let me put a bid on it, and then, uh, not thinking that I would actually win it, like two days later, uh, I actually won it for like twenty eight hundred bucks.

Emily Fox: The moral of the story is don’t put them in on a car unless you’re actually ready to buy it. So he ended up buying it and we ended up making the trip to New Jersey and the trip up was lovely and then we got To the shop where the car was and then we learned about the car.

I think

Nate Burton: the trip overall was lovely

Emily Fox: It was lovely until you learned about the car

Nate Burton: What was it the? fuel gauge [00:10:00] didn’t work What else did we

Emily Fox: found out that the fuel gauge sender was actually missing

Nate Burton: Was there a hole in the

Mike Crutchfield: tank because

Nate Burton: of that? The guy who sold it to me just said the fuel gauge didn’t work and then when we actually got it home and dug into it there was no fuel sender in the tank at all.

Like somebody had like, it had probably broken at some point. They had taken it out and just put the lid back on. It was gone. Uh, so the fuel, the fuel gauge didn’t work. I feel like something else that, Oh, the locks. Yeah. So we pick up the car, we buy the car, uh, we, we, uh, drive it away and go to some parking lot where we can like actually check it out after we bought it and figure out all the things.

Emily Fox: We went to White Castle.

Nate Burton: Um, and after we checked it out, we then went to White Castle and then we were in like some shady part of New Jersey. As every White Castle is. As, as probably where every White Castle is located. And the locks didn’t. I’ve been there. We’re like car, were you way up the,

Mike Crutchfield: were you way up the turnpike?

[00:11:00] What were you, way up the Jersey turnpike? Yeah. It was like

Nate Burton: right outside

Mike Crutchfield: of New York City. I’ve probably been to that same White Castle. Yeah. You don’t wanna be there without locking your doors.

Nate Burton: Yeah. So we’re like, okay, we need locked car. We get outta the car and I lock the car and like the alarm starts going off.

Um, and so then I had to unlock the car and the alarm thankfully stopped going off. But, uh, the Mercedes, at least the W124 and probably some of the earlier models used a vacuum actuated locking system. So, uh, don’t

Emily Fox: buy a car with a vacuum actuated locking system, please.

Nate Burton: Are you saying

Mike Crutchfield: they suck?

Emily Fox: No, they don’t

That’s the problem.

Nate Burton: Well, when, when mice invade a car and let, that’s an chew on the hard plastic vacuum lines, and they then they know. So let,

Emily Fox: let’s talk about the mice in the car minute. We live with a compound. We’re, we’re in a rural part of Laurel. and mice have been attacking this vehicle. And you’d think that at this point the mice have probably vacated the premises, but no, they did not.

We [00:12:00] found more mice or evidence of mice in said Mercedes and then all of a sudden we didn’t start. Seeing any more mice. We were kind of curious as to why there’s no more mice in the car because we didn’t really do much to get rid of them. Well, we were working on the Mercedes. We were, what, changing the oil.

We, it has, it has a protective cover underneath of it. So we’re both laying on the ground. We’re removing the screws to pull the protective cover off of the bottom of it. And this coil drops down. And we’re like, that’s really weird. And then the coil

Nate Burton: moves. Where did this hose come from? Where did the hose

Emily Fox: come from and why is it moving?

It was a snake. So we both, like, roll away from the car, across the asphalts, at the compound, and there’s a snake in the engine. I’m like, how the fuck do we get the snake out? So I put on gloves and long sleeves, and I ended up pulling the snake out of the engine as it tried to drive back into the chassis to get through to the cabin, which is not fun.

I got bit. [00:13:00] It’s not poisonous. But that was the first snake in the Mercedes. There was another snake, which he’s outside doing an oil change on the Mercedes. And all of a sudden he comes hauling ass into the house. And this is not the first of problems with Mercedes. This is the second. Several of them. Tom Holland asked in the house.

She’s like, Oh my God, I found a snake. What do I do? And I’m like, you gotta be kidding me. I scared the last one. The snake had decided to coil up on the oil containment.

