by Doug DeMuro
Earlier this year there was one 2003 and one 2004 red/tan 360 with similar or fewer miles than your car, Daytona interiors, Tubi exhausts, Challenge grills, F1 transmissions, leather rear shelves and headliners, Hi-Fi/sub-woofers. Those cars sold for $82,000 and $83,000. Each needed some mechanical or cosmetic services, which would have raised the prices to approximately $95,000 total. At $80,000 your car easily becomes $95,000 if you add rear challenge grill ($2,500 installed); Tubi exhaust ($5,500 installed); Daytona interior ($5,000) and the tire, brakes and major service completion ($5,000 approx). YES, I am interested in your car. But I will pay what it is worth. My local dealer recently sold a 10,000 mile 2000 360 with all the options, all the services completed and NO NEEDS WHATSOEVER—a far cry from your car—for $82,000. Unfortunately, it was not a color I liked! I know I need to pay within a certain range. NO PRICE WE HAVE DISCUSSED is within that range.
Lastly, if I get the inspection, it is a pre-purchase inspection. If you get it, it is pre-sale inspection. If I get it they will talk to me candidly about the car. If you get it they may not talk to me at all. I also thought that my willingness to pay for the inspection was a sign of good will. Before today your remarks had led me to believe that we had a deal subject to the inspection proving your representations. The circumstances have proven something completely different: the car is at variance with what we anticipated the issues to be when we talked last time. If you want to talk about it call me.
Rod
At this point, I cut off all contact with Rod, who became considerably more polite once he realized I had other buyers lined up. The Ferrari eventually went to an engineer in northern California, but only after he requested a thorough pre-purchase inspection from the Ferrari dealership and flew all the way out to Philadelphia with his wife to take a look at it.
Fortunately, the buyer knew exactly who was selling him the Ferrari: he had Googled me and watched several of my videos before signing the papers. I was happy he did this, and that he carried out the inspection—because while the online Ferrari forums were cautioning people not to buy the car from “the crazy Jalopnik guy,” the buyer knew differently: the car was in great condition and I had maintained it very well during my ownership—and he had the inspection to prove it.
It shipped out of my house in an enclosed trailer bound for California on January 4, 2015. Philadelphia got its first snowfall of the season the very next day.
The Hummer: From the moment I bought my Hummer, I thought selling it would be a huge problem. I mainly believed this because I had no idea who the hell would want to spend any amount of money for this awful, rough, ugly, loud vehicle, let alone something close to $30,000, which is what I paid for it.
I truly thought the buyer would be a tattooed, gun-toting, land-owning, government-hating madman, who would only pay me in Bitcoin or off-the-grid silver, and would I consider a trade for seven pump-action shotguns plus cash?
I couldn’t have been more wrong. The guy who bought the Hummer showed up in business clothes and a Honda CR-V. He was soft-spoken, he was quiet, and he didn’t provide a single political opinion. He was a businessman who lived in New Hampshire and worked in a corporate office near Boston. He was buying the Hummer to use with his kids: they were in elementary school, and they were excited about construction vehicles and big trucks, and he thought it’d be fun to drive to his local town’s ice cream shop, or to the movie theater, or to the supermarket, with his kids in tow. He told me they were tremendously excited at the prospect of Dad having a Hummer.
The sale turned out to be the easiest I’ve ever had: he merely had me drive him around the block in the Hummer, made an offer, and then walked directly to my bank to give me a $2,000 deposit check. I never spoke to a single other buyer, and—six months after the sale—I haven’t heard from the guy again.
To my knowledge, he had no idea who I am or what I do—and if he did, he certainly didn’t say anything. I guess that means he also has no idea that his Hummer was once parked on top of a Chrysler PT Cruiser.
Nissan Skyline GT-R: I sold my Nissan Skyline GT-R on Bring a Trailer, which is an online car sales site that runs automotive auctions and highlights unique vehicles found for sale on the Internet. Since the site highlighted some of my writing and videos about the car during the auction, the buyer knew the car’s unusual online history before he purchased it.
The Skyline went to a car enthusiast in Wichita, Kansas, who was a great guy with a wide-ranging interest in vehicles: he had old muscle cars and American classics, two Porsche 911 Speedsters, a Porsche 944 Turbo, and a new Nissan GT-R—and now he has my Skyline.
I truly believe the Skyline, more than any other car, is responsible for my automotive writing success, so saying goodbye was a sad moment. Ironically, the trailer came to haul away my Skyline the day I bought the V8 Vantage—and I had to hustle back from the dealership where I bought the Aston so I could deliver the Skyline to the truck driver.
Every so often, a reader sends me a tweet or an e-mail showing my old Skyline at the local Wichita cars and coffee—and every so often, I think about how cool it would be to have it back. Then I remember the YouTube commenters. I’m happy it’s gone.
The Guy with the Audi S4
One of the most popular columns I ever wrote was about the V8-powered Audi S4, which was sold from 2004 to 2008, wherein I called the S4 an “awful used car.”
