WSIB: Teens & First Timers!

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Our panel of break fix petrolheads are back for another rousing what should I buy debate. Using unique shopping criteria, they are challenged to find our first time collector the best vehicle that will make their friends go, where’d you get that, or what the hell is wrong with you, at the next Cars and Coffee.

Crew Chief Eric: Dear Abby, my daughter Stacy is looking for her first car, and has her heart set on a Volkswagen Bug. Do you have any suggestions?

Crew Chief Brad: You know, it’s not uncommon for us to receive an email or text like this, one from friends or co workers. As fathers of future petrolheads, we couldn’t resist getting the band back together for yet another What Should I Buy debate.

Crew Chief Eric: Mind you, these messages are sometimes never more detailed than what you just heard. But it’s enough to start the conversation, and like all What Should I Buy episodes, we have some great content. some shopping criteria. So obviously the next logical questions are how old, how many miles, and what’s your budget?

Crew Chief Brad: Tonight we’re bringing together some of the OG What Should I Buy crew. Not [00:01:00] Man Dan, Rob Lohrs, and Mike Storytime Crutchfield, but it wouldn’t be a What Should I Buy without our panelists, William Big Money Ross. Mark, the data cruncher shank and Don Weeberg from garage style magazine.

Crew Chief Eric: And in this episode, our panel of extraordinary petrol heads are challenged to find our first time driver, something that will make their friends go, wait, you drove that at 16.

And with that, welcome back to another. What should I buy guys?

Crew Chief Brad: Welcome. Welcome.

William Ross: Hello, Stacy’s mom. Got it going on.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah.

William Ross: And Scotty doesn’t

Crew Chief Eric: know

Crew Chief Brad: Eric alluded to off air. This is the first time I think everybody on the show is a parent.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s right.

Crew Chief Brad: We’re all parents. So we all are going to go through this or have gone through this at some point in our lives.

Crew Chief Eric: This topic resurfaces every couple of seasons and it’s like, Oh man, we’re going to do this again. How are we going to solve this puzzle? I found it extremely challenging in doing the research because, you know, when we [00:02:00] do other What Should I Buy’s, we’re buying for fictitious collectors. We have these outrageous budgets.

We’re trying to add cars to our garages and it’s all glitz and glam. And then when you bring it down to earth and you’re like, what would I buy my 16 year old? I was like completely dumbfounded. You know, it’s almost like writer’s block. I’m like, I don’t know where to go from here. What’s funny is Don gave me a call out of the blue and he’s like, Hey, I’m shopping for my daughter and I’m struggling with this.

Would you guys mind helping me through the thought process? And I said, Oh my God, this is like the old. What should I buy? Yeah, let’s do this. Let’s rock and roll. So tonight Don’s in the hot seat. He’s the one with the shopping criteria and we’re trying to buy a car for his daughter. So why don’t you refine your shopping criteria a little bit for us now?

What’s the budget? How old, how many miles? What are you thinking?

Don Weberg: Okay, well, according to my wife, the budget is zero. We’re not going to spend any money, we’re not going to buy a car, we’re going to stick to what we’ve got in the driveway, which is a Honda Accord, a Ford Flex, and a Caprice Classic of all things.

And a DeLorean. [00:03:00] Well, yeah, but I’m not going to send that to high school with her, you know. So those are the three that would be as Eric says in the hot seat. I don’t want the caprice going all original paint everything, so I don’t want that thing sitting out. The flex is kind of a waste for that thing to go sit in a parking lot for nine hours of the day when my wife and I are zipping all over town and we usually have the dog with us.

And the dog wears the Accord because he’s just too big for it. The Accord, on the other hand, my daughter’s terrified of. It’s simply too quick. So she doesn’t like how fast that car does everything. So she doesn’t want that thing. So if my wife has her say. That’ll be it. One of those three cars she picks, or she keeps getting rides from us.

That said, what is the budget? I would say, you know, no more than 10 grand. We’d love to come in under that. I grew up the son of a contractor, so my first vehicle was a 74 150. It was fly yellow. You’ll be proud of that, William. I’m from, uh, Being literally a contractor’s truck to a contractor’s truck, [00:04:00] to our runaround truck, to my dad’s hot rod that I got to drive to high school.

Beautiful truck once my dad was done with it. You know, I was just happy to have a car. We’re of that generation. We were just thrilled. 16 years old. We got a car waiting for us and there it is. Would I have preferred other cars? Oh, hell yeah. Absolutely. But when I got to school and all the guys. Saw that yellow truck and they wondered what is Don driving?

Like, I mean, his dad’s a contractor, so he’s always had trucks around, but what is he driving? Why is it bright yellow? Who has a bright yellow contractor truck? Oh, because this truck was retired. It’s no longer in service. My sister had it before me. My dad was afraid of my sister’s driving. He painted it bright yellow so that everybody would see her coming.

Oh man, it’s like that

Crew Chief Eric: episode of Who’s the Boss. Did he strap tires to the side of it too? No, it wasn’t that bad.

Don Weberg: Wasn’t that bad. My dad did tell people he was worried that Holly, my sister, was a bit of an aggressive driver, a bit of an absent minded driver, a bit of a fast driver. Bright yellow [00:05:00] to let everybody know she’s coming.

Now it becomes my vehicle. I like it. It’s cool. It’s quirky. It’s a car. I don’t care. I’m 16. I got a car. I’m happy. But all the guys were smitten with it. They thought it was the coolest thing in the parking lot. Look at those white wheels. Who the hell puts white wheels on a car? Well, yeah, US Mags. They still had the white wheel with the red and blue stripe around the edge.

Under the hood is a four 60 with a four barrel with a crank. I mean, dad built the thing out at forget what it is now, but at the wheels, that thing was putting out somewhere around five 50 horse now, Dan, it was a single cab, eight foot bed. With 550 horse at the wheels. This was not a friendly vehicle to a 16 year old kid.

I was scared to death of that truck because I knew what it could do. And so me alone with this beast, believe me, I was not going over 30 miles an hour or going to school. I was just easing through stuff. Well, First day there, my best friend jumps in the truck, wants to ride home. Okay, this is [00:06:00] going to be fun.

Well, he sees I’m driving like a grandma. He’s like, dude, aren’t you? Okay. Well, my mom and dad told me, be careful because the brake booster is failing. So you don’t want to get in a situation where you have to slam on the brakes. Okay. What do you do at 16 years old when your best friend is encouraging you?

Holy Jesus wept that thing. I could not believe. The bolt, we were forced back into the seat. The rear end started barking, the rear end started fish tailing a bit. And me being the animal rights activist, a cat runs right out in front of us. I hit those brakes as hard as I can, straight down to the floor.

No master cylinder, no nothing. We’re just hosting along. So now I’m freaking out. I have no brakes. I’ve just killed a cat. I mean, I am blowing up inside. Well, my buddy, he says, that is fine. He laid down, the truck went right over him. We’re fine. How are the brakes? Well, pump them up, pump them up and you’re okay.

You’re fine. But I’ll tell you something. It scared me so bad. I took a long time to learn how to drive that [00:07:00] truck. It was out of respect that truck taught me a mess with me, kid. I’ll put you around a pole. And that was important.

Mountain Man Dan: It taught him to respect it and it made him gun shy. Every novice driver has some point that that’s going to happen.

Like, and for me with my daughter, it actually happened before she even got her license when we were up at pit race and did a carting event. Someone nailed her hard and yelled at her and it freaked her out. And for her actually getting in the car, driving a road or even getting on a track. Bricked her out for at least a year.

Like she was adamantly against it. I’m like, that was carding in a car. It’s completely different.

Crew Chief Eric: What it demonstrates Don is that these first cars, sometimes not necessarily by your choice are part of your story as a petrol head. That’s what we say. Everybody has a story. Every car has a story. And so, okay.

If cars just. Basic transportation, like a bicycle or any other appliances, then it’s just, Oh, I had a Toyota Corolla big deal. You know what I mean? But the adventures you had in the Corolla, like the things that allowed you to do, [00:08:00] that’s the thing that Dan and I talk about a lot is how do we bring that to the youths and say, This is why cars are cool.

It’s the freedom of driving and this and go, and you can do these things. And that car took you to that place where you met those people or you did that thing. And now it’s a memory and that car is part of that memory. And so I don’t want to say you want to start them off with the right car, because that’s the wrong thing, but you want to get them excited about what they’re going to drive.

It’s like, Oh yeah. It’s grandma’s Buick 88, like, oh, big deal. You know what I mean? There’s a lot to that. And then again, that goes into that social dynamic of the car and who your friend circle was. And maybe like you said about the truck, it drew people in because it was a point of attraction in the parking lot.

Don Weberg: I have fond memories of pickups as being first vehicles because you can beat the hell out of them. Honestly, there’s no repercussions or it’s a truck. It’s meant to take some abuse. You’re going to do fine.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, I’m glad you opened that door, Don. So let’s talk about first cars before we dive a little deeper into some of our suggestions and pick [00:09:00] your brain on more of your shopping criteria.

So Rob, what about you? First car.

Rob Luhrs: Learned on an 87 Volkswagen Vanikin GL Synchro.

Crew Chief Eric: My man.

Rob Luhrs: With a manual transmission, but the first car I bought myself was an 8 valve Scirocco from 85.

Crew Chief Eric: See, this is why we bring Rob to the party.

Don Weberg: Yeah, I’m noticing a little bias here with the Germans, with Rob and Eric, and then there’s Mark in the background scouring at me.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, so Mark, what about you? What was your first car?

Mark Shank: 89 Chevy Cavalier. It’s a good car. It’s kind of an American. Turn, but it was a good car. I have genuine affection for it. The first one I really loved was a 94 Z28. Very different kind of car at that point.

Crew Chief Eric: William, what about you? First car?

William Ross: 1983 Mazda GLC hatchback.

Oh

Crew Chief Eric: my man. My man. Yeah, high speed. Brad, I remember your first car.

Crew Chief Brad: It was a 1991 red Honda Civic hatchback with four on the floor.

Crew Chief Eric: Since nothing ever leaves the mountain, I’m sure your first car is [00:10:00] still up there. Dan, what was it? Actually, it’s not here. What?

Mountain Man Dan: Are we talking first owned car or first car that actually was put on the road and driven?

Oh my god.

Crew Chief Brad: Dan still owns all of his first cars. My

Mark Shank: point. You thought my story was gonna be long? The first one that was yours, Dan. If you considered it yours, then it counts.

Mountain Man Dan: They were mine. So the first car I had was a 64 Chevy two Nova that I was in the process of fixing up and then unfortunately family got on part times and had to sell it.

First car actually put on the road was actually a 82 Toyota

Crew Chief Eric: Corolla. They could not be any more different. Those two. Yeah, and I’ll round it out. I had an 87 Audi coupe with five speed. I had the weirdest car in the parking lot at high school. That’s for sure.

Rob Luhrs: I don’t know that’s that much weirder than the Scirocco just to be clear.

Crew Chief Eric: Everybody knew what a Scirocco was though.

Rob Luhrs: Everybody knew what a Scirocco was, knew what an Audi coupe was. At least I did. All my friends did.

Mark Shank: Back then, Audis were in the doghouse. Nobody had Audis.

Crew Chief Eric: Exactly. And our resale value was printed right across the grill. You know, all zeros, worth nothing. Being the weirdest car in the world.

[00:11:00] Driven by the weird kid at school worked out. Dan, when you and I were preparing for this and talking about this, you made a very good point about the shopping criteria and kind of bracketed it using the way we do our new, what should I buy episodes, which is. Three tier, the parents assisting in the purchase, the 16 year old buying it themselves and funding it through, you know, side hustles and part time jobs and things like that, or the silver spoon option.

So I kind of wondered with your first cars, how many of you guys bought it yourselves? Well, myself. Okay. So that’s two. How many were a hand me down? Okay. So that’s two more. And then our parents bought it for us. Okay. And that’s the rest of us. And then there’s William. Okay. So that rounds us out. So we’re kind of evenly split amongst those three options that you mentioned, Dan.

So Don, this kind of leads back to you. How do you want this to work out? Do you want her to work for the car? Do you want to gift her a car to your wife? Once it’s been 0.

Don Weberg: Yeah, [00:12:00] honestly, I think how it’ll work is, I mean, if I get my way. And she doesn’t end up in the Caprice of the Flex. Michelle and I will buy a car for her.

And it’ll just be one of those ex rental Buicks or something that we can afford, that she can beat up, you know, learning how to not hit curbs, things like that. I think it would just be something like that. Now that said, she herself, Caitlin, is a bit of a car girl. She has a penchant for the modern VW Beetles.

She loved Beetles period. She doesn’t care how old they are, but she definitely has more of an interest in the newer Beetles. Outside of that, it basically goes a little wonky. She starts loving 50, 51 Hudson, like Doc Hudson. She really starts getting into the, uh, the Corvettes, which I think that’s She loves everything we have, the Fiat, the Mustang, the DeLorean, the Caprice has long been one of her favorites.