Nate Burton: It was in an oil pan.

Emily Fox: Yeah. It was in an oil pan.

Nate Burton: So that

Emily Fox: one I ended up killing because we didn’t know what kind of snake it was and I was not willing to get bit again.

That

Nate Burton: one was a much smaller snake. It was a baby, but it

Emily Fox: was smaller. The first

Nate Burton: one was like massive four feet long. It was huge,

Emily Fox: but this is all. After we got the Mercedes back. So this genius just like, [00:14:00] no, no, no, no, all the, all the dirty laundry. So this genius, we get the Mercedes and we need to get it through the inspection.

So what does he want to do is he wants to replace the aluminum strips on the door. So, because they didn’t look quite right. This wasn’t related

Nate Burton: to the inspection. It was related to the inspection, getting it ready to go to Wolfson. We had to get

Emily Fox: it through the inspection first. So he’s out in the garage, by the way, compound, large area, multiple out buildings, he’s down at the back part of the property in another building at night after driving what eight hours to take your son to your parents and then back home.

And he’s, he’s scraping away at the aluminum. So molding with a brand new exacto knife and decides to slice open his So we made a trip to the emergency room. He has a lovely scar to show for it, but we had what one week to get the car past inspections and now he can’t work on it. So this, this was my, uh, Hey, honey, can you help me?[00:15:00]

Can you do the brakes? Can you do the rotors? Can you do the emergency brake on the Mercedes? That way it can just pass inspection. That’s how I learned how to do brakes and rotors was this guy with a bum hand.

Nate Burton: Oh, how about the transmission needed to pass inspection? The thing that I sliced my hand open on is certainly not at all related to the inspection.

Priorities that are important.

Mike Crutchfield: I like,

Nate Burton: I like the car to look good.

Mike Crutchfield: I seem to also remember stories of the transmission in that car too. So there, there were a lot of stories. So

Nate Burton: she, she had jumped all over

the place, not keeping the timeline. So we’d go get the car in New Jersey. We, it doesn’t have a working fuel system or fuel gauge.

We get it back. Uh, we, we go to white castle. I mentioned that we go to the, Uh, we go to the, what’s the, Statue of Liberty? Yeah. We take the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty. Yeah. It was a good road trip for a random purchased car on eBay. That ended. Um, that, [00:16:00] that has, that has had a long tail of maintenance and car support tied to it.

Emily Fox: It’s like a bad windows install.

Nate Burton: So we, we, we had to do a bunch of things to get it to pass inspection. Uh, the shocks were completely blown. It drove like,

Emily Fox: like, uh,

Nate Burton: like a,

Emily Fox: a

Nate Burton: donk just bouncing down the road. Um,

Emily Fox: yeah.

Nate Burton: Uh, so just, so we put H& R lowering springs, um, and, uh,

Emily Fox: it looks lovely. It’s, it’s, it’s quite beautiful.

Like, so we, we, we. We borrowed Crutch’s, uh, what is it? Fender flaring? Fender flaring tool. So we, we rolled the fenders so that we could put the nice, the nice new wheels on. They look lovely, especially with everything lowered. Fixed the, uh, grille on it so the grille is nice and shiny. Had to pull parts off of a couple of different ones that was nice to put together.

Thankfully

Nate Burton: Mercedes made a shit ton of the W124 [00:17:00] models. So they’re always in the junkyard when you need to go find parts.

Emily Fox: But it eventually got to the point where we, when we drove it back from New Jersey and a couple of times after that, we didn’t realize that the transmission fluid was low. No. So we did

Nate Burton: all that work to get the car ready to pass inspection.

And because we were going to take a road trip to New Hampshire to take it to Wolfscart. Uh, so Wolfskart is this, it’s actually a, a Volkswagen, uh, focused, uh, car show up in Vermont, in Burlington. Uh, it’s a fantastic car show. So we’re going to take the,

Mike Crutchfield: so

Nate Burton: we took the, we took the Mercedes up there on our first big road trip after buying it later that same summer, um, it got up there with, with no problems really.

