The Dead Car Road Trip Adventure (Part 1 of 3)

In 2016, I had a major upheaval in my life. The year before, my funding at the engineering job I had for 30 years (finding unexploded shells on old military training ranges; long story) had spiraled down to only 12 hours a week. Bentley Publishers had recently published my first book, they offered me what seemed like a dream job writing more books, and I took it. But a year later, tough times in publishing caught up with me, and I was let go. I went back to my engineering job as a consultant and, in the fall of 2016, did one final two-month geophysical survey in Denver.

While I was out there in the great American west, I became obsessed with the idea of buying a needy RV for short money, fixing it, having my wife fly out, and doing a National Parks road trip together. But I didn’t want just any RV. As a diehard BMW guy, I set my sights on a Vixen 21TD, the weird low-production RV from the mid-1980s that was powered by a BMW turbodiesel engine and had a five-speed transaxle. Amazingly, I found a well-priced needy one in Albuquerque, about seven hours south of Denver. My middle son Kyle lives in nearby Santa Fe, so I rolled visiting him and the Vixen into a weekend trip. Kyle’s father-in-law Mike is a diehard car guy, so he wanted in when I went to look at the Vixen. Mike even offered that, if I wanted it or some other vehicle, he could arrange to have it towed to his house in Santa Fe and I could work on it in his driveway.

During this period, I was talking with my old employer about officially getting my engineering job back. They said that they had more survey work lined up in the new year, so that was possible. I began to dream that an automotive adventure and a road trip vacation with my darling wife, followed by a return to the chain gang of regular employment would all slot in nicely.

It didn’t. Everything train-wrecked, beginning with the Vixen. When Mike and I saw it, any dreams of resurrecting it flew out the window. It was a basket case—engine seized, steering column inexplicably laying on the floor, interior likely an active Hantavirus laboratory. Mike repeated his gracious offer of driveway repair space and storage, but it was clear that if I had one free-spin card to use, it shouldn’t be on this. And when the Denver survey ended shortly before Christmas 2016 and I spoke with my old employer about officially coming back, I was told that that couldn’t happen because the work had been postponed due to delayed funding.

And so I entered 2017 unemployed for the first time since 1984. I scrambled and ramped up my writing for the BMW Car Club of America (BMW CCA), adding a weekly online piece to my longstanding Hack Mechanic Roundel magazine column. A few months later, I began writing here for Hagerty, something for which I am eternally grateful.

But I couldn’t let go of the idea of remotely buying a dead or needy car, swooping in, doing whatever sort-out was necessary, and road-tripping it home, even though the economics and timing made no sense whatsoever. I’ll admit freely that some of this was driven by an adventure that my former colleague at Roundel magazine Dan Erwin had when he drove his BMW 2002 from Virginia to Denver and wrote about it in his article “Crusty Goes West.” The idea of being like Dan and pitting my experience, wits, and chutzpah against inanimate metal was intoxicating. I mean, I have a long history of resurrecting cars, prepping them for road trips, and fixing them when they break. How different was this, really?

The answer is “Quite a bit.” Start with the “dead” part. It’s really pretty obvious. We don’t road-trip dead cars, now, do we? No, we don’t. After winning an eBay or BaT auction for a dead car (or finding the car on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace and corresponding with the seller), what exactly would you do? Remember, you’re not buying a running car and figuring that, if it dies, you’ll turn your cell phone and credit card into a rented U-Haul truck and an auto transporter. Or driving there with a truck and a trailer to pick it up (although that’s what “bring a trailer” used to mean). Or arranging for shipping. None of those are the adventure you said you crave. You’re signing up for something far more visceral and stupid.