Literally, ever since she was a little girl, she’s just been a little gaga for the Caprice. She would love to take that to school, and we’ve actually talked about finding another brick to join [00:13:00] this brick, and She has my flavor a little bit with the Baguan paint. Definitely interested in having a little fun with hippie schemes or things like that.

Part of me says, yeah, an old brick could be perfect for that. And then there’s another part of me that’s like, you know, those bricks are starting to dry up and they’re starting to gain in some value a little bit. Getting a little harder for me to say, yeah, go ahead, honey. Go take that brick and screw it up.

Crew Chief Eric: Leads into another question, which is the next logical conclusion. And I’m sure I’m going to get a church nod for this one is. The maintenance part of this aspect, which is a lot of things a first time driver forgets about it was sort of the bill I was handed when I got my first car. It’s like, we’re going to buy you the car and here’s a bag of wrenches and you’re on your own after that point.

So I was there to figure out how to pay for my insurance. Anything that broke, if I wanted to do mods, it was on me. And it always seemed like on the Audi, the magic number was like 1100 bucks. Every time I turned around, I had to come up with a thousand dollars to replace suspension or do exhaust or whatever, because it was a 10 year old car by the time I got it.

Right. So it needed everything. What’s your thought [00:14:00] there? Is she going to go to work to pay for that stuff? If something breaks as a, Hey dad, I’m on the side of the road. How is that going to play out for you guys?

Don Weberg: It’s funny. That kind of brings us right into a secondary point that I always concerned about in my family, we were car people.

We grew up cars. We had my God at any given time, there were 10 cars hanging around the house. We just had the ones that were specific to us that we drove every day, but they were all, except for my mom and my dad’s dailies, All of them were old. They were all in some form of disrepair. It’s interesting, as I went through life, I had fun with that.

I bought the Fiat, I bought tons of Lincolns, tons of old Dodges, tons of whatever I could get my hands on. And this is where I start to sound a little un far guy. Earned up a ton of cash. I mean, just burned through it like a wildfire. And looking back, one of the last old cars was supposed to be a Mercedes.

It belonged to my grandmother. Things didn’t go right with me and my grandfather, so I ended up not buying the car. But I ended up with a very slightly used Toyota 4×4 pickup. Absolutely [00:15:00] gorgeous. Bright red. The whole in yard. That car. Got me through 15 years, something like that. I don’t even know, but it got me through everything.

Got me through three colleges. Got me through God knows, you know, how many friends, relationships, Hey, Don, what are you doing this weekend? I’m doing something else. The keys are on the shelf. I don’t want to help you move. That was the only problem with having a pickup. I’m sure Mountain Man Dan can attest to that as well.

But what resonated with me was the Mercedes was a 73. There’s no way in hell. Okay. That Mercedes would have gone through everything that Toyota went through day in, day out, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it hit me how little money I spent on that truck. Yes, there was the cost of it. That was one of the ones, you know, my parents were going to buy it.

I had to come up with the money. I had to make the payments. I was working at Paramount. Everything was good. So I was fine. But I think when all was done, interest everything, I think I was out the door 17, 000 and change. So 18, 000 for that truck. And yet, look at everything it got me through, trouble [00:16:00] free. I put one set of tires on that truck, one, that’s it.

I put no brakes on that truck, none. I always took it to the dealer because I was my father’s worst nightmare. Never put brakes on the truck, always downshifted. It needed one clutch, so that kind of makes sense. No brakes, but I replaced the clutch. Still, total everything up in that truck, I didn’t spend all that much money to get me through to the next vehicle, which was the Australian GTO, which was another absolutely fantastic car.

But we’ll go into that another time. So the thought is much as I’d love to get her an old beetle or. An old caprice to screw around with. I remember the thought of how well the Toyota served me. And I look at her and I think, okay, you’re just starting high school. You know, let’s go screw something up.

Let’s get the wrecks out of our system. Let’s get that and do that with some old jalopy. That’s not going to bother anybody if you wreck it. But I live in, and this is another part of the equation we need to take in very seriously. I have never seen worse drivers in my life. Then where I live right now, [00:17:00] where are you?

The Dallas area, Dallas, Fort Worth.

Rob Luhrs: But every road is seven lanes wide and dead straight.

Don Weberg: Pretty much. They are extremely emotionally driven, no pun intended, but what they love to do is get right on your back bumper. We all love the littler cars. They’re fine. They’re fun. They’re enjoyable all the way, but yeah, it does have to do with.

You drive those things around here, you’re gonna get bullied.

Rob Luhrs: I towed the tractor, I loaded the Miata everywhere I went. It would be hilarious to be next to someone’s, like, perfectly normal SUV and think, like, they can’t see me at all. I am below the window line of the visibility of that 18 year old who doesn’t know what they’re doing in their mom’s caravan, right?

So there’s a fear factor to saying, like, Get a BRZ or get a TC or Miata, like there’s a fear factor.

Don Weberg: Yeah, well, it’s funny though, you bring that up the rear view mirror. I can’t see the Miata. If it pulls up close enough to the flexes rear end, you can’t see it. You cannot see that car. So yeah, there’s a definite fear factor.

There’s little cars.

Rob Luhrs: So you need to roll coal so you can throw giant black. Yeah, so you can start rolling [00:18:00] coal and they’ll back off

Don Weberg: pretty

Rob Luhrs: fast,

Don Weberg: right? Now being from LA, it is a different driving style in California period compared to Texas. all the way around. So I had to relearn, okay, how are these guys expecting me to drive?

It kind of helped adapting to how they do things, but this is God’s honest truth. We had a friend visiting us, Sarah, two years ago, something like that. She came out for a weekend visit. In that three days that she was with us, nine car wrecks, nine that we counted just in Mansfield, which is the exact town where I live.

They are scary out here. They’re very emotional. Most of them drive massive pickup trucks with bumpers that weigh as much as the DeLorean itself. Pure steel sitting out there, just waiting to topple something. This is where the Flex is really, really fantastic because it’s not huge. It’s not a suburban, but it’s got that old dog sense to it.

You know, it’s there, you know, it’s big. You know it’s heavy, it’s gonna fight back if you nudge it. People know that. You put the Accord on the road, my god, you’re [00:19:00] getting bleed left, right, and center. They just cannot wait to shove you out of the way. Even if you’re in the slow lane doing 80, and I’m not kidding you, 80 out here is sort of the beginning of, this is our freeway speed.

They just lie out here. So it’s very unsafe. Bottom line, so when I look at the Beetle, when I look at even the Caprice, even though the Caprice is a solid piece of work, no airbags, it’s very unforgiving, in a wreck, it’s really not going to be your best friend. So I keep looking at vehicles that are a bit safer, a bit more solid, a bit more robust.

But my thought is, I’d love for her to have a car that’s gonna see her, assuming we go to college, at least get her halfway through her college education. And fortunately, we’re in this era right now, you go back to the 90s, some of these cars are tanks, the way they were engineered, because safety was a huge concern for everybody.

Mark Shank: I do think that you have to think seriously about crash safety standards and how they matured. Which challenges a lot of the [00:20:00] cars from the 90s, post 98, there was a big change in the crash safety standards and that’s why a lot of those cars got heavier after that.

Don Weberg: Hope that gives you a few of the parameters we’re thinking about.

Crew Chief Eric: All of us are in different parts of this journey, right? Even as fathers of petrolheads. So, you’re right in the middle of this. Rob’s right behind you. Dan just went through this and so did William. And then obviously Brad, Mark, and I are on the, still on the front end of this, catching up with you guys. So what I want to do is turn it to Dan and to William to say with your girls, what did you go through?

What was some of your thought process? What were the considerations that you made for your daughters picking their first car?

William Ross: Being in Ohio, one four wheel drive, two safety, It’s not like we get blizzards every other week or something like that, but it gets pretty shitty.

Don Weberg: When it snows, it doesn’t snow here, it just gets ice.

That’s all we get. We just get ice.

William Ross: Ice doesn’t matter if you got six wheel drive. Doesn’t matter. You’re gonna slide.

Don Weberg: Now, frankly, I had a ball learning how to fishtail and learning how to correct in my old truck. I thought that was more [00:21:00] fun than anything. You get that light rear end out there, it’s gonna be a little weird, but times have changed.

You know, the police are not so Open minded about a young person learning how to correct the skid and things like that.

William Ross: But the big thing was for me was just the four wheel drive. Kind of like how Don’s saying, you know, where he’s at. Your child’s a new driver. They’re not really adjusting themselves to environment and how they should be driving or whatnot.

It’s more like they’re just freaking out going, Oh, okay. What’s going to give them the most sense of calmness? So they feel safe. We had a 2014 Acadia just sitting there. So she wasn’t fond of it because of the size, but she got accustomed to it. She got used to it as what you do with anything. Yeah. And then she’d get towed her friends all around and everything like that.

But for her, that worked the best. We lucked out. So that’s what I had sitting there.

Mountain Man Dan: The initial plan was to get an older vehicle to restore with her. So she’d know every nut and bolt, but unfortunately budget didn’t allow that to happen for what she wanted. So she wound up commandeering one of my trucks and that’s what she drives the majority of the time.

And I have a car here that she’ll [00:22:00] eventually start driving once she gets a little bit better driving manual. Surprisingly, she’s really taken to my dually and every chance she gets, she steals that from me. It’s good having her in a bigger vehicle, but at the same time, it’s scary because I tell her all the time, like, the dually’s a lot wider than the other vehicles.

You hit something, you’re paying for it.

Mark Shank: I say the same kind of crap. Are you really gonna bankrupt your child if they hit something with your dually? That’s not worth that.

Mountain Man Dan: Luckily not, but I’ll definitely get some sweat and labor out of her if she weren’t a record.

Mark Shank: Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. Alright, honest answer.

I appreciate that.

Crew Chief Eric: That’d be a lot of cursing, that’s for sure. But

Mark Shank: the thing is, they don’t realize that, so it’s a valid threat. It’s a valid threat. They don’t appreciate the reality of the situation. You’re just trying to make a threat that registers. I get it.

Rob Luhrs: Is the truck that she does use, is that a manual or automatic?

Mountain Man Dan: It’s an automatic. It’s actually a 86 Chevy K ten four wheel drive. Square bucket.

Crew Chief Eric: Nice. Don, is manual an option or that’s off the table right now? Automatics only, right?

Don Weberg: It’ll go either way. Okay. Caitlyn and Michelle both wanna learn how to drive stick shift. [00:23:00] So now that the Fiat’s back and now that the weather’s getting a little better, we do have plans to go out in the neighborhood and run the fiat around and Okay.

Learn how to do that. So we’ll go. We’ll go either way.

Rob Luhrs: I want to ask, for the two of you who’ve already gone through this, were your choices and criterias based on your experience with your first cars, or what you wanted to correct from what you felt happened in your first one? Because my current thought with my kids are very different for very different reasons, so I really want to hear what’s going through there on that side.

William Ross: I wanted to get her a small car, it was a 5 speed or something, you know, she’d learn how to drive a stick in that, but It was weird because she wanted to get her driver’s license, but she was really nervous and scared about driving. I think it was probably five or six months that she had her license before she even got on the highway.

Rob Luhrs: Did she learn from you or from your wife or from elsewhere? My wife, I

William Ross: got zero patience. I helped her a little bit with the maneuverability stuff, kind of learning that. But other than that, no, she always went out with my wife. I was putting my foot through the imaginary brake in the floor in the passenger seat all the time.

And it would drive her nuts. She’s like, stop that. Like I said, I [00:24:00] wanted to get her a manual. Thought was, okay, Hand on the steering wheel, hand on the gears lever, she’s moving, she can’t be on her phone, da da da, you know, that kind of stuff. As a kid though, you’ll figure it out. I did. We all did, I had a manual.

You figured it out how to drive with big golf, whatever, and everything like that. Texted with manuals with a 9E

Rob Luhrs: phone.

Crew Chief Eric: With T9, you’re

Rob Luhrs: younger than I am. I had already long since learned to drive before like the first car phones were installed.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s a rite of passage to learn how to drive with your one knee.

Rob Luhrs: Yes. The one thing I still do, my kids in the backseat, they’ll be like, dad, where are your hands doing? I’m like, I’m busy eating this.

Don Weberg: My knees got control of the car. You’re fine. Somebody just said it, and I think it was William. You do sort of get comfortable with the car. You do sort of figure out. The idiosyncrasy of the car.

So

Rob Luhrs: Dan, if you want to answer the same question that William answered.

Mountain Man Dan: No, the automatic just mainly having as to what was here, but having her drive a manual is definitely a requirement I had for her. Surprisingly, the first manual she drove was my race car up at pit race a couple of years ago. And I was amazed that she didn’t stall it out with the clutch that’s in it.

She’s [00:25:00] gotten better with manuals where she has a dirt bike and stuff like that. She rides, but initially she wanted an old Volkswagen bug. And then probably when she was about 12 years old, that changed and she decided she wanted an old fifties model truck. Yeah. But unfortunately, I couldn’t find one in decent enough condition for the prices they were asking.