Um, and then the night before the show or the morning of the show, we go out to breakfast, get some breakfast burritos, come out to the car, there’s a puddle

Emily Fox: under it, there’s

Nate Burton: a puddle of [00:18:00] oil. Underneath the car.

Emily Fox: Not a drip, a puddle. You could swim in it.

Nate Burton: Puddle. Uh, so we, we drove down to the nearest like auto zone or uh, advanced auto parts, I forget what it was, to buy some oil.

I think it took like two quarts of oil. It was a lot. I mean the engine takes like seven, so it wasn’t, it wasn’t like completely down on oil. This wasn’t the trip

Emily Fox: that we had to replace the alternator, right?

Nate Burton: No, no.

Emily Fox: That was a second, separate trip.

Nate Burton: There have been lots of trips where things broke. So, uh, Added oil, bought some extra cans of it, did the rest of the, the show event in Wolfsgard fine, and then kind of drove, drove back to Maryland.

And on the drive back to Maryland, we noticed that the car squealed when we put it in, when we tried to put it in reverse. It’s a, it’s an automatic, and didn’t think to check the transmission fluid. Probably should have.

Emily Fox: Always check the transmission

Nate Burton: fluid. Uh, we, we got home and, [00:19:00] uh, Turned out the car was super low on transmission fluid, running it low on transmission fluid, caused the, uh, torque converter to heat up and then spin the bearing on the oil pump in the front of the transmission.

Um, and that’s what, that’s what caused all the problems. Along that same point in time. We also noticed that there was oil in the coolant reservoir. Not a good sign. Drain the oil, and we had like a full oil pan of like chocolate mix soup.

Emily Fox: It was really gross. Oh, it was nasty.

Nate Burton: Uh, so, uh, the car ended up having a head gasket problem.

Don’t say it. I mean, it probably had a head gasket problem when I bought it. We

Emily Fox: ended up pulling the engine and the transmission out and neither of us having done an automatic transmission rebuild decided, Hey, let’s try it on a Mercedes, not any of the other German or Swedish cars in the history that he [00:20:00] has worked on.

Certainly not that I’ve worked on.

Nate Burton: So my, my car history has been a whole lot of firsts and usually my firsts involve learning hard

lessons and then watching a whole shit ton of YouTube videos. You’ve

Mike Crutchfield: also just described most of our professions too.

Emily Fox: You gotta learn from somebody. Somebody else has gotta screw it up first so you can just screw it up less badly.

Nate Burton: So we sent the head off to a shop to get the head resurfaced. We did a,

Emily Fox: uh, we

Nate Burton: did a redneck rebuild of the block. So, uh, rings and bearings and seals and all that. And we tried our hand at rebuilding the automatic transmission or at least disassembling of the automatic transmission to figure out. What was going on?

And that’s, that’s, that’s how I found the, the spun bearing on the, on the front oil pump,

Emily Fox: it was, it remained disassembled for a while in the house. By the way, we, we rebuilt [00:21:00] that transmission and the engine in the house

Nate Burton: during the winter,

Emily Fox: during the winter on the compounds. I cleared out space on our porch.

So we had a porch. It was a covered porch. It was an external cold area. So it didn’t have heat going to it, but we had already had car parts lined all the way around the porch for the other cars that we had. So I had to reorganize the porch. So we had a clean space to rebuild the transmission because you can’t rebuild a transmission.

If you’ve got crap everywhere, it has to be clean.

Mike Crutchfield: Is Eric starting to realize why I said we need to have this conversation?

Nate Burton: Well, this is the entire pit stop right here. I’m just going to cut it out. So, so yeah, the nice thing about the compound is there’s plenty of room for cars. The not so nice thing about the compound is that none of that is indoor heated space.

Uh, so, so we pulled the we had to lift the engine into the house. And [00:22:00] do the rebuild inside the porch area.

Emily Fox: And then carry the engine back out of the house. Same thing with the transmission. So we, we ended up rebuilding the transmission. We found first gear because we didn’t have first gear before then.