So, slow down, take a second, and start thinking about the steps. Do you buy a plane ticket, take a carry-on with just jeans, socks, and underwear, come face-to-face with your fantasy purchase, and just figure the whole thing out on the fly? Do you pack a tent and a sleeping bag and surprise the seller by doing the “forgiveness not permission” thing and sleeping on his property and asking to use his bathroom while you work on the car, calling DoorDash for meals and Uber for runs to the nearest Harbor Freight and AutoZone and using his address for parts deliveries? And if you get the thing running, do you just head out of the seller’s driveway to the open road to engage your naïve psychotic future, frantically taking notes of the car’s needs during the first mile of driving, then stop at the first Motel 6, order parts, wait for them to arrive, work on it in the parking lot, then lather-rinse-repeat your way across the country?

With the idea half-formed (more like half-baked) in my mind, I began looking. I found a 1968 BMW on Craigslist on the west coast that I referred to as “the bathmat” as it was powder blue with two yellow stripes. The gas tank was missing, but a video showed it running with the carb fed from a can of Monster energy drink, which I assume was filled with gas as opposed to caffeine and sugar. I liked its vibe, emailed the seller, and floated the idea that I buy it sight-unseen, but asked the “Can I tent in your yard for a few days while I sort out a few things” question as well as inquired about the tires and brakes because, well, I would have to go over the Sierra Nevadas in winter. His response was “This must be spam, because no one would actually propose doing something that stupid.” He was right.

I found another car, a fuel-injected 2002tii on eBay in Florida that I termed “the bumblebee” due to its yellow-and-black paint scheme that seemed to better fit the bill. It was clearly a Franken-car (the interior alone clearly involved several donors), and it too was missing its gas tank, replaced by a red 2 ½ gallon unsealed gas can with the fuel send and return lines stuck in the top. I bid and thought I won, but a last-moment snipe edged me out.

The more I thought about it, the clearer it was that the logistics of this endeavor were non-trivial, and that the following were necessary for it to not be a fool’s errand:

1. The car should be a model you know well so you stand a better chance at diagnosing and repairing it as quickly and easily as possible (hence my looking at BMW 2002s, of which I’ve owned 40).
2. The car needs to either be capable of being driven off the seller’s property, or at least be towed somewhere nearby where you can suss it out and work on it.
3. Thus, you need to have a relative or close friend nearby with garage space and a spare bedroom, or at least a driveway and a sofa. My son’s father-in-law Mike offering this to me with the Vixen happened so seamlessly that it hid the fact that it was an indispensable part of any realistic plan.
4. The more upfront intel you can get on the car, the better. That way you can show up with at least a first round of needed parts.

The RV craving revived itself a few years later, resulting in the purchase of my now-departed 1995 Winnebago Rialta, which is a Volkswagen Eurovan with a Winnebago camper on the back. The big western road trip, however, never happened. The buy-and-revive-a-dead-car road trip, though, just needed to wait for the right car.

And then along came Louie. I didn’t find it through the usual method of pounding on ad sites. The car, a very-desirable round tail light fuel-injected 1972 BMW 2002tii, was down in Louisville, Kentucky. The owner had floated it for sale on a local BMW 2002 Facebook group. It looked pretty in its Agave (green) paint and original interior, but it had three big strikes against it: It had been sitting for a decade, it didn’t run, and it didn’t have a title (it and the registration, both in the previous owner’s name, had been kept in the glovebox and had reportedly been eaten by mice). The owner bought it, reportedly from its original owner after it sat under a carport dead for a decade, because he’d long wanted a round tail light 2002, but he wasn’t terribly mechanically inclined and didn’t really know how to revive and sort out a dead car, or even really how to describe and advertise one. The pressing issue was that he was getting married and needed to get the money out of the car. His asking price was very low.

Folks on the forum jumped all over him for not solving the title issue before advertising it. I corresponded with the guy, advising him that if he got a title, the car was probably worth two to three times what he was asking. I wasn’t trying to buy it. I was just trying to try to help him out with advice on the title as well as ascertaining and describing the true condition of the car. Was there rust? Where and how bad? Did the engine turn? Any potential buyer would want to know these things.