Because initially I was going to get her the vehicle for her 13th birthday and I was going to give us three years to rebuild it. And my biggest concern was her knowing how to work on the vehicle. If something happened, she broke down alongside the road. It was more along the fact of her being a female and not having someone come take advantage of her not knowing the vehicle than whether it was manual or automatic car or truck.

With the truck, I’ve taught her damn near everything on it, and she’s been around square bodies since she was little because I’ve owned them since before she was born. It’s one of those things, luckily, that generation of GMs in general, whether it be car or truck, engine wise, are very similar if it’s a small block.

Crew Chief Eric: So Rob, all that being said, where’s your head at?

Rob Luhrs: So going back to sort of what William said, it’s definitely manual. I mean, my first driving experience was taking the whole family to upstate [00:26:00] New York in that Vanagon manual, and that was the first time I had driven the car, in any car. And I just remember, like, getting on the highway was fine, and then I get to these stoplights, and at one point, I was in the middle of New York somewhere.

I couldn’t get it started again in first. Turns out I was in third, finally figured it out. But I had cars behind me, you know, swearing, swinging around you and doing everything. Looking back, like, I loved that fear factor, because that fear factor, like, gave you a sense of what a privilege more than a right it is to drive, and to have to understand how the car works and how everything works.

In order to drive it. And it wasn’t an appliance, right? It wasn’t like I hit the power button on my electric vehicle and to step on the gas and it’s just going to go. It was no, no, I need to know how to do a few things and sort of earn the respect of this is how a car works and how I interact with other people on a road.

And I loved that experience. You know, I have the GTI now and I’ve considered getting something different. And I’m like, Nope, either that or a golf or something in that realm is what I want my kids to learn on. Whether I want that to be the first car is different. I think it’s a little too quick, but my head is 100 percent on it has to be a manual.

I don’t want an automatic. Even now, [00:27:00] right? I have friends who are like, Oh, can I borrow your car? I’m like, you don’t know how to drive stick. You know, you can’t help. Like I got a buddy who drives stick, but his wife doesn’t. And so whenever we try to trade off cars, it’s like this mental gymnastics. I’m like, no, my kids need to learn how to drive stick.

Crew Chief Eric: I agree with you there because I’ve always. idea that if you learn how to drive a manual, then you can pretty much drive anything, whether it’s a tractor or a truck or a motorcycle. If you understand the mechanics of how a manual transmission works, it’s not just about the car you have, but also older cars too, because if you end up in the collector world or if you, somebody goes, Hey, Let’s go for a spin.

And you know, my old nine 11 SC, well, you look down and you go, well, that’s an interesting anti theft device. You got to learn what the three pedals do and it makes you a better driver. And I agree with William with the distracted driving thing too. I mean, yes, you can defeat that, but realistically you’re more situationally aware when you drive a manual.

Because there’s more things you have to physically do when you’re driving. So I’m with you on all that stuff.

Rob Luhrs: When I got to college, I ended up driving buses. I drove transit buses and I ended up being an instructor of new [00:28:00] students who came in and even driving buses. And again, we’re driving those big transit buses around Western Massachusetts.

All the training was done on manual transmission, double clutching school buses. And so we got kids who had never driven a stick before that are coming in. They’re like, Oh, it’s, I want to learn how to drive buses. You know, they watch bus drivers with automatics. And they’re like, wait, I got to learn this.

Every one of them by going through that learning process, I would put up the drivers that we had, even in college as college kids, right. Who are just all a bunch of punks. We would go to these bus rodeos and we would always finish in the top part because we were one of the few groups in new England that would mandate only manuals for instruction purposes.

Mark Shank: Manuals with no synchros. That’s a big difference relative to what. People deal with 100 percent

Rob Luhrs: and I feel like even seeing it at the college level just made a huge difference in the abilities of all the drivers, but coming out of driving manual Volkswagen buses and stuff like I didn’t find it to be that big a deal because I understood the mechanics of it.

It was pretty easy.

William Ross: Really want to mess, get a three on the tree. Yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh boy. Or does Chaveau with that umbrella handle in the dashboard. [00:29:00]

Rob Luhrs: And that first VW. Plus even like this van against synchros have so much low end torque that like, you know, once we figured out the gear thing, like you don’t even need the gas.

You just slowly release the clutch and it’ll go 10 miles an hour. Fine. And so like, it’s a easy car to learn on. That was kind of a fun aspect of it too. But yeah, that’s where my head’s at was purely gotta be manual. I want it small. I also, I worry about this might be a cultural thing. I worry about a vehicle that has too much.

People storing ability because I know that my kids will easily get, you know, six kids in the back going crazy and boom, that’s, you’re going to have it. Like the one accident I ever had in my entire life as a kid was driving the bus back from an ultimate frenzy return with five people in the car and everyone’s talking and chattering and I’m like, okay, yep, okay, yep, I’m fine.

I’m fine. And, uh, Sideswiping a guardrail is you just get distracted from all the people. And it wasn’t phones or stereos, it’s the people. And so I’m a big fan of like, two doors, tight cars, smaller cars. Like I had the Scirocco, and it was one of those like, you gotta work to cram four people, and none of them are happy.

But I want less space. And so like, the idea of a pickup is great, because yes, as they get used to it, they put seven kids in the back to [00:30:00] go drive into the mountains to go do stuff, fine. But the drive into school and back, you’re not picking up seven people. You don’t have people throwing stuff in the back and distracting you.

So you’re actually a less distracted driver with having less people capacity in the car.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s a very valid point. You sort of tripped over here because Don and I talked about this off air. There’s a sociological aspect to your first car. And do you want to be the cool kid from 90210 with the ZR1 Corvette and everybody goes, Ooh, look at him.

He’s the next James Dean. Or are you suddenly the designated driver because you have mom’s old minivan. And to your point, you can tote around nine or 10 of your drunk friends and you’re never having any fun at the party. Not saying that you should be doing that.

Mark Shank: Don’t drink anymore.

Crew Chief Eric: But there’s sort of this.

now social dynamic that builds around your first car because Rob’s the guy with the van. We’re going to go ask Rob and to Don’s point, well, you got the pickup. Can you help me move? And you’re like, I don’t want to do that. So to your point, choosing that first car actually puts your kid into a weird [00:31:00] social swim lane.

And I think you need to be careful about what you choose based on their personality, based on who their friends are. Again, this is why I said at the beginning, this is a very challenging subject because I never realized how many layers there were to buying a car, especially a first car.

Mountain Man Dan: So I have to disagree a little bit with the social impact there, compared to when we were getting our license, we were like dead set wanting it the day we were allowed to.

Today’s generation is not as. Press to get their license and my daughter wanted to get hers, but it was like it wasn’t near as much as me. I was like out the gates running as fast as I could. My daughter’s nonchalantly walking to get hers basically. And I’ve noticed more and more, especially dealing with all her friends.

They don’t care as much what the car is as we did. Which is surprising because it’s like a completely different dynamic to the way we looked at cars compared to how they look at it now. And I’m not sure how your guys kids are with how it might change by the time yours are getting their license, Eric, because that’s a couple years from now.

Mark Shank: I agree. It feels almost European in the sense that you used to say [00:32:00] Americans were house. Car clothes and Europeans were clothes house car in priority of spending, just kind of like a stereotype when not a lot of kids get their license. The fact that you have your license in a car in and of itself makes you unique.

It doesn’t matter what the hell drive period. End of story. And so the fact that you have a car stands out when you’re 16 or 17 years old in a modern context where we went from a, you know, 70 to 80 percent of 16 year olds getting licenses down to, it’s like something like under 40 percent or whatever today.

I think if you’re on this podcast, you obviously enjoy automobiles and you’d rather your kid’s first car be an N A or N B Miata. Look, it’s just two of you and it’s a manual and it’s a little car, but SUVs and pickup trucks are a thing. And I don’t want my kid to die. So that’s probably not going to be their first car.

Crew Chief Eric: But there’s the other side of this too, Mark, where I look at some of the kids that are driving around the [00:33:00] schools that our kids go to, and I’m like, I would kill for the hand me downs that they’re getting. I’m like, you’re driving your dad’s old five series. Like, seriously, I had a 2, 000 piece of crap and that was expensive back then.

You know what I mean? So I look at some of these other cars and I’m like, you have got to be kidding me, but there’s a social dynamic to that too. Even if you’re receiving a 10 year old BMW, it’s a 10 year old BMW. It’s like, Holy cow. That’s a good car by the standards of cars that we drove. So it’s really awkward.

It’s really strange. And I’m not jealous, but on the same token, to your point, I want my kids to have like a cool car. But to Rob’s point, I don’t want it to be so good that then everybody wants to be on the party bus. You know what I mean?

Mark Shank: It’s tricky. It’s I do think for me, the killer feature for a 16 year old, I’m going to say dumb ass kid lovingly for my own children would be auto braking.

And if you look at who’s out there and who has good systems that can hit the brake on a car before your kid actually hits the brake on the [00:34:00] car. Toyota does really well. Obviously Tesla does really well as much as we love to hate. You know, I’m one of those haters too. Fine, fair enough, put me out there.

But they do well in that

Rob Luhrs: camp. The Subarus do pretty well in that too. The newer EyeSight one, you can get a Forester, which is a similar vehicle to a lot of this.

Mark Shank: But the newer ones, they got good at that in the last five years or so, at least according to my reading.

Rob Luhrs: I would agree, but you can get a five year old Forester for starting to get into this range, because people bought them as appliances.

Mark Shank: And so you have to start thinking about the killer app of what’s really going to be a big safety mechanism for that distracted kid who’s maybe listening to their friends as we’ve talked about the back or they’re getting a text message or Spotify notification on their phone.

Rob Luhrs: The other aspect besides that, which I hate to even mention, because I’m not a fan of this and kids are sort of forbidden from, Phones for a reason, right?

Is, and it’s only in the newer cars, making sure it has a head unit with CarPlay, being able to abstract the need to look at a phone, any of the newer ones, right, you hit a button and it just [00:35:00] reads you what the text message is. And you can, you know, do you want to reply? You just say, yes, tell Jill, LOL or something, and it just does it for you.

And they never need to actually. reach down and pick up a phone and take their eyes off of the road. To that point, that’s also a feature that we haven’t even discussed at all, right? Which is more whiz bang. So there’s the distraction, but it removes the, I’m going to physically pick this thing up and do this to answer my question, as opposed to just hit a button on a big giant screen in the center of the console.

Mark Shank: It’s not whiz bang to say, Hey Siri, give me directions to school or give me directions to home. Right. In Apple CarPlay or Google Android is infinitely better at that than the OEM systems. And you look at where generative AI is coming in relative to Apple coming out with, you know, there’s going to be huge advancements there.

Siri replying to me right now, mid podcast, because I made the mistake of saying her name. And that’s something we haven’t talked about either, which is Do you really want to eliminate distracted driving? Is AI a component of that and the [00:36:00] ability to have legitimate natural language interpretation and just say what you want your car to be able to do and it gives you those directions or it responds to you in that kind of way?

And is that inherently more safe? I think there has to be some legitimacy to that. I do think that CarPlay as a platform will help older cars be better at that very quickly, because you put a more modern iPhone plugged into an older Apple CarPlay implementation, it will inherit those capabilities. And so that will be a big boon to these kids in this type of situation.

Rob Luhrs: A lot of it depends on where you are too. That was going to be my next question for Don as we try to get closer to the actual answer, right, is like, I live in the city, I live in Capitol Hill, my kid is walking to middle school or biking to middle school every day, and the high school is closer than the middle school, like if he goes to the local one, right, so no one needs a car around here.

Now that said, my kids know that I’m a gear head that I work on. Like the GT I have is because I taught a friend how to do everything. And my kids ardently watched and my kid’s biggest joy is like getting onto an on ramp and seeing if I can get the car [00:37:00] sideways on an off ramp. And my kids love that stuff, right?

So they’re going to learn to drive the moment they can. They’re going to want me to. Thank God, get back to doing track days. And so I can bring them out and have them start learning. So I’m excited for that to happen, but their commuting side, isn’t going to be there. Right. So like in my case, I could totally make their first car an NB Miata.

The only purpose of this is to drive to an autocross spot or a drive to a track day, and then work on car control skills and drive home because their day to day life through high school, at least doesn’t going to involve a car.

Crew Chief Eric: You hit the nail on the head through high school. And Don sort of alluded to this earlier about the weather.

One of the things that I was thinking about is don’t buy a car. For your current situation, especially with a 18 year old. Maybe they’re starting to drive a little bit later. If they’re going off to college, think about the climate in that area. If you’re going to the middle of the country, go into Ohio or William is, or you’re going to new England where it’s going to snow, not inches, but feet.

You don’t want to show up with a Miata in the winter time when you’re in school, because you’re going to be bumming rides. From your [00:38:00] friend with the Toyota four by four. If you’re going to Florida, then a convertible is perfect. Think about where they’re going to be going and make the car buying part of maybe the college selection process.