But then we lost a gear when we did the rebuild. So,

Nate Burton: Well, let’s see. It’s,

Emily Fox: it’s, it’s

Nate Burton: a, I remember, I remember all these with reverse going into the transmission rebuild, reverse didn’t work coming out of the transmission rebuild, reverse worked. But fourth gear

didn’t.

Emily Fox: And we, we were, we drove it like that for a while and then decided we should probably just pay somebody to do a proper rebuild on the transmission.

So we ended up, so we had put the engine and the transmission back in the Mercedes and then we ended up dropping the, our personal rebuild of the transmission out. I still remember Being under the Mercedes when it was jacked up and you’re like, are you sure you want me to take this out? [00:23:00] I’m like, yeah, I got this.

Just drop it. And I’ll shimmy it out from underneath. And he couldn’t believe that I lift the transmission out from underneath of the car like that. And that’s how we got the new one back in was the same way, because you know, we didn’t have a lift.

Nate Burton: We, we, we had to build these, uh, these cribbing blocks out of two by fours, uh, to, to jack the car.

Like, Very two and a half feet up in the air, but they’re, they’re super sturdy and they’re super easy to build just a bunch of kind of two by fours, kind of like Lincoln logs. Um, so,

Emily Fox: so that when we got all that fixed, we thought the Mercedes problems were going to stop. And then you found a hole in the muffler recently.

That’s the

Nate Burton: reason why there are other Mercedes problems.

Emily Fox: There were, but we’re, we ended up replacing the alternator on a hill in a parking lot of an auto zone. On a road trip. On

Nate Burton: the way to the vintage. Without

Emily Fox: any tools to do it. If you’ve seen the alternator on a Mercedes W124. It’s a pain in the [00:24:00] ass to get out.

And it is a pain in the ass to put back in. So if you have. If you are an individual. That is interested in working on cars. Make sure you have a friend. With narrow fingers. Good finger strength and happens to have crocheted hooks and knitting needles nearby because those things come in handy when you’re trying to get stuff out or put stuff in.

And that’s what we ended up doing when we drafted it. We had to jack up the car but it was on a hill and we had to, you know, It was just, it was so hard to do. We were there for a few hours. I think, I

Nate Burton: think, I think that was before, that might’ve been before we lowered the Mercedes.

Emily Fox: Oh yeah. And

Nate Burton: so it was actually possible to like get the alternator out without jacking it up.

Emily Fox: Yeah. Um, but hole in the muffler. And rather than decide to fix the exhaust on the Mercedes and sell,

Nate Burton: you said something that made me think, uh, if you like working on cars,

Emily Fox: buy a Mercedes,

Nate Burton: because you’ll be able to work on them all the time.

Emily Fox: So, the [00:25:00] 1 time that he decided to not work on the Mercedes and take it to a shop, we’ve.

We’ve moved to the country. We are in north northwestern Maryland. We have a

Nate Burton: garage now. We

Emily Fox: have a garage. It’s a wonderful three bay garage. Two stories. Not tall enough to put a four post lift in. But you know, we’re, we’re talking about plans that we can, I I’m

Mike Crutchfield: just, I’m basically around the corner from you, Eric.

Yeah. .

Emily Fox: So, you know the country and you know, the kind of trucks that drive around the country with the exhaust. And so, by

Nate Burton: the way. By the way, I’m the idiot with the European spec golf wagon running around. Oh, nice. Yeah, and I know the guy with the, with the bright orange VR6 right hand. Oh, the right hand drive one?

Yeah, he used to work, he used to work at the Starbucks. He also has a cabrio with the VR6 swap in it. Oh, nice. So, yeah. I probably should have asked you for an exhaust, uh, an exhaust shop that’s decent before I did what I did. Or I just call Mountain Man Dan down from the mountain and he’ll do it. I [00:26:00] usually do all my own work.

And in a, well, he welds. So it’s, it’s a beautiful, well, I have a welder. I know how to weld

too.