Here’s why: the original S4 had a timing belt, which annoyed everyone because it had to be changed every so often. To remedy this, Audi fitted the V8 S4 with a timing chain, which never had to be changed—so they stuck it in the back of the engine, away from everything else. Theoretically, this was an improvement, with one problem: while the timing chain itself never failed, the chain’s tensioners were prone to failure, which could destroy the entire engine. Even if you caught the problem before it got to that level, you still had to pull the engine out of the car and replace dozens of parts, the total cost of which is something like $8,000.
If you’re reading this now and you own a V8-powered Audi S4, you just got very nervous.
And indeed, that’s what happened after I wrote the column. I put the column up at Christmas because I figured nobody would really care about a five- to ten-year-old used car, but what happened instead was the Audi corner of the Internet exploded. Whereas a column will usually generate one or two e-mails, I got twenty or thirty from people all over the country who wanted to share their own S4 engine problem experience.
The best part of the column was the reaction from owners: usually, when I make fun of a car, I get nasty e-mails from owners telling me I’m wrong, and I’m an idiot, and I have no idea what I’m talking about, and I should go die in a corner. This time, the owners all solemnly agreed … yeah, you’re right. Several people e-mailed to tell me they had a very hard time selling their S4 after the column came out.
So anyway: in the column, I mentioned a specific car I had considered buying until I discovered this problem. Of course, I didn’t buy the car—and I never told the seller why, or even that I write for Jalopnik. I just told him I wasn’t interested anymore, and that was that.
Three months later, I got a text message from the seller of the car I was considering. He told me he’d figured that out I wrote the column, and he’d figured out that I was talking about his car, and he’d had so much trouble selling the thing that he eventually just pulled out the engine and replaced the tensioners himself, as he was an Audi technician.
I read his texts with amusement, and then his last lines caught my attention. He fixed the tensioners?
“Great!” I told him. “Now I’m interested in buying it!”
His reply: “Hell no. Now I’m keeping it!”
The Crazy E-Mails
One of the most amazing things to me about the work I do is the number of people willing to express their opinions without knowing all the details of whatever the hell I’m writing about, or talking about, or filming.
For example: I still remem
ber the backlash when I told people that my Hummer was too wide for me to park it in the street, “so I parked it on the sidewalk.” Even though I showed photos that I really only parked it on the curb, and the sidewalk was closed due to construction and therefore impassible, and the tree next to the Hummer blocked the sidewalk about four feet more than the Hummer did, these people could not be convinced to cease their rage.
The Internet lends itself to this kind of open expression of opinions from completely unqualified people. And while they mostly stick to posting comments on Jalopnik or YouTube, occasionally they’ll take the time to actually send me an e-mail. What follows are three of the most memorable and bizarre e-mails I’ve received over the last few years. The first is from a guy who e-mailed me after seeing my listing on the Hummer web forums, where it sold less than two weeks later. The second is from a reader who got mad when I insulted drag racing. And the third… well, you’ll just have to read it for yourself.
***
Hi Doug,
I have enjoyed your videos. I also wrote in my posts that some of your expressions
remind me that you look like Jay Leno a little …
Now to the hummer:
you have a 95 truck. It is GASSER. It has a terrible yellow paint job -- looks like it
done at a gas station. I used to own a 95 gasser for 11yrs. I decided to sell it. I took it to CARMAX and got an offer of $17K. Then I was luck to sell it for $23K.
As far as hummers are concerned, they have to be diesel all the way. There are fans of gas
trucks but very few and far between. GAS trucks will go for approx 20% to 30% less when
compared to an identical counterpart. The gas trucks are good for city but their driving gas cost is very very high since they give single digits gas mileage and the engines are way way underpowered.
On the HML, hummvee.net, if you can log in, search for my posts. They banned me for being too honest and open.
I have now bought a 1998 turbo diesel wagon. No comparison with my 1995 gas truck. The engine power is so apparent in a diesel. Like comparing a toyota camry with a mecedess S600, in terms of power and feel.
I am not trying to discourage you with my neg comments but I am trying to tell you what the
market is. Some gas trucks have only sold for high teens.
So get ready and fasten your seatbelt...
***
hey fuck face.
I read your stupid fucking post at jalopnik in which you make fun of poor white people for being different and then proceed to shit on their hobby and its practices and sayings while obviously knowing jack shit about drag racing. Good job on making yourself look like a snobby prick who speaks from ignroance.
let me guess. bought not built, right?
go fuck yourself
Justin
***
Hi Doug, You know that grey and white striped shirt you wear in some of those in studio videos you do? Those shirts are almost exactly the pattern worn by jews in the Nazi concentration camps. It makes me sick watching you wear these shirts. Maybe it's only me that notices, but the rest of the viewer are ignorant idiots, and you're a decent person.