These are other parts that suddenly made the equation way more complicated than, man, I’m really interested in an 82 Trans Am. It’s way more dynamic than buying a collector car. I

Don Weberg: mean, we can end it right now because there’s one car that fills every bill. Every bill is filled by one car, and that is the 89 Chrysler TC by Maserati.

Crew Chief Eric: I thought you were going to say the Cadillac Elante. Why is that not on your list? You should buy her an Elante.

Don Weberg: The Elante is a wonderful car, but it’s a little ostentatious. The Chrysler’s a little more sedate, you know?

Crew Chief Eric: A little unmodified. That Chrysler’s on my list. And what’s funny is we were hinting at the younger kids, like me and Mark and Brad, right?

What are they going to be driving six years from now? Let’s say that because they’re all in that, you know, 10 year old range. So for Brad’s kids, you’re catching up a little bit more. Yeah, I

Crew Chief Brad: think the car that my kids are going to drive hasn’t been built yet. It’s not around yet.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, [00:39:00] you’re hitting it right on the head.

So my math is always what was available new 10 years from the date that they’re going to start driving. So if we’re looking at 2024, We need to start talking about what was available in 2014, plus or minus a year 2013 to 2015 in that range.

Rob Luhrs: I consider those new cars, by the way, just to be clear. I’m old enough that, like, if somebody handed me a 2014, I’d be like, that’s the newest car I’ve ever seen, like, ever owned.

Crew Chief Eric: But, Don gave us a number. Ten grand. So we have some wiggle room to play with.

Mark Shank: Even when looking at under 10 K. There are so many really cool cars out there, and I actually love that. They think, you know, your modern cord is too fast, so it’s like, great, let’s go back to the nineties when everything didn’t have 280 horsepower.

There’s just so many cool things out there. This is going to be a lot of fun.

Don Weberg: I need you to put on your thinking caps here, boys. I need you to think of something that ain’t going to get bullied around in the bathroom.

Crew Chief Eric: So who wants to take a stab? At some suggestions for Don in the 10, [00:40:00] 000 and under category within, let’s say, maybe the last 10 years.

And if you got something outside of the 10 year window, I am curious, my

Mark Shank: default was we go so much older than 10. So I’m really saying, you know, if I’m going back to 2014. I’m saying 2014 and 10 grand. Is that what I’m

Crew Chief Eric: looking at? Yeah. Right. And there are cars that ended their lives in 2014. So it’s very fair to say I’m going to get the 2002 version of that because it spanned the whole gamut up to 2014.

So you can still kind of get the last version of that old car, which is actually a very smart thing to do if you’re a conscientious buyer. So I’m leaving a little bit of wiggle room, but I think the further you go back, the more problems you may run into with a new driver in a super old car.

Mark Shank: I think that’s totally fair,

Crew Chief Eric: man.

It’s tough.

William Ross: I mean, the nice thing though for him is that Being in Texas, you obviously have a very broad range of where you can go around and find the car, but two, you don’t have to worry so much rust [00:41:00] and that stuff, cars, not going to get beat up all that much in regards to stop and go and that, because you’re out there in the wide open spaces, higher mileages are really something to be too afraid.

Crew Chief Eric: And I spent way too much time on cars. com in this category. I’m going to throw one out. I’m going to chum the water for you guys. And then I’ll let you guys rip from there. And I know that Don is a huge fan of the Ford Flex. And he talked about maybe getting a second one because Caitlyn loves his Ford Flex, but he doesn’t want to give up his.

So he’d have to get another one, sort of like the Caprice thing, right? But Don, for your consideration, might I offer you for the low, low price of 8, 500, a Lincoln Mark T with the EcoBoost. Which is just a Ford flex with leather.

Don Weberg: Yeah, that would work. The only thing, and this happened to mine just recently, I just found out about the water pump on the 3.

5 liter Ford and perhaps even the 3. 7 liter, I’m not sure yet, the water pump on these 3. 5 liter Fords is internal inside the engine. So when it pops, I have the receipt somewhere. [00:42:00] It was 4, 100 to repair mine. It’s not so much the part and getting into the motor and changing it out. That’s not the problem.

The whole front end has to come off. The whole car basically comes apart when you do the water pump.

Rob Luhrs: That’s not true for every car. Yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: right.

Rob Luhrs: As somebody who belongs to the Audi club and owns Volkswagen, I thought the front end had to come off for all that stuff anyways in every car.

Crew Chief Eric: Service position is engine out.

Rob Luhrs: I was gonna say, isn’t that normal? I thought that was normal. I’ve seen people do that during a track day. They pull off the whole front end of the Audi to check the water pump.

Crew Chief Eric: We won’t talk about that, but it is true.

Don Weberg: What else I found what was interesting is 3. 5 liter in the F 150 because The engine is mounted longitudinally.

It’s a different water pump. Okay. So they only put it internal for the front wheel drive packaging, but it’s going to be narrower fit in between fenders rather than firewall and grill. So that’s apparently where the thinking was. So if you didn’t have one 50, you’re going to be okay with that V6, but yes, to your point, the MKT, the flex, both of them are great vehicles.

You just gotta be prepared [00:43:00] for when that water pump. Needs to be replaced.

Crew Chief Eric: That was what I call my cheap, chic choice. If you wanted to have something a little classy and go back to Lincoln, but I also will throw in there. And I didn’t realize that the bottom had fallen out of these cars. And my wife owned one is the Cadillac SRX.

You can get one of those. For around 6, 500 to 8, 500 bucks. Like the Lincoln. I saw Lincoln’s in that range as well. And the Cadillac was great. The only thing we experienced with it that was bad was their Q system, which is the infotainment thing. It would go numb, but other than that, the Camaro motor that’s in it.

Was rock solid. The all wheel drive was fantastic. It’s a haulback system from the UK. We had zero issues with the bunch of years that we had the Cadillac. But finally, when we got rid of it, the infotainment system, which controlled the HVAC, which was the bigger issue started to get wonky. And that’s a very expensive replacement.

It’s almost 8, 000 to include labor. Cause they have to rip basically the whole front of the interior part. If you get one that was blessed that doesn’t have the [00:44:00] defect, then those cars are amazing and they’re a lot of fun and they’re funky. They’re like the tall CTS too fast. Yeah, it’s true. 330 horse in that stole my 2 cents in manual diesel Jetta

William Ross: Hundred horsepower baby.

Rob Luhrs: Those are the newer, the TDI ones are quick as hell though. Off the line.

William Ross: New ones, but we’re talking. Oh, we’re talking, you know, 20 12, 20 14 ish. 110 horsepower. I think. Something like that. A

Rob Luhrs: lot of torque at the low end, though.

William Ross: But that thing will run forever. If you want something that’s gonna get her all the way through college, everything, there you go.

Those things are bulletproof.

Crew Chief Eric: But timeout, the only thing I wouldn’t do to a kid going through this experience myself, I would never recommend a German car, especially a VAG product, to a 16 year old. In Texas.

Rob Luhrs: The funnier part of this is that it’s diesel, which means they’re always going to go to the wrong pump and they’re going to screw that part up first, just to be clear.

Mountain Man Dan: First time my daughter took the dually, which is a diesel, and she’s used to driving the halftime, which is gas, I’d caught her for something right as she pulled up to the gas station. And she’s like, yeah, I’m about to throw gas in [00:45:00] the truck. I’m like, you’re about to put what in the truck? She’s like, gas.

I’m like, you better put diesel in it. She’s like, oh yeah. Had I not caught her at that point, there would have been full tank of gas in my diesel truck and I would have hated life. I love my diesels, but for a kid that age, sometimes they’re a little bit absent minded.

Rob Luhrs: I agree. My older one has ADHD.

Mountain Man Dan: Keep it simple.

Rob Luhrs: Keep it simple. It’s gotta be gas or for Brad’s kids, electric at that point.

Crew Chief Eric: And that’s why the Mark T the reason I brought that up first is it breaks my sort of rule, no turbos for first drivers, because that adds a layer of complexity. That doesn’t need to be there. And I don’t want to have to explain forced induction or repair it, or why does it run like crap and all that kind of stuff.

So for me, it’s got to be normally aspirated. And I think Rob, you made kind of the side comment about Volkswagen’s in Texas and this and that dealership network or repair shops. It’s gotta be something domestic or domestically built. So we’re talking Honda, Toyota. The big three and maybe a couple other cars where there’s a decent dealer network.

Again, going [00:46:00] back to my thought about where are they going to college? Because suddenly you find yourself in Utah and it’s like, you’re the only gal in town with a beetle. And they’re like, well, that’s a pretty car. Where are you going to get that worked on? So you don’t want to be in that situation. I’m making a gross generalization, but it’s another piece of this.

Puzzle that you have to factor in is where can you get the car serviced when you’re not home with mom and dad?

Don Weberg: All of my trips back to california with the family. I’ve never counted them. I don’t think but it was always really nice You know, you’re busting down the freeway the ford blue oval the ford blue oval the ford blue oval There’s dealerships all along the way and right across the freeway, well, there’s the Chevy Bowtie.

Either way, you know, Chevy Ford seemed to be kind of the best way to go in terms of servicing. You got to think we are a traveling family. We go back to LA, we go to El Paso, we go up north to Kansas. So it is sort of something we need to take into consideration too, is yeah, if that puppy breaks down somewhere in the middle of the country, We’re hoping that, yeah, there’s a dealer network to take care of [00:47:00] it.

Now, Volkswagen, I’d have some confidence in, they’ve got a pretty good dealer network.

Rob Luhrs: They’re pretty big these days. Yeah. Them and Subaru are actually more places than you think now. Like you can be in the middle of podunk nowhere. There’s a Subaru dealership and a VW dealership. Like those are becoming ubiquitous.

Similar to Ford Chevy.

Mark Shank: So many parts share in the Volkswagen group. Yeah. I don’t mean to disagree with Eric, but it feels like a little bit of a 90s kind of Maybe in all these point of view, old fashioned, if we’re saying we’re looking within the last decade, there’s so much part sharing and Volkswagen group has alternated around the largest by volume factor in the world.

Rob Luhrs: Right. You have a golf or a Jetta or a Passat or this or that, or all those things use the exact same parts. That 10 year old beetle is basically a golf, which is the same as a Jetta, which is the same. Yeah. All those things are small.

Crew Chief Eric: That is true. But here’s the problem with the German cars. I know this firsthand.

When they break, even though they’re all the same, the same part breaks on all of them. It’s a stupid reason that it broke and then it’s idiotically expensive to replace. [00:48:00]

Rob Luhrs: I disagree. You end up learning yourself how to do it. Like, I remember driving home and that Scirocco in a rainstorm, replacing an alternator on the side of the highway.

It was like one of those rites of passage. It was kind of fun. Because

Crew Chief Eric: you could, Rob, but do that on a 2014 GTI. You don’t have the Schwaben XYZ tool necessary to take the alternator out now.

Mountain Man Dan: Other than that, the Scirocco had parts that were actually made of like, Cast aluminum or metal and stuff like that.

A lot of these new it’s all plastic.

Rob Luhrs: It’s all plastic and plastic. Yeah.

Mountain Man Dan: Eric and I know firsthand for the fact when the Mark fours, the coolant lines that are made of plastic, like the Y pieces and stuff, and it’s like, it’s going to break, there’s no question about it. It’s just when so much of the stuff is made of plastic.

And then of course the electronics, like you guys were mentioned with some of those stuff. That’s another nightmare in itself for a 10 year old vehicle.

Mark Shank: So as much as you complain about plastic and crap falling apart, Cars are so much more durable and longer lasting than they have ever been. And you can see the average age of the fleet in the [00:49:00] cars registered in the United States getting older every year as evidence of that, and it does have to change your calculus.

Rob Luhrs: So you’re saying we should look at 20 year old vehicles is what I’m hearing. I agree with where you’re headed here, man. I like this idea. Let’s go older. Older is better.

Don Weberg: It’s kind of funny that I really don’t have much objection to finding another brick. Another Caprice. I really don’t.

Crew Chief Eric: Here’s the other problem.

The older the car is, the more difficult it’s going to be to insure, especially if you want full coverage. And then there’s a lot of companies that maybe don’t want to cover that. Now, do you need to get classic? It becomes a nightmare. So if you stay in a 10 year window, you’re still on GEICO or Allstate or Nationwide’s amortization tables so you can insure the car.

Rob Luhrs: Almost, I assume everybody on this call This is going to be the third to seventh to twelfth car on a plan. It’s not going to make a big impact to anybody. I only have two currently on mine. I had three for a while. Adding a third is not going to, like, it could be a 1950s car. It’s not going to make a huge difference.

Well,

Crew Chief Eric: you got boys and I hate to say it’s going to cost [00:50:00] Double.

Rob Luhrs: Yeah, I know. And which is why they’re getting a manual transmission element or a old beat up Golf. But the insurance for those is not going to be a major consideration.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s going to be a lot.

Rob Luhrs: Yeah, but we all have multiple cars. You’re going to go from two grand to 2, 800 a year.