I went to, I took a class at Anne Arundel Community College years ago to figure out how to weld. It was great. But, uh, but in a, in a, in a, in a bit of weakness, I decided, ah, I don’t wanna deal with this hole in my exhaust.

I’ll take it to a shop and I’ll just let them do it. And, uh, they’ve had my car for about a month now.

Mike Crutchfield: We

Nate Burton: went and we got it back after like two or three weeks. And, uh, it

Emily Fox: sounded just like all of the other trucks that come down the road. And it’s a Mercedes. It

Nate Burton: sounded like a diesel pickup truck.

Mike Crutchfield: Nice. It sounded like the TT that one time.

Nate Burton: So I, I call, oh, and they also cut my catalytic converter off, even though I didn’t ask for it.

That’s what they pay for. So that’s still

Emily Fox: the shop getting fixed. So we talked to [00:27:00] the shop. Wait, is it at the

Nate Burton: Mercedes? Is it at the Mercedes shop across the road? No, no, no, no. He did

Emily Fox: not take it to the Mercedes shop. He took it to an exhaust place. Is it the exhaust place across

Mike Crutchfield: the street from the Rofo?

Yes.

Emily Fox: I’m getting it fixed. They’re, they’re very nice people. So we’re, hopefully it’ll be done this week. So that, that’s the latest on the Mercedes.

Nate Burton: So I have a couple other questions, some fun questions for you guys, since we’ve, we’ve talked at, you know, at length about this Volvo, but now that you’re a car, car people and Emily’s always been one, even though she doesn’t want to admit it.

Top three favorite cars of all time? Yes.

Emily Fox: I have

Nate Burton: a list and you can’t say the four 80 . She’s, she’s prepared. I have a

Emily Fox: list. So I like the Triumph Herald, the M-B-G-G-T, the 2002 MR two W, uh, W 10. So the earlier models, the, not like the, the, the later models that are curvy. The, the

Nate Burton: [00:28:00] Toyota MR two W 10. Yeah, he said 2002.

Emily Fox: Sorry. Toyota. MR two. Sorry. I’m just excited. The BMW 2002 touring specifically in 1973 model, 1986 Volkswagen Golf GTI Mark 2, 1990s Peugeot 205 GTI. Sorry, I have like four more. No, go

Nate Burton: ahead. Um, you’re on a roll.

Emily Fox: Uh, pretty much any Gremlin. Uh, there was one for sale on Bring a Trailer that was gorgeous. It was purple and lime green and had a lovely, lovely paint job on it.

It went

Nate Burton: for cheap.

Emily Fox: It went for cheap and we didn’t get it. 1974 Datsun 260Z. Renault R5 GT Turbo, the Studebaker Lark, the two door wagon model, and now the brand new Nissan Z Proto. I’ve been eyeballing that one.

Nate Burton: The 400Z? That looks amazing. Aside from the rectangular front. We have a, we have a member that is Contemplating getting rid of his F Type Jag for a 400Z.

So we’re going to see if that’s going to happen. [00:29:00] Um, he says he has to sit in it first. He needs to know if he fits. So, so wow. That you’re, and yet you’re not a car person, you know, or whatever.

That’s a very, and that’s a very specific list, like 1986, mark two, not in 88 or a 92. It’s like, it, it’s gotta be in 86. It’s like, what? So

Emily Fox: I, so I, being around him long enough, I’ve started to spend time reading through the history with some of these cars and noticing the changes in that are made across model years.

And like some of ’em are very specific, like. If you’re going to get a year, this is the year that you’re going to get because it has the least amount of problems. It has the, the styling that everybody is looking for. So there’s, there’s a return on investment if you’re getting them. I don’t really care about the return on the investment part of it.

Like

Nate Burton: around the BMW 2002 versus the, uh, square light. It’s more about like

Emily Fox: what I like. I don’t care what other people like. I like. Specific [00:30:00] styles. I like the 1980s boxiness. I like the weird cars. I like the ugly cars that a lot of people don’t like. I still think the Aztec is absolutely horrid though.