Your move,
Jim
The Jalopnik Stories
The next collection of stories is a grouping of some of my finest columns that have appeared on Jalopnik over the last 18 months. I know these are my finest because they make me smile. They make me giggle. They make me laugh. And also, they have generated the most hate mail. Enjoy!
Here’s Why the 996 Turbo Is the Best Porsche 911 You Can Buy
Originally published on Jalopnik—December 2, 2014
Whenever people find out that I worked for Porsche, they always ask the same thing. They look at me for a second, then they think. Then they look at me again, and they think some more. And then they say: “Are you the asshole who designed the Panamera?”
Ha ha! I’m just kidding. What people really want to hear about, when they discover that I worked for Porsche, is all the cool stuff I got to do. Testing new models. Driving press vehicles. Flinging sports cars around the racetrack.
But everyone is always disappointed to discover that none of these things actually happened. Instead, I explain, my job primarily involved sitting behind a desk, creating “IF” statements in Microsoft Excel, and eating sandwiches during lunch meetings. My entire racetrack experience came during the Cayenne launch, when I threw up after a hot lap in an ML63.
But my time at Porsche did teach me about one important thing: the 911. Throughout my job, I drove them all: from 1970s models up to the brand-new 991. From Turbos and GT3s to the vaunted 993. I had four different 911 company cars, and I personally owned one more. And after all this experience, and all this exposure, and all this time behind the wheel, I’ve reached the following conclusion: the 996 Turbo is the best one of them all.
For those of you who aren’t aware of the 996 model, allow me to explain: this was the 911 sold from 1999 to 2005. It’s sleek, and it’s fast, and it’s fun to drive, and it’s cheap to buy, and to most casual observers its styling is approximately identical to every other 911, which is to say: it looks like the kind of thing your dad might buy when he starts to lose his hair.
But to Porsche enthusiasts, this car is the devil in automotive form. Sure, it was faster, and more powerful, and more luxurious, and more practical than its predecessors. But if you ask a Porsche enthusiast about the 996, you’ll get this look, as if you’re in the middle of a Mopar meet, and you just went up to some Dodge-loving, Barracuda-driving, Hemi-obsessed redneck and asked what he thinks about the PT Cruiser.
And I admit, Porsche enthusiasts have their reasons for hating the 996. For one thing, they hate the headlights, which did away with the traditional circular look in favor of an unusual new design that resembles a pre-schooler’s misguided portrait of the family dog. They hate that it’s water-cooled, not air-cooled like earlier models. And then there’s the matter of the engine, namely the fact that—at any moment—it may catastrophically fail without warning.
But I still think the 996 Turbo is the best of them, and today I’m going to try and explain why.
(Full disclosure: I owned a 2001 996 Turbo that I later sold to a Comcast executive. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have sold it to him. When he called, I should’ve answered the phone and put him on hold for three hours before transferring him to a guy in Papua New Guinea.)
To begin, let’s address that engine issue. What I’m referring to here is the “intermediate shaft,” also known as the “IMS,” which is a famous late-1990s and early-2000s Porsche problem where you’d be driving along one day, top down, sun out, birds chirping, wind in your hair, and all of a sudden your engine would make noises like you just stuck a prairie dog down a blender. So you’d get out to check the situation, and you’d have your car towed into a mechanic, and you’d discover that your engine is now trash, but would you like to replace it for $20,000?
Well, here’s the good news: that problem can affect virtually every 996 model except the Turbo. It affected the naturally aspirated cars, the Carrera 4S models, the anniversary editions, and even the Boxsters of the same era. But the 996 Turbo used a different engine design, free from IMS faults, free from any issues, really, except the one that comes when you’re cruising down the highway, open road ahead of you, problems melting away, and suddenly you remember you were supposed to pick up Grandma at the airport seven hours ago.
Now, let’s talk styling. No, the 996 isn’t the most attractive car in the world. But when you go home tonight, take a good look in the mirror and ask yourself: Am I the most attractive human in the world? Of course you aren’t. You’re probably mediocre. You’re probably in the bottom 50 percent, overall. In fact, and I don’t mean to be disrespectful here, but let’s face it: there’s a good chance that you are the 996 of mankind. Suddenly the car’s flaws don’t seem so bad now, do they?
Plus, the 996 Turbo didn’t look all that bad. Yes, it still suf
fered from the same pre-schooler-family-dog-portrait headlight issue as the rest of the cars. But it also had a wider rear end, cool side-mounted air intakes, dramatic Turbo-only wheels, and a fixed rear spoiler designed to remind everyone that the 996 Turbo is, unequivocally, the best of a bad lot. It’s the Porsche equivalent of showing up at Enterprise and getting a Fusion.
And performance? Wonderful, of course. Oh, sure, it understeers a bit here and there. But this is an all-wheel drive Porsche 911 with 415 horsepower, a slick manual transmission, a four-second 0-to-60 time, and a 190-mph top speed. It’s fast. It’s fun. It handles well. And it’ll run circles around its predecessor, the 993 Turbo, which costs twice as much.