It’s not going to be a big thing. What? Have

Crew Chief Eric: you looked lately? Dude! 30 years ago now, I was paying 2, 500 a year in insurance for a 10 year old car.

Rob Luhrs: What do you pay right now in insurance? For your fleet.

Crew Chief Eric: Three cars, it’s about that, with two drivers.

Rob Luhrs: Is it only three that are insured right now? Yeah, it’s only three.

Crew Chief Eric: Why would you insure a race car? This is a track insurance. I know. It’s separate. I didn’t know if

Rob Luhrs: you had other crap lying around somewhere else.

Crew Chief Eric: No,

Rob Luhrs: no. This doesn’t count the 914? No, no, no, no. This doesn’t count the TT? No, no, no, no. This doesn’t count the No, no, no. Okay. It’s just the Pacifica and the

Crew Chief Eric: stuff that actually has tags.

Rob Luhrs: Yeah, okay. But

Crew Chief Eric: anyway. The

Rob Luhrs: point is, but you had a fourth of that, right? Let’s say the nine 14 was stock and you added it to that, right? That’s an older car. If you were to add that on there, it’s not going to make a, it’s like, I’m not going to double that or anything like that,

Crew Chief Eric: but you also have to factor in every state’s different.

Don in Texas has to go through all his inspections and [00:51:00] registrations. California is extremely, it’s Texas. So he’s going

Rob Luhrs: to make sure he’s got his gun rack installed and has his concealed carry permit attached to his window. That’s

Don Weberg: another reason I like the caprice. There’s plenty of room for guns.

Seriously. All

Crew Chief Eric: right.

Don Weberg: Sorry, had to go there.

Crew Chief Eric: But for everybody else that’s listening to this, 10 year old card. Anybody else have suggestions? Because I’ve got a list that we can kind of go through here if nobody wants to throw something up on the table.

Mark Shank: I’m really torn between the enthusiast aspect of it and the practical aspect of it.

In trying to thread the needle between those two things so that, like, I can hopefully engender, I’ll say engender instead of encourage, I can engender in my kid some degree of automobile enthusiast, while at the same time, not feeling guilty that, like, I’m in some way endangering my child because I put him in a.

Fox body convertible Mustang.

Mountain Man Dan: Are you endangering your child in the fox body or are you endangering all the civilians and speculators? Well, that’s true. It is a Mustang after [00:52:00] all.

Mark Shank: That convertible fox body is a bit of a death trap. Let’s just call a spade a spade.

Rob Luhrs: As a side note, I recommend everybody do what Eric did, and I didn’t do this.

Go to cars. com and try to look in that age range, like under 10 grand. It is everything from like Mercedes Benz GLKs to like

Crew Chief Eric: Yes, there’s a lot of cars.

Don Weberg: Yeah, that’s what I mean by we are in a wonderful generation right now, because the cars that are going back 10 years, even 20 years Are so nice compared to what all of us had is our first cars.

These cars are really incredible.

Rob Luhrs: If this was 500 podcasts ago, by the way, I’d have to pull out the fact that you can get an HHR from 2011 and call it a day.

Crew Chief Eric: We’re going to get there, but I’ll throw this on the table. Don, did you know? Because you’re a blue oval man, you could get a Ford Taurus Police Interceptor for 8, 500.

Don Weberg: Depending on the year, yeah, I know. Yeah, believe me, I looked at the Tauruses, but again, the fear factor of the modern Taurus is front wheel drive, 3. 5 liter.

Crew Chief Eric: But there’s no fear factor, you’ve got rhino [00:53:00] bars on the front of that thing.

Don Weberg: You do. If you’ve ever actually looked at the police package Fords, they’re incredible.

Crew Chief Eric: Big brakes, sway bars, suspension. Yeah.

Don Weberg: Oh yeah. And there’s literally a division at Ford. That’s all these guys do. They develop, think about and build police cars. That’s it. But when it comes to the Taurus, if you’re going for the modern one, you’re looking at that 3. 5 liter again, and it’s going to be that funky little water pump, which all I’m getting at though, is I’m looking at the 3.

5. It’s in the Explorer, it’s in the Taurus, it’s in the Flex, it’s in all these front wheel drive application vehicles. I have a feeling in just a few years, we’re going to start seeing these things winding up at the junkyard because people just don’t want to afford to fix them. My mom and I talked about this the other day.

She has the Explorer with a front wheel drive and a 3. 5 liter. And I told her, you know, the comical thing about all of this, four grand we paid for that water pump. I’ve always wanted a Range Rover. I have always had a thing for Range Rover. I’ve always been. Terrified of them. Could I hear these horror stories all the time?

Guess what? I’m living the horror story. My wife’s [00:54:00] power window switch on the Honda went out because of my dog who kept stepping on the button and somehow broke something in power window world. Yeah, whatever it was, it was 900 just for the part. So when I hear this, I think to myself, okay, why do we not have an older Maserati and an older Range Rover in the driveway?

Why be scared now? Which goes back to the 2005 Buick LeSabre, the 85 Caprice, et cetera, et cetera. Those cars were tanks. Yes. They’re built better today than they ever have been, but the parts are so much more expensive.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s the availability. And here’s my litmus test for that. And I know where Mark was going to with buy an older car, but if you go to rock auto and the parts list is this long, that’s not the car you buy.

Because it means you cannot service it. It makes it really, really difficult to maintain. So that’s why 10 years is that sweet spot. They’re still making replacement parts. People are keeping those cars on the road. And to your point, Don, the junkyard, when I grew up, that was like every other [00:55:00] weekend. We’re going, going to find this, looking for that shit.

Dan and I still do that. Now looking for parts for the race car.

Mountain Man Dan: Good thing when it comes to salvage yard down in Texas and the Southwest, the salvage yards there are many times better than I hear on the East coast, because The weather’s better so the cars can sit there for longer and a lot of the guys have a lot more land

Crew Chief Eric: But the point is junkyard is a gold mine if you know what you’re doing But after a while even the junkyard starts to dry up and they stop buying those cars because they’re like they’re too old Because they’re working in a 10 year window So I think that 10 year window is super important to a first time car buyers decision making process

Don Weberg: Well, and you and I talked about this off camera.

We talked about the volvos And I’m a big Volvo fan. I’ve always loved Volvo. My daughter likes the Volvos. So it seems like it’d be a shoe and they’re very safe. They have a sort of bulldog ish nature to them, but you start pushing that 10 year mark, that 15 year mark, you talk about a small section of the parts catalog.

I mean, there’s nothing there. And if there is. [00:56:00] You better bring your wallet that they are not going to be cheap to find parts for those Volvo.

Crew Chief Eric: So the Taurus was my last three and a half liter special, the Cadillacs, a 3. 6 liter Camaro engine. So do you want to go into the Mopar camp or would you want to go to a car that would fit inside the flex?

Don Weberg: When it comes to Mopar, there’s really only one car to discuss.

Crew Chief Eric: All right. So let’s go B spec for a moment. Rob, a car you might appreciate. The Honda Fit.

Rob Luhrs: I just looked, I saw Fits are available, and I’m, at first I was scrolling through it, I’m like, oh, Mini Coopers you could get for that much, and I was like, oh, the Fit.

That’s basically that, but slower and better parts availability.

Crew Chief Eric: 100%. The Mini is one of those you’re going to pay the BMW tax on, and you have to be ready for it.

Rob Luhrs: Yeah, and the Fit’s the same car when it’s that old, for the purposes of a new driver. You can still get a manual or automatic, and they will run forever, and are bigger in the inside than they seem on the outside.

And so easier to parallel park and when you’re done, you can sell it for what you paid for it.

Crew Chief Eric: When you’re done, you strip it down and you go Sunday Cup racing with Gridlife. What are you talking about? You have a built in race car.

Don Weberg: Yeah, the other one would be the RAV4, [00:57:00] kind of the competitor to that.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, if you want to go SUV.

Rob Luhrs: If I go to Toyota, I go like, I’m almost thinking like the Scion TC or something also sort of fixes this problem. So you get like, so the boxy two door action and you can go with the Matrix. It’s a little, that’s the bigger version of that.

Crew Chief Eric: Pontiac Vibe, right? Well,

Rob Luhrs: Vibe and Matrix, same car.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah.

Rob Luhrs: Again, it’s basically a Toyota.

So parts availability is easy and reliability is good.

Don Weberg: Again, though, we’re getting into that bully factor. Those cars, they’re gonna get bullied.

Crew Chief Eric: So if you don’t want to get bullied around, that takes a couple other cars off my list though, because I had the Dodge Dart on the list because you can get those for under 10k.

You can also get the Chrysler 200 on that list under 10k.

Rob Luhrs: I would not want that car.

Crew Chief Eric: I don’t think anybody wanted that car. You can still get them new on dealerships. If you’re going to stay in a car, sedan, now you can start talking about Impalas. But if you want to go cheap chic, Chrysler 300 is an option with the 3.

5 liter Pentastar.

Don Weberg: That’s actually not a bad idea, the 300 or the Charger, either one of them. Yep.

Rob Luhrs: I haven’t seen a Charger yet scrolling [00:58:00] through here. I’ve seen the other one. 300’s

Crew Chief Eric: all day with the six cylinder.

Rob Luhrs: Yeah, 300’s yeah, but I haven’t seen a Charger in here yet. And they’re

Crew Chief Eric: making 300 horse, but it’s heavy.

I really enjoyed those as rental cars. They were smooth. They’re like Paleozoic era, Mercedes chassis. They’re just nice and comfortable. You can put four people in it. You can put luggage in it. It’s not a hatchback. It’s not a truck. It’s kind of like, give me a little bit of everything and you’re good to go.

And again, I was surprised how cheap they were.

William Ross: I like that Chrysler 300. That’s a great car. My dad had one of those way back. You know, I love that car. I think it was great. Great on the highway. Great cruise. I think it was a great car. And knowing that she’s kind of afraid saying the cord’s too fast, and kind of how Don was saying when he’s driving down there 80s in the slow lane and whatnot, you’re going to want to have something.

I mean, I don’t know if she’s going to be driving on the highways, but you know, she’s going to want to have something. It’s going to have some oomph to it. Because she’s gonna have to get out of the way. She’s gonna have to move or do whatever, you know, so it’s you don’t want to have something that’s got 110 horsepower that she puts her foot to the floor and, you [00:59:00] know, she’s got a F 350 Dually behind her, rolling coal, he’s got his stacks going, he’s laying on his air horn, freaking her out.

It’s kind of like you got to have something that’s going to have some get up and go also now. You start getting Jeep Renegade, Ford Escape.

Rob Luhrs: All that RAV4, CR V, every car in that class is available. Nissan, Rogue, I mean, they’re all the same. Yeah, you can have any of those.

Crew Chief Eric: Exactly. Well, and I’m glad you went there, because I also considered The Jeep Patriot.

Rob Luhrs: As a car guy, I hate the existence of that along with the compass. I can’t in good conscience recommend any of that crap.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, the Patriot looks awesome if you slam it down and put it on big wheels.

Rob Luhrs: Yeah, if you do a bunch of stuff to it that turns it not into a Patriot, then it’s great. Yeah, that’s true for a lot of things.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, because it’s a Neon, right?

Rob Luhrs: Yeah, but no, no. It’s like a Jeep Liberty. Like, don’t, don’t. Yeah. Get a Grand Cherokee or a Wrangler or stay out of that.

Crew Chief Eric: Exactly, exactly. Now, that’s another option, Don, if you want to go a little bit bigger. The Grand Cherokee. Is a very similarly appointed interior to the 300, especially in that age [01:00:00] rage, when it became the later WK twos shares, a lot of the same parts.

It’s the same Pena star. You’re going to get the same gas mileage. It weighs about the same as the 300. So you kind of have your choice. Do you want the sedan or do you want the SUV? Do you want the all wheel drive or do you just want two wheel drive? So the grand Cherokee is definitely something to consider.

And I think they’re quite a handsome looking SUV. Now you can go a little ways back. Brad had an early WK2, which was a little bit more stodgy and Mercedes with the more utilitarian interior. If you like it a little bit more boxy. But shares the same chassis. Now, Brad, the only thing you worried about was the Hemi tip.

Crew Chief Brad: I didn’t have any issues with that, but I had premature water pump failure, which is known problem with those Hemis, but it was only a 700 fix

Crew Chief Eric: and that’s on the V8. That was the V8, but the V6, those things are bulletproof. There are early

Crew Chief Brad: pen and stars. They had problems, but they worked out the kinks. So now the pen and stars are really good.

Motor

Mountain Man Dan: cost is an issue. Instead of going with the grand Cherokee, just a regular Cherokee would be a little bit cheaper.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, that’s true. But I will say the Grand [01:01:00] Cherokee is super easy to work on. It’s built like a truck, just wrenches and screwdrivers and hammers and you’re good to go. I mean, it’s not hard to work on at all.