Nate Burton: And I think, oh, just wait. Just wait, wait. Hang on. Our ugly cars episode comes out. It’s a doozy. , what do you think of the HHR?

Emily Fox: I don’t think I’ve seen it.

Mike Crutchfield: The Chevy. HHR ugly. It is the, it’s the Chevy PT Cruiser. Cruiser.

Emily Fox: Oh. Oh. No . Oh, no. Best car

Nate Burton: ever. So now we’ll flip the coin and go to Nate. So if you had a top three cars and you can’t be the Volvo 480, what would it be?

Huh? I, I, for a long time have lusted after a Porsche 911. I kick myself every day for not getting one like 10 or 15 years ago. Is there a specific year like Emily? Like it has to be a 1972 E model. I do have a specific year, uh, [00:31:00] mainly driven based on potential affordability. Um, I like the, uh, like 86 to 89 911 Carrera.

Right when they switched from, uh, what was it? The, the, the old gearbox, the new one. They went from the 915 and it’s got a 3. 2 liter. Yep. I’m a little bit of a Porsche person. Yeah. So I would love one of those. Um, but the prices are still, oh, they’re only going, they’re only going up. They’re only going up. I really love the Renault R5 Turbo 2.

That, again, is way out of price range for, like, ever affording. Uh, so I would settle for a Renault 5, R5 GT Turbo. Kind of looks like the R5 Turbo 2, but it’s not rear engined. It’s normal front engine front wheel drive. A Peugeot 205 GTI. I kind of like hot hatches, uh, but here’s a weird one, a Lotus Esprit Turbo.

Which version of it? The original [00:32:00] one or the later ones? The, the, the mid 80s ones. Yeah, because the Esprit came out in like the late 70s, so it all depends, you know. Uh, although I know that car would be a horrible car to own. Yes. Yeah, the only thing good about those cars is the transmission and it’s a terrible trans.

So I do like a lot of the Volkswagen, uh, type three styles, like the fastback or the square back ones at 411 to get like a, a square back and like rest of mod it with, uh, like a Subaru engine or something in the back.

Mike Crutchfield: Well, obviously you need to shove a W12 in there somehow.

Nate Burton: 1. 8 turbo. I’m just saying.

Anyway, well that’s cool. So, okay, let’s, let’s do the, the million dollar man question, right? Which is, if you had all the money in the world, and you can only buy one car, what would it be?

Emily Fox: Um, I’m [00:33:00] not sure. That’s a hard one. Well, if we’re talking about all the money in the world, There were no r5 gt turbo.

Nate Burton: No, that’s her turbo too.

The real one the real one rear engine

Emily Fox: Yeah, I think that would be it because it’s all the money in the world and those cars are pretty expensive And it’s really

Mike Crutchfield: cool to look at

Emily Fox: yeah, I They’re yeah I think that would be the one for me.

Nate Burton: Um Trying to think of something we might have seen at Oh,

Emily Fox: what was that?

The

Nate Burton: classic remis Uh, so what was it last year, the year before, I don’t know, it’s been so long. We’ve been

Emily Fox: married for two years. So let’s start with that. So two years ago, we went to Germany and we went to Classic Remise.

Nate Burton: Uh, so in Berlin, there’s this amazing old train station, train depot. It has been converted to workshop.

Slash collector [00:34:00] car storage

Emily Fox: museum slash

Nate Burton: museum.

Emily Fox: Yeah,

Nate Burton: and it’s free to the public to walk in and there’s workshops around the outside edge of craftsmen working on doing like pristine nut and bolt restorations on old Ferraris and Mercedes and things like that. And then there’s cars there in storage. Uh, they, they had one of the, what was that?

Uh, Volkswagen electric car from the 2000s or

Mike Crutchfield: the, what was it called? The, Oh, no,

Nate Burton: that’s the one, the one was that it was also that it was, it wasn’t the three wheeled one, right? I don’t think so. Okay. It was,

Mike Crutchfield: it was like the center seat. Really sleek one.