Don Weberg: The nice thing about those jeeps specifically, it’s like we were saying early, early, early in the conversation, the beauty of having a truck. You don’t have to worry about it too much. It’ll take a beating and keep on going. The Jeep is in that same boat. They are built fairly solidly.

Crew Chief Eric: The Jeep to me is like a Swiss army knife.

It’s the reason I chose one and I love it. And I have zero complaints. Knock on wood. It’s been really trouble free. It’s something definitely to put on the list. Now you’re probably going to pay a little bit more for a grand. You’re probably gonna be 10, 12, 14, but you’re going to get something lower mileage, probably adult maintained.

It’s not a bad buy for what it is. If you stretch your wallet just a little bit, but the 300 comes in under 10 grand pretty easily.

Don Weberg: Yeah, the sister to that, of course, would be the Durango, the Dodge side of the family.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah,

Don Weberg: basically the same exact car, it’s just a different body.

Crew Chief Eric: Correct.

Don Weberg: All three of those are good ideas.

Crew Chief Eric: Now, if you notice, I stuck to a no turbo [01:02:00] rule except for the Lincoln, which had the EcoBoost.

Don Weberg: Yeah, and I agree with that.

Crew Chief Eric: But I’m also staying away from V8s because I want to think a little bit economically to Mark’s point from earlier. I don’t want to bankrupt my kid every third day at the gas pump at 4 a gallon because you got to run premium in your Hemi or whatever it is.

So a V6 is this nice compromise between torque. And horsepower and being able to rev up and go and not be a slug in traffic because a Honda fit as fun as that is for us enthusiasts, you know, rowing the gears and burning it up at 8, 200 RPM with the VTEC on and all that stuff. That’s fantastic, but it can’t get out of its own way.

So a nice three and a half liter, let’s just say V6. Is a great all around engine. It’s not going to set the world on fire from an economy standpoint, but it’s also not going to bankrupt you every time you go to the pump.

Rob Luhrs: When we were kids, one of the good starting cars was like a Saturn cause it was all plastic.

Cause I’m thinking any kid is going to be door ding central. And so like you just sort of pop it out and therefore things weren’t a thing. You didn’t really have to worry about a lot of that kind of stuff. Thinking about which of these cars [01:03:00] have. easier repellability which ones have like the trim stripe along the door that sort of helps prevent some of those door dings those kind of Things for some of the minor crud that’s going to happen in a high school Parking lot right in the college parking lot as they drive into it Because at some point that car is going to be in your driveway and as a car guy Having the beat to hell scratched up car that your kid comes home and it’s like what did you teach that kid?

My wife’s dad is a huge car guy And every time we come in if my wife’s gotten a scratch on her car He literally is like i’m almost ashamed to have you park in my driveway like that What did I teach you? This should have been taken care of.

Crew Chief Eric: And that goes back to the point earlier about the German cars and why I’m not recommending a single one of them.

Because as enthusiasts, we buy a GTI and I got to have the blue iridescent pearl magic paint, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you buy that as a hand me down from somebody. If you want to do paint correction, open your wallet because it’s not just red or blue or white like a Honda or Toyota or whatever it is.

And I’m not saying they don’t have their special colors, but the German stuff is always sort of over the top and to replace a fender [01:04:00] on a GTI, if you get into a scrap, let’s just say something even happens in the parking lot or you get hit by a shopping cart or whatever. How many Jeeps were produced in a single year versus GTIs?

You can go get a fender for 20 bucks versus 250 or 2, 000 for something that is quote unquote, exotic, like a GTI would be in comparison,

Don Weberg: bringing back the 300, the charger, the flex. You have a slab side. If a very flat sided are, they show everything, every little thing that can happen on the one of those cards.

You’re going to see it because it’s so flat. That’s where we kind of go back to. There were Jeep Cherokees. I don’t know. Grand Cherokees. They had plastic cladding on the side. The Chevy Avalanche invented the whole concept of that.

Rob Luhrs: Some of the Grand Cherokees did, too. That’s what I was trying to remember, if that The earlier ones.

Yeah, the earlier versions all had that plastic, which made it easier, because it was ridged in a certain way, and The Aztec perfected the plastic clasp.

Crew Chief Eric: It was ahead of its time.

Rob Luhrs: My Scirocco, my [01:05:00] mom’s, you know, GTI and GLI and such. I mean, they all had that nice black sticker rubber on the side, which worked so well for preventing the bullshit dings.

And actually, my current 2012 GTI Every time I look at it, I’m like, I wish this had that little raised door ding bar on it. Cause otherwise every little scratch that somebody should like, you see it. Whereas if you had that little bit of rubber, it just preserves it that much better from that sort of stupid crap.

Crew Chief Eric: You know, we were talking about kids driving later, but there’s also a lot of kids that are a little bit more earth conscious or eco friendly. I started thinking about, you know, are there any hybrids available for under 10 K? The only thing that comes up on the list is probably going to be very, very obvious.

But you can get Priuses for that kind of money if that’s what you’re into. From what I understand, you know, some of those second and third gen Priuses, a lot of them are just unbreakable. I mean, they just run forever and they don’t seem to have a ton of problems.

Rob Luhrs: Much to the sadness of everybody who’s stuck owning one of them.

That’s a different definition of slow.

Crew Chief Eric: True, but then there’s the other side of that that makes me worried in that the people that have their Priuses and love them aren’t [01:06:00] getting rid of them. So if you’re selling a Prius, why are you selling it? What’s wrong with it? So that was my only word of caution when I saw those come up on the list.

And there’s other cars like that, where you’re like, that car is so good. What’s the story here? Why are you getting rid of it? There’s reasons and seasons for everything. Usually Prius folks are very, very

Mountain Man Dan: faithful. You know, if we’re going to go with the 10 year mark, the Camry had the hybrid during that time.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, anything in the Toyota family that’s a hybrid. If you’re eco conscious and not interested in a diesel or anything like that, and you want to save money on gas, I would definitely look in that camp. As much as, as an enthusiast, those cars, they irk me a little bit, but there’s, I don’t find anything wrong with them.

They’re just stylistically, uh, you know, whatever. But, uh, For their purpose, for their reason, they make a thousand percent sense. Camrys

Mountain Man Dan: are known to be just a plain Jane vehicle. In the dictionary, it’s just a car. It’s a

Rob Luhrs: picture of a Camry.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, right. A hundred percent.

Mountain Man Dan: I recently saw one of the new TRD Camrys.

Yeah. And had to do a double take because it caught my eye. And I was like, that looked sharp. And I didn’t think I would ever say that about a Camry.

Crew Chief Eric: It needs to [01:07:00] be a GR Camry. When they come out with that, then you got my attention. There is another car that I think we’ve avoided, and it’s sort of the last one on my list of cars under 10 grand I would give a kid, that I think are sort of, not Tonka toys, but you know, they’re sort of, you’re looking for a car that’s bulletproof, right, you’re looking for an engine that’s bulletproof, like we said, a car that can take maybe a slight fender bender, that can take a couple door dings, that can live through high school, shenanigans, can go through college, and there’s one car, we joke about this on the drive thru pretty often, they’re absolutely indestructible, you see them everywhere you turn around, And that’s the Nissan Altima.

Mountain Man Dan: I have to disagree slightly there because if it has the 3. 5 liter V6 in them, they were known because the Kelly converter was part of the downpipe. Yeah.

Don Weberg: Right.

Mountain Man Dan: If it had enough miles on it would start to suck debris back in and it would wipe the rings on it and then you had issues with the engine.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, but those people still kept

William Ross: driving them.

Don Weberg: Yeah, that’s why they were smoking.

William Ross: Stouted taxes, they’re gonna think you’re running drugs from, uh, Mexico.

Rob Luhrs: I was about to say, you also have to not live in [01:08:00] Maryland. So if you live in Maryland, you have one of those, it’s probably a temporary tag, and you’ve probably slammed it into a telephone pole, or multiple other cars, and then ran away.

Crew Chief Eric: But it’s still

Rob Luhrs: Every accident in D. C., every accident in D. C. is like a Nissan Altima with temporary Maryland tanks.

Crew Chief Eric: Yes.

Rob Luhrs: Like, every one of them. They’re probably all the same car.

Crew Chief Eric: They’re all like the original Eleanor from Gone in 60 Seconds. You just cannot kill those things. I know. At the end of Nuclear Holocaust, There’s going to be cockroaches and Nissan Altimas.

So that’s a solid buy. They are indestructible.

Don Weberg: And remember too, the 3. 5 liter was a fantastic engine. When that thing came out, it blew everybody away. How quick it was, how rev happy it was.

Rob Luhrs: They put that in the Maxima first. Those Maximas were super fast with that. It bloody was one of those. Those were crazy quick.

Don Weberg: But when the Altima came out, they also had the 2. 5 liter, the four cylinder. And if you drove one of those, believe me, you were not disappointed. Good. That little guy would really get up and put, and you [01:09:00] didn’t quite have all the problems that the 3. 5 that was the

Rob Luhrs: same 2. 5 ended up putting in the little, uh, the center of SCR.

Yes. It’s the same motor yet, which was pretty peppy in that

Don Weberg: kind of agree with what you’re saying though. There’s a certain or, uh, It goes with the Altima ownership. And believe me, when I worked at Stillen, I was introduced to these cars at Motor Trend when they first came out with the big Altima 3. 5 liter, blah, blah, blah.

I was hooked. Oh my God. I thought these were the greatest cars in the world. And when I worked at Stillen, we had the orange car, which you can look that up on Google if you want to. It’s the Stillen Orange Altima. It’s an incredible car. Amazing cars. They really are. But today, as life goes on. And sadly, I think it’s most of the Nissan family.

And it’s really weird, but they’re very accident prone.

Crew Chief Eric: Nissan only sells Altimas and then the Z, that’s it. Because the Murano’s a Taltima, right? And the Rogue is, it’s all the same. I

Rob Luhrs: mean, to be clear, I had a Pathfinder for a while that was spectacular. But that’s different.

Crew Chief Eric: All right, so that kind of rounded out my punch [01:10:00] list.

I think the only honorable mention, and I said I was going to talk about German cars, but the only one I brought up was the American made Passat with the five cylinder, because you can get that with DSG, with the automatic, or with the five or six speed manual on that. Those five cylinders, they’ve been perfected, they’ve got 30 years of evolution in them, they will literally run forever.

Rob Luhrs: They were rust prone though, those Passats were, I don’t know why, but like, not the Jettas, not the Gulls, but those Passats were rust prone.

Crew Chief Eric: That is the Achilles heel to the American made Passat, but as far as the sheet metal around the engine, the engine is amazing. Yeah,

Rob Luhrs: the engine’s fine, yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s the only reason I was like, this is an honorable mention, if you had to have something German, that would be your option.

And those ranged wildly from like, 5 grand to 9 grand, they were all over the map, and it was just like, okay, it couldn’t really pinpoint an average there.

Mountain Man Dan: As Don will mention, it’s not bad because, once again, Don’s in Texas, the rust issue won’t be near as bad. Yeah, that’s true.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s very true. That sort of rounds out my punches.

Anybody else have something that they came across that would fit the [01:11:00] bill here? I

Crew Chief Brad: have a joke list.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, I do too, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Rob Luhrs: My generic answer to what car I wish I could get my kids, because my brother had one, but stupidly sold it because I wanted to give it, was a manual transmission Honda Element.

Crew Chief Eric: Ooh.

Rob Luhrs: Enough room to haul crap. It’s a Honda. He doesn’t know shit about cars. Ran it into the ground. The car still worked perfectly fine when he sold it because that’s the way they work. Great on road trips, fine on gas, they have that funky two doors, you have to have like, the side doors, you have to have friends who are comfortable climbing the back, you can sort of help people move, but you don’t have to, you can sort of have four passengers, but you can also fold the seats up into the wall and say, no, I’m taking my mountain bike, or I’m taking this, or I’m off to hockey practice and I have all my crap in it.

And it’s high enough off the ground, has enough safety features, has all wheel drive, has the manual transmission, and it’s still kind of cool and funky and different and isn’t going to get boxed around by trucks. Like to me, if I could find one, like that’s the perfect starting vehicle right there is a manual transmission element.

Crew Chief Eric: And it’s an ultimate Halloween car. If you get it in silver, you put brown foam. It looks like a toaster. If [01:12:00] you get an orange, it’s. The Great Pumpkin, you know, the whole nine yards.

Rob Luhrs: I got a friend in Boulder who just bought one. She found one because she’s married, but she frequently goes by herself on climbing trips and she’s like, I needed something I could sleep in and put all my crap in that would never break down and could drive over the passes in Colorado and be perfectly fine.

Cause she lives in Boulder and she’s like, it’s wonderful. She’s taken it all last winter, all the way to Crested Butte, all over the place and says like, can’t find a better car and they’re cheap. They’re well in the price range.

Mountain Man Dan: How hard is it to find the elements of a manual? It’s not

Rob Luhrs: as hard because there’s sort of bulletproof engines on those things because they’re used in everything.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s a Civic motor.

Rob Luhrs: Yeah, so it’s not hard to find those things. My friend in Boulder said she could choose between like 10 of them when she bought hers and that’s out in the mountains out there and I’ve seen them around here. If you want to go newer, you could also go with the Toyota Matrix. Nope, like an element.

Crew Chief Brad: Venza?

Rob Luhrs: No, no, Venza’s too new.

Crew Chief Brad: The XB? The FJ. Oh, the FJ, yeah. So you can

Rob Luhrs: find like a FJ. In manuals, they’re actually cheaper than they are in automatics. I have a buddy who owns one who’s going to sell it and I was going to buy it off him and then he’s like, I [01:13:00] decided to keep it. And so, but I mean, it was going to be sub 10K.

And both elements and FJs can go either way, but in terms of like the all wheel drive safety aspect, a little higher up and also less people space, but enough space, I still like that class of vehicle. They’re taller. I don’t know that that class seems good for first cars.

Don Weberg: And they’re both not so high.

That they’re going to be prone to tip over?

Rob Luhrs: No, it’s not a Wrangler, but it’s also, yeah, it’s not quite a Subaru Outback or Forester or Impreza. It’s a little bit higher than that. But as we said, with all the trucks and big SUVs in the road, it’s nice to have that little bit more height for the younger drivers.

Crew Chief Eric: I will say, Rob, you hit something on the head there. I’ve teased my wife for years now that my girls will get two choices. And they will both be manual. They get to pick from either a Wrangler or a Veloster, one or the other. That’s it. Because both are extremely uncomfortable to your point, but they can kind of go anywhere.

So if you’re going South, the Veloster is awesome. If you’re going North, the Jeep will take you anywhere you need to go.

Rob Luhrs: My kids love Jeeps. We have a buddy with a farm down in Charlottesville that has. A Wrangler he keeps there and we get down there immediately. They bugged my buddy. They’re like, Mr. Paul, take us to the Jeep, [01:14:00] take us to the Jeep.

Cause he’ll just, you know, go up the sides of things and they love it.

Don Weberg: Yeah. I got it. I gotta be real blunt here with that. When you brought up the element, I don’t think I’ve ever even thought about the element. And I got to tell you that really struck me. I thought that’s a damn good car. It’s a Honda.

It’ll run forever. It’s utilitarian. The interior is completely plastic. The side body cladding, like we’re talking about door dings in a high school parking lot, backpacks, whatever, it’s not gonna, it’s not gonna get too damaged up. That’s actually a really sharp idea. It really is. The element really turned me on.

I thought that was a good idea.

Rob Luhrs: That was, yeah, literally my first thought. I mean, looking through this list, I mean, strangely, you can get a ton of Odysseys in this price range, but if you want the giant minivan, but for anybody who’s seen, uh, Deadpool and Wolverine, you can’t really suggest an Odyssey without laughing.

And if you haven’t seen it, you’ll get that joke when you watch it.

Mark Shank: So the Odyssey is a horrible driving car. Yes.

Rob Luhrs: It’s a miserably, which again, if you’ve seen the movie, it gets a lot of Funnier and funnier. But yes, the element I think is sort of the key. You can get a pilot in that same price [01:15:00] range. What

Crew Chief Eric: was that?

The passport, which was the Isuzu rodeo.

Rob Luhrs: Yeah. But I think the element just makes more sense for that sort of phenomenal college car,

Crew Chief Eric: right? Like

Rob Luhrs: you’re moving from a dorm room to off campus housing. Like you don’t need the pickup. You just fold those seats up and throw all the crap in it. Do a couple of runs if you want.

Don Weberg: Well, and the nice thing too, you’re not going to have friends banging on your door saying, Hey, help me move.

Rob Luhrs: No, because it looks like a really small box. It does. My brother’s wife had one teacher in Massachusetts and she’s like, I needed a car I could put a full timpani in. And it doesn’t look that big, but I have no problem fitting full size timpanis in that you can’t fit in most wagons.

Like you need a pickup, even minivans have trouble with it.

Don Weberg: And then judging by its boxy nature, it’s gotta be the easiest thing in the world to park.

Rob Luhrs: Yeah, they are. Cause they’re shorter than you think they’re not the wheelbase.

Mountain Man Dan: Yeah,

Rob Luhrs: but nice and slow and boxy. And I don’t know,

Mountain Man Dan: my neighbor’s daughter was given an element by her grandparents.

When she was like 17 and she drove that thing till it had like 380, 000 miles on it before they finally decided to just sell it and it was still running, but they [01:16:00] decided she didn’t want it anymore. And I think she used it at least 2 to 3 years into college before she switched vehicles. Mileage wise, they’ll go forever as long as the maintenance is done.

Had a couple of little things here and there that helped them fix on it, but it was nothing extreme and major that broke the bank

Rob Luhrs: easy to work on to real simple cars to work on.

Don Weberg: And I think we can safely assume just by virtue of being a Honda, being a civic, blah, blah, blah. You’re not going to have any trouble finding parts for that thing, because even though the element is a little bit weird unto itself, so the body parts might be a little hard to find, but everything else mechanically chastity, et cetera, has got to be pretty simple.

Could it solve just in the Honda family? Yeah. Okay. Maybe that let’s just say for a number, they built a hundred thousand elements. They built. A million civics.

Crew Chief Eric: Yep.

Don Weberg: So you’ve got that million that you still have to serve with those parts. The element just takes advantage of it from the bottom and it just happened to be able to still get parts for.

And

Crew Chief Eric: there’s actually some hot rod elements if you look and you want to spend a little extra. What is it? The element SE, which is like, Their version of like a type R or whatever it is. And it [01:17:00] came with different wheels and there were some options in there in the last couple of years of that thing. If that’s what you’re into and you’re geeking out, take a look at the packages.

Now, I had a friend that owned one of those, like the hot rod one. The only thing I thought was weird was the stadium seating that they had inside where the passengers in the back are up higher than, than the front. So that way the idea was that if you’re talking, then you don’t get drowned out or something like that.

I was like, okay, cool. To me, it was a little awkward, but to Rob’s point, it If you’re a hobbyist of any hobby, you just take them out, move stuff around. What was the joke? That you could just power wash the inside of it because it’s all rubber? You can’t. Yeah, you can hose

Rob Luhrs: out the interior. We have to take it to beach frisbee tournaments and literally afterwards you’d hose out the whole interior and just call it a day.

Mountain Man Dan: With the fact of trucks being in Texas, it’s not uncommon for people to be driving them, but If you don’t want her to get into a full size thing, I guess, compared to older trucks, it would be considerable. So something like a Colorado, since they don’t like to make S10s or anything anymore. And you’re worried about the rear end on it being light, but majority of the Colorados nowadays are crew cab.

So a lot of that weight is very similar [01:18:00] to that of like a crossover or an SUV for the weight displacement on the chassis. Like Honda did, like the Ridgeline. There’s those options as well, if you’re looking for something. We’ve mentioned most of the others that I thought of. Oh, we forgot one. It’s

Crew Chief Eric: super

Mountain Man Dan: special.

Rob Luhrs: The biggest I would go is sort of like that element size is similar, but like the RAV4, the CRV style sort of world that I find if I go up my front door right now, there are 30 of those, right? There are 30 Mazda CX 5s, CRVs, RAV4s, they’re everywhere. I don’t like having what everybody else has so my brain immediately is like back to those, you know, the FJ and the Element and some of the stuff that’s a little more fun.

And if you, you know, sounds like you don’t want the smaller cars. I think a lot of the smaller cars are awesome in this price range for those kids, right? I mean, as we said, the Scion TC or the smaller Golfs, the Honda Fit is an amazing car for that, right? You can get some of those. That size car I think is great, but to your point, if they’re all driving around with people with F250s, it’s not going to work.

You need something a little bigger. And again, it brings me back to that Element FJ pseudo truck ish sort of but still [01:19:00] cool and still small enough to park and not worry about but can hold its own and not get pushed around.

Crew Chief Eric: Well I found a car that we’ve all forgotten about and it fits in our window because it ended at the beginning of our window.

You’re not going to get bullied because people are going to be too busy laughing at you. You’re not going to have to worry about being like everybody else on the road because you haven’t seen one of these in a while. It’s roomy, you can haul people, you can haul things, it’s versatile. Some would argue that it’s stylish.

And if you got the right package, peppy enough. So for your consideration, I will throw out The PT cruiser. I hate

Don Weberg: to admit it, but I thought about that.

Crew Chief Eric: Mark’s like falling out of his seat.

Don Weberg: I thought it was HHR. I had mentioned that one earlier. Yeah, I did. I thought about the PT and I thought about the HHR.

I think both of them are cool. I got to use both of them at Motor Trend. Michelle and I actually had one for multi thousand mile journey around California and HHR. We loved it. We really did. It was a fantastic little car.

Mountain Man Dan: The PT surprisingly had more space than it looked like from the outside.

Don Weberg: And yeah, I don’t think people will believe [01:20:00] it.

I think they’re scared of it. Exactly. I don’t know how you’re going to respond. So I’m going to give you some space because you’re a weirdo. But you know, it’s funny going to the, either one, the HHR has, if you’re worried about performance, you’ve got the SS. And that is one serious little machine, especially if you have the, uh, six speed manual transmission, that is a really, really fast car on the Chrysler side of life.

You got the GT 2. 4 liter turbo, but we’re breaking that rule of turbocharging.

Mountain Man Dan: They were known for the turbo seal inside getting bad to where oil and corn would mix.

Crew Chief Eric: The same as the

Don Weberg: neon. Yeah. Yeah. It’d be fun, but it is an element that is going to break at some point.

Crew Chief Eric: Versus like the 300 and the Jeep and some of the bigger stuff that we talked about.

If you’re looking at an element, I would really consider, especially in the right paint scheme, a PT cruiser. She might enjoy that. It’s different. It’s quirky, but on the same token, it doesn’t have enough power to get you into trouble. It’s pretty insurable.

Rob Luhrs: You can’t hose it out.

Crew Chief Eric: No, you can’t. That’s for sure.

Rob Luhrs: You’ll get a convertible though. That’s

Crew Chief Eric: true. [01:21:00] You can’t get a PT convertible. I forgot about that.

Don Weberg: Yeah, those were kind of cool. I kind of like those.

Crew Chief Eric: Mark’s making this face like he just wants to hang up the call. Like, all right, lay it on me.

Mark Shank: We’re in an interesting spot. I’m definitely not a PT cruiser fan, in spite of it being the TARDIS of vehicles, apparently, according to Mountain Man Dan.

And honestly, I think that this whole conversation has gone in an interesting direction that I wouldn’t have anticipated prior to coming into it, where I’m now legitimately thinking about buying my kid a Honda element. Um, Rob is definitely hitting it out of the park tonight. Right. And FJ Cruze is totally cooler, but it is a challenging space to try to operate in.

And so I am thinking that at least for my kids. I struggle going back more than 20 years, you know, that kind of 2000 to 2020 time range in that space. I want something with a little higher belt line. That’s going to take a [01:22:00] hit from another vehicle with a higher belt line. And so, you know, you just kind of add these requirements up and it starts to winnow the list down and it takes out a lot of the cool stuff that I love as an enthusiast, but I struggle to put my 16 year old inside of and so is the magic spot one of these midsize SUVs that we’ve kind of keep coming back to and talking about.

Yeah, sure. Maybe I just don’t get rid of my X five and my kids, that kid that drives their dads old X five. I don’t want that to be the situation, but I don’t know, maybe that, maybe that’s the most pragmatic situation. And I was, Oh,

Crew Chief Eric: Zs are going to come off that thing real quick though.

Mark Shank: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, fine.

Maybe they don’t need Italian wheels, but I’ve gotten more out of this conversation that I’ve contributed to it. It has made me think a lot more about it than maybe originally I was.

William Ross: You know, here’s a question, Don, is it going to be your decision or is she going to be have input in this?

Don Weberg: Oh, I think [01:23:00] there’ll be input from both Michelle and Kaitlin.

William Ross: Yeah. I mean, all three of you sitting down going through auto tempest or whatever and kind of, Hey, what about this? You know, and try and feel it out. You’ll, you know, try and gauge, you know, to make her happy.

Don Weberg: Yeah.

William Ross: I was, you know, you put in your two cents, I mean like that, but Kind of boils down to is you kind of want your kid to like the car.

Don Weberg: She’s interesting because she has quirky taste. I mean, she really does. She is a bit of a car gal. Caitlin is similar to Rob in that she sees too many of a certain car. She suddenly gets turned off by them. She doesn’t really want to have anything. And yet, you know, flip side of the coin, she likes Mustangs.

Mustangs are belly button cars. Everybody has one, but she likes them. So it’s kind of interesting, but yeah, that’s where, again, I think the element would really be interesting. I, that one, Rob really, really struck a chord with that car because it, it is durable. It is tough. It does have that bulldog sort of nature where you’re not quite sure, can you bully this thing around psychologically?