Nate Burton: They had one of those there. Uh, they had really old Lamborghinis and Porsches.

They had the Lancia

Mike Crutchfield: Stratos. That would

Nate Burton: be a pretty cool car. If I had all the [00:35:00] money, they had one of those there. Speaking of Lancias, I, when I was looking and buying my Volvo Amazon, looking for old car that was weird and cheap. And met those requirements. Uh, I came across a Long Sia beta. Some guy had like three of them down in Virginia and they were all rust buckets.

Oh yeah, so over here they sold the Scorpion and they sold the Beta Monte Carlo. They’re both betas basically. They’re, they’re, you have to like that Panda, I call it the Panda front end because it’s got that, that ring around the lights, kind of like a DeLorean, you know, that whole deal.

Mike Crutchfield: Yeah.

Nate Burton: But uh, yeah, they’re interesting little cars.

The last time I saw one of those that was running is when I watched Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo. So yeah. But uh, but at any rate, yeah, no, so that’s. That’s kind of cool. That’s interesting. I mean, we get answers from all over the place, but one of the ones that Brad usually likes to ask is in your opinion, the sexiest car of all time.[00:36:00]

Cool.

Crew Chief Brad: Volvo 480.

Emily Fox: Okay. So, so I’m going to say this because so Nate probably knows that I’m going to say, I believe it’s the mark two Stingray, the one that’s got the hips for miles. And I say that lovingly, like it’s the curves on that car are just beautiful for the era that it was made in. It was, it was very not practical.

And that’s, that’s my opinion. What makes those cars beautiful. It’s not beautiful by modern standards for car design. What did we see recently that Doug was talking about? And it was, it was beautiful. Yeah.

Nate Burton: I cannot remember, but that was the one that’s stuck in my head right now. Yeah.

Emily Fox: It’s it’s, it’s going to kill me, but Doug DeMuro reviewed a car recently.

That was just wonderful. Was that two? Is it 2020? [00:37:00] Right? No,

Nate Burton: we’ll

Emily Fox: figure out what it is. Like later tonight, wake up in the middle of the night and like scream it. Eventually you might hear it, but yeah, I, I like this thing. Right. I think they’re beautiful.

Nate Burton: I like. I like the old Porsche 356. I think those are some of the most beautiful cars.

Yeah, we’ll, we’ll flip it on its, on its nose. And you guys already kind of, you’ve kind of served this up in some respects, but the ugliest car in your opinion?

Emily Fox: I don’t think the Aztec is the ugliest. I think it is very ugly, but I do not think that it is the ugliest.

Nate Burton: I know. I’ll go first. Yeah. Um, I think one of the ugliest cars is the Nissan S Cargo.

Emily Fox: All right.

Nate Burton: Looks like a snail. Yep.

Emily Fox: I don’t know. I can’t really think of one right now. [00:38:00] I don’t know. I, cars have to have character, and if it doesn’t have character, it’s, it’s not really a car. Like, a lot of people think of cars as just something to get them from point A to B, and they should really be more than that.

So, if you don’t enjoy looking at it, and you certainly don’t enjoy driving it, it’s not going to be a pretty car. It’s going to be an ugly car no matter what, from the inside out.

Mike Crutchfield: Well, and that’s as an automotive enthusiast, it I die a little inside every day because so many people just want an appliance.

And so we just, the market gets flooded with an, with appliances, you know, other than the, the halo cars or, or some low production models, there aren’t that many truly sexy vehicles anymore

Nate Burton: that you can just walk

Mike Crutchfield: in and buy.

Nate Burton: They’re all fairly bland. Um, I, I think the Nissan 400Z is like the, one of the most recent cars that I’ve seen that actually [00:39:00] Has a fairly attractive styling to it.

’cause it seems like all the other car makers have just been trying to outdo each other with like way too many lines and, and giant grills. and then things Oh, well what, like, like every new BMW these days, the M three, M four.

Mike Crutchfield: Have you seen the, the picture that takes an X seven grill and puts it on the front of an E 30.