It’s going to last forever. It’s [01:24:00] all wheel drive. You can get a manual transmission if you want. You hose out the interior. It swallows up grand piano. There’s no problem. It’s really, really an interesting choice. And it’s quirky enough that somebody like Caitlin would probably enjoy this car. It’s different enough.

You’re not going to see another one in the high school parking lot. Her other friends are going to really enjoy it.

Crew Chief Eric: As is tradition with all of our, what should I buy episodes? We’re going to do a little lightning round here to close out all the things we spoke about, but this one’s a little bit different as enthusiasts, as dads, we’re going to play the selfish dad lightning round.

And that means if you were 16 today and handed 10, 000 bucks to buy your first car, what would it be? And it could be from any era, any age, any decade, you got 10 grand to spend on your first car. Are you going to buy?

Mountain Man Dan: Facing up to today’s prices. Okay, I’ll have to think about this.

Don Weberg: Can you do something like you buy something, you’re going to build it up?

Crew Chief Eric: You know that’s how this game works, so you just go ahead. If you want a Corvette [01:25:00] engine

Don Weberg: Miata

Rob Luhrs: and you can do it for 10 grand, have at it. I like him.

Crew Chief Eric: All right, who wants to go first?

Crew Chief Brad: I’ve got a list of six cars.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, Brad, Brad coming in swinging. Go ahead.

Crew Chief Brad: I’m going to go back through the years. All of these I found for less than 10 grand.

I’m going to start with the newest car and work my way back to the oldest car.

Crew Chief Eric: All right.

Crew Chief Brad: So the newest car is a 2015 Lexus RX 350. Probably get the Lexus RX 300 for even cheaper. 2013 Land Rover LR4. I’m ignoring mileage

Crew Chief Eric: and maintenance. Cause you’re gonna need 10 grand of maintenance on that land rover right away.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, here’s where the, here’s where it starts to get fun. A 2008 Porsche Cayenne.

Rob Luhrs: Those are surprisingly cheap, by the way.

Crew Chief Brad: 2003 Mercedes CL 500. One of my all time favorite cars. I love those cars so much.

Mark Shank: The suppository model. Yes, yes,

Crew Chief Brad: yes. Is the big giant tic tac. I love it. Here’s the one I think Don’s going to resonate with the most 1995 Jaguar XJ VandenPlasse.

Don Weberg: And

Crew Chief Brad: then an [01:26:00] 86, nine, four, four, all of these are under 10

Mark Shank: grand. I love Brad’s recommendations. You can’t get a nine four, four turbo anymore for 10 grand. Is it just that guy? I’m sure that’s not a thing. Yeah, it’s not possible. You

Rob Luhrs: can, but you have to fix it up. My brother in law has one and just went to nine 44 fest out.

It was the track in Ohio,

Crew Chief Eric: Mid-O,

Rob Luhrs: not Mid-Ohio, the smaller Nelson ledges Nelson ledger, the dead flat one. So he has a nine 44 turbo. He got it for less than 10, but has it put another like five in to get it. Remo, it’s now beautiful, like it’s a gorgeous fun car, but you can’t get a well sorted one for under 10 right now.

Fair enough 15. You could pull it off 10 more.

Crew Chief Eric: William’s buying a mondial t for 10 grand, right? Yeah, put 50 into it to keep it running

Mark Shank: All right. I mean, I think buying an english car as a 16 year old pretty low income is pretty horrible idea

Crew Chief Brad: But you’re 16. You are the epitome of horrible ideas at that age.

Mark Shank: Yeah. You’re not making good decisions. This is an optimum [01:27:00] scenario where I’m taking my 43 year old self to being 16 in 2024 and I get 10 grand to buy a car. I think it’s American muscle. It has to be something that’s. Fun, fast, easy to maintain and sustainable.

Probably tough on gasoline. I’ll give

Crew Chief Eric: you that.

Mark Shank: You can get a Cobra from 99. Yeah. I mean, I’d love an old predator Cobra prior to COVID. Those were totally doable for 10 grand, but that’s not true anymore. So I think I would probably look for an SS Camaro just because, you know, the V8 there is just in a different class in that price category than the Mustangs.

Sorry for the four people. I’m not really affiliated one way. I love them both equally. I’m going to say in this generation, if I’ve got 10 grand, it’s probably an SS Camaro and I might not make it to graduation. It’s a horrible idea. I’d never buy that for my 16 year old kid, but if I was 16 and I had 10 grand, that’s totally what I buy.

Don Weberg: Kind of agree with Mark. The Z28, when did that body style [01:28:00] come out? Like 90,

Crew Chief Brad: the LT1. You can do better than an LT1. Do an LS1 was 98 to 2002.

Don Weberg: Yeah. I mean, that, that was, that still is one hell of a package for the money. I mean, what you’re getting in that car, it’s a lot of car. It really is. And yeah, you’re right.

You might not make it to graduation. I had a friend in high school who had, uh, two, he had the RS was the car to have back then that

Crew Chief Eric: really slow. That’s what that stood for

Don Weberg: really slow. Car was actually very, very scary, quick, fast. He wrecked two of them. Challenge over what the car can do. But yeah, I think you’re going to be hard pressed to go bad with one of those Z28s.

The Mustang, always a good option. 16, 10 grand. I do, I think I’d find a Mustang GT or a Camaro Z28.

William Ross: V8 manual. So either a Mustang, C4 Vette or a Camaro. Oh yeah, I’m killing myself before I get to graduation.

Don Weberg: You’re gonna look good doing it.

Crew Chief Eric: Rob, are you in the same camp? 10 grand, you’re 16 again?

Rob Luhrs: I’ve always [01:29:00] wanted a V8 Mustang because I love the sound of it, but I don’t think I would choose it.

It’s just not in my nature. I’d want to have one to drive, but I wouldn’t want to own one, if that makes sense, because I wouldn’t take it. So, just scrolling through, the first one that jumped out at me is you can get a Fiesta ST for under 10 grand, which is a pretty ridiculously fun choice. If I lived where I lived when I was 16, my answer would have been either a WRX or a Wrangler.

I want the WRX because I grew up in Massachusetts and I wanted to go just sliding around mountain roads and rally style driving. Even now I have friends who own a house in Davis, West Virginia, and they’re like, The guy with the mini countryman would be like, Rob, you know what you’re doing here? Take the key.

Then I just slide up the mountain roads and have a complete blast. I love that feeling of just sliding the cars up those roads. And the WRX fits that bill really well. The other one growing up again in Massachusetts is I, I always as a kid wanted a Wrangler, I love the idea of, I could go skiing in the mountains with it.

And then I could go to the beach and take off the top and the doors and fold the windshield down and cruise around in it. It’s a pretty big range, but one of probably a Wrangler or a WRX [01:30:00] are my two Top choices for those reasons, but I cannot possibly disagree or have any shade whatsoever on the people choosing the V8 because even now as a, you know, I drive sort of sportier cars and love them.

And my dad’s got a, you know, 911 SC, the air cooled that I drive around, but I get a chance to, I still roll down the windows to listen to somebody in a V8 Mustang just rev, just the sound of that just makes me happy. And I’d love to have one of those under my right foot for a little while. Don’t know if I’d want that as much as I’d want to be sliding around roads in a WRX.

Or off roading it up in a Wrangler.

Crew Chief Eric: All right, Dan, did we buy you enough time? Are you just going to say some year plus square body?

Mountain Man Dan: Of course I would always add to the square body collection, but so here’s the thing I have to say, I’m glad we weren’t doing this three years ago when the used car market was insane.

Rob Luhrs: But you could buy an old Nissan and that’s about it.

Mountain Man Dan: So I’m glad that the market has corrected some. But the 16 year old me, back when I was 16, it would have been that 68 Camaro, with that as that not being the option. Modern day me, if I was [01:31:00] 16 today, I definitely like the idea of WS6 9802 Trans Ams. I like the Trans Ams better than the Camaros.

Also, I love the CTS V with the 6 speed.

Rob Luhrs: You get those for 10k? No. I haven’t seen one yet. If I saw one I

Mountain Man Dan: had to window shop for them every so often. They normally need a little bit of work, but you can get them at that price. A little bit of work.

Crew Chief Brad: I will say, to Rob’s point there, I feel like we’ve all been doing this We were all going to cars.

com, where we really need to hang out, is Dan’s favorite site, Facebook Marketplace. You can find a treasure trove of shit on Facebook Marketplace. You

Crew Chief Eric: mean Craigslist?

Crew Chief Brad: I swear, that’s where we need to be for all the fun stuff.

Rob Luhrs: I agree. I did find a Quattroporte. On, uh, Autotrader, by the way, for under 10k. A Maserati.

But you’re right. My brain was like, I should be going to Craigslist, and I should be going to Facebook Marketplace. And then all of us are like, Oh, I’ll take a, you know, a 986 911, or I’ll take a RS5 that for some reason somebody misposted at a [01:32:00] different number. I mean,

Crew Chief Brad: they’re all 6. Exactly.

Rob Luhrs: Me, when I was 16, though, I did try to buy a 914 and still kick myself that I didn’t buy it.

Because that would have been a dream car back then that you can’t get for 10k now. Otherwise, that would be on my list.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, I’ll wow you guys with my selfish dad. If I could be 16 again with what I know now for 10 grand, it would have to be black. Is the 3. 8 liter Hyundai Genesis Coupe.

Rob Luhrs: That’s a fast, fun car.

Genesis are pretty cool. Those are fun cars.

Crew Chief Eric: At 16 and I got 10 grand to blow on a car. Something different in the high school parking lot for sure. And on that bombshell, Brad, it’s time to take us home.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s a tough call to make on behalf of a young driver. Not only are the economics of the situation, a challenge or an additional burden, so this particular type of car buying, we hope that this episode gives you some food for thought.

And if you’d like to continue the conversation or expand on some of the topics here, don’t be shy. podcast, Facebook group, or discord, where you can get in contact with the panelists you heard here tonight. And I want to thank our panel for another great, what should I [01:33:00] buy debate? Oh, you know, we haven’t heard from my Crutchfield and it’s a shame we’ve run out of time and we’ll have to get to them next time on the next, what should I buy?

Crew Chief Eric: Well guys, for most of the general public, it’s safe to assume that in their lifetime, they will probably own a total of five cars, max per person. And that’s based on our very scientific method of talking to non car friends and asking about their car buying history. But as we talked about earlier. It’s those first impressions that are lasting impressions.

So helping to pick that right first car is really important to the future of your petrol heads and their story. As they look back on what they imprinted on. So remember everyone has a story and it’s this point, this very moment, when you decide on that first car, that’s going to Second trajectory of where their story’s gonna go.

Consider that when you’re purchasing a car for your first time driving.

Don Weberg: Well, thank you guys. This has been helpful.

Crew Chief Eric: Was it, Don? Did you get something out of this?

Don Weberg: It was, I think Rob hit it out of the park actually really feeling a gravitational pull [01:34:00] toward that Honda. The question is, can we find one, can we afford it?

And. Is the wife and daughter on board with it.

Crew Chief Eric: I very much appreciate this. And I look forward to getting back together with y’all very, very soon. Obviously we do these all the time. This is

Rob Luhrs: a blast. I feel like it’s both been only like a day and yet it’s been a decade since I was last on. And like last time it was a lot of more HRR talk, just to be clear.

Crew Chief Eric: Yes. Yes. But we’ve matured since those days.

Don Weberg: All right.

Rob Luhrs: Well,

Don Weberg: thanks you guys. Take care. Thanks.

Rob Luhrs: And make sure you got to make sure you report back with what she ends up getting.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, for sure.

Don Weberg: Okay. We’ll do.

Crew Chief Eric: We hope you enjoyed another awesome episode of Brake Fix Podcast brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports. If you’d like to be a guest on the show or get involved, be sure to follow us on all social media platforms at GrandTouringMotorsports. And if you’d like to learn more about the content of this episode, be sure to check out the follow on article [01:35:00] at GTMotorsports.

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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 the Debate
• 00:55 Meet the Panelists
• 02:34 Don’s Dilemma: Choosing a Car for His Daughter
• 09:02 First Car Stories: Panelists Share Their Experiences
• 23:09 Manual vs. Automatic: The Great Debate
• 30:12 The Social Impact of Your First Car
• 31:14 Generational Differences in Car Enthusiasm
• 33:42 Safety Features for Teen Drivers
• 37:26 Choosing the Right Car for College
• 39:26 Affordable Car Options Under $10K
• 44:05 The Debate on Older vs. Newer Cars
• 46:22 Practical Considerations for Teen Cars
• 01:03:27 The Cost of German Car Enthusiasm
• 01:05:20 Affordable Hybrids for Eco-Conscious Drivers
• 01:07:04 The Indestructible Nissan Altima
• 01:11:04 The Versatile Honda Element
• 01:24:22 Selfish Dad Lightning Round: Dream Cars for $10K
• 01:32:34 Final Thoughts and Farewell

• What’s Your Number?
• I am looking for a used car, Any suggestions? A VW buyers guide.
• Regrets and the Desert Island