That’s,

Emily Fox: that’s

Nate Burton: a new F four. Yeah.

Mike Crutchfield: Well, and then,

Nate Burton: and then it has an evolution of that that takes the X seven grill and just makes it the entire car with,

Mike Crutchfield: yeah.

Nate Burton: I think the other thing that I dislike about current car design is that because of the popularity of SUVs, probably also due to the ever increasing safety standards and everything, cars just become bigger and heavier and like every car these days is kind of a crossover in look.

They all look like. A car that was put into a photocopier and put on [00:40:00] 150 percent zoom, like enlargement. I don’t call them crossovers. I call them compromises, you know, pretty much what they are.

Mike Crutchfield: So I’m going to be in the boat where we’re probably buying our first crossover here very soon. But it will be unique.

Uh, because we, we are looking at buying one of the first release ID force by Volkswagen. So. It is a crossover style. I mean, I’ve, I’ve other than, you know, the trucks and SUVs I’ve had for towing and the truck I had right in college, everything else I’ve owned has been a sedan hatchback or wagon I’ve, I’ve never owned something in the crossover segment.

Nate Burton: Dude. Once you go van life, that’s it. It’s over. Um, another car that I am really fascinated about and, uh, disappointed that like we don’t get a lot of cool cars here in the, in the U S. Being a kind of hatchback lover, you don’t get a lot of cool, small little cars. [00:41:00] The, the Honda e? Yeah, that’s it. Yes! The, are you familiar with the Honda e?

I am, and we just talked about this on the fourth episode of the drive thru. And my sister is a big fan of European hatchbacks as well, but she’s in the Fiat camp. And so recently there was a comparison between a rendering of Of the Fiat 126 electric and the Honda e and I hate to say the Fiat wins every day.

I don’t think I’ve seen that one. I’ll have to look it up. Brad might be able to find a picture of it. Oh, he’s got the escargot there, but I do think the Honda e is pretty cool. Um, I’d like the, the front grill headlight area. I like the fact that they’ve kind of made this the dashboard. And cluster kind of the seamless, uh, screen that goes across the dash.

Yeah. They, they tried that in the nineties, they tried that in the nineties with the prelude. So, you know, and then integrated the side mirrors as cameras, [00:42:00] uh, built into the screens on the dash. I think that’s pretty neat.

Mike Crutchfield: So I’m looking, I’m looking at a photo of the Hyundai right now. It looks like a movie robot from the early two thousands.

Like it has that front end. It looks like it belongs in Wally. Yeah.

Emily Fox: Yes!

Mike Crutchfield: Just straight out of the movie.

Emily Fox: It’s a friendly car. Children will love it.

Nate Burton: It’s different, you know. Uh, another cool, uh, EV

Emily Fox: is

Nate Burton: the Peugeot E Legend. Have you seen that one?

Emily Fox: It’s pretty.

Nate Burton: That one’s really cool. Yeah, you guys want a nerd on EVs, I gotta connect you with my sister cause she She goes hog wild on that.

When we do the drive through, it’s like, Oh God, there’s like a 10 of them we got to talk about, you know, it’s like

Crew Chief Brad: her favorite is the Bugatti baby.

Nate Burton: Two 45, 000 for a kid’s toy.

Crew Chief Brad: If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about GTM, be sure to check us out on www. [00:43:00] gtmotorsports. org. You can also find us on Instagram at grand touring motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call or text us at 202 630 1770 or send us an email at crewchief at gtmotorsports.

org. We’d love to hear from you.

Nate Burton: Hey listeners, Crew Chief Eric here. Do you like what you’ve seen, heard, and read? Great, so do we, and we have a lot of fun doing it, but please remember, we’re fueled by volunteers and remain a no annual fee organization, but we still need help to keep the momentum going so that we can continue to record, write, edit, and broadcast all of your favorite content.

So be sure to visit www. patreon. com forward slash GT motor sports, or visit our website and click in the top right corner on the support and donate to learn how you can help. Can [00:44:00] help.

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