A few days later, the fellow messaged me, sending me a link to a folder with 133 photos in it, and encouraging me to make him an offer on the car. Nothing says “I have nothing to hide” like 133 photos. The pics showed that the car had a nasty line of rust-through in the nose under the bumper line that wasn’t visible at the walk-around level, and had spots of discolorations in the green paint where rust blisters had been sanded and treated with Hunter Green Rust-Oleum (“Yeah,” he said, “that probably wasn’t the best idea”), but other than that looked sold and remarkably original. I have a thing for original cars. Paint them and replace the rug and reupholster the seats and they’re prettier, but never quite the same. Citing my recent job change, I declined to make an offer, but really the issue was that I couldn’t even remotely imagine that we could get to a price point that was fair to both of us. I thought that was that.

But after the owner hit a dead end on getting a duplicate title from the previous owner, and answered a hailstorm of questions from interested parties and then had them pull back or ghost him, he had enough. He called me, saying that someone had made him a low no-title as-is offer, he reluctantly accepted, only to have the buyer change his mind. He was done. He said that I’d been helpful and truthful to him and he would love it if the car went to me, and offered it to me for a price that stopped me in my tracks. I told him I’d call him back in an hour (as a buyer or a seller, you can convey a lot of value to the other party simply by saying you’ll do something and then actually doing it). I went to the laptop and pored over all the photos again.

At some point in this process, I was contacted by a fellow named Jake who lived in Louisville and who I’d met once for ten minutes at the BMW event “The Vintage” that’s held every year in North Carolina. He’d actually gone to see the car when it was first floated for sale on the local Facebook group. His opinion of the car was fairly positive, with the caveats that he thought the interior was “crunchy”—that is, the old vinyl seat material was crack-free and looked great, but was hardened by sun exposure and was likely to crack when sat in—and that there wasn’t a body panel that didn’t have some of the green rust touch-up spots on it.

And then came the unexpected pearl: While I wasn’t explicitly tying the car to my dead-car-road-trip fantasy, Jake said that he had a pole barn in which he and his friends wrenched, and offered that he could have the car towed there and give it a thorough look-over so I’d have a better idea of what it needed, and could store it for me for a reasonable price until I decided how I wanted to retrieve it. Further, if I did want to try to come down, revive the car, and drive it home, Jake said that he and his wife had a spare bedroom, and I was welcome to stay with them. I realized that all four of the major bullets in my dead-car-road-trip logistics were suddenly satisfied.

The final hurdle was my internal sanity-check: Was I missing something? Why didn’t someone else snap up this car? Why was it falling back to the guy who said he wasn’t interested?

I thought about it carefully. Decade-dead cars do have a lot of risk. They can revive easily, or they can need everything including an engine. You don’t know which it’ll be until you get into the revival process. And people are afraid of the 2002tii’s Kugelfisher mechanical fuel injection. However, I’d revived half a dozen dead tiis, including one that was currently in my driveway, so none of this frightened me.

The title, though, was an issue. Other states may not require one for a car over 15 years old, but here in Massachusetts, you need a title to register any car, no matter its age. Although we don’t have bonded titles in this state, there are (or were back in 2017) ways of getting a title that involve running the car through another state with more laxe title laws, which is usually what happens when you pay a “title service” anyway. I’d be hesitant to do this now (see the story of my Lotus Elan +2 that had a valid NH title but was denied a MA title because it was mistakenly “marked as stolen”), but in 2017 I was willing to take the risk.

Lastly, I’ve long said that if you know about a car that others don’t, that’s a gift, because as soon as it hits eBay or BaT or Facebook Marketplace, thousands of eyeballs are on it and the odds of you being able to swoop in and grab it plummet. This wasn’t exactly that, but he contacted me and offered the car to me for a price that others would’ve killed for. This was a rare and precious situation.

I called the seller and said “yes.”

My oldest son who lives with us witnessed the week of communication with the seller that began with my saying that I didn’t want the car but advised him that he was asking far too little for it, transitioned to my helping him assess its condition and advertise it, and ended with him offering it to me for a price I couldn’t refuse, and said “Wow.. you’re like some Hack Jedi.”

Rob Siegel. Hack Jedi. I like it.

[Next week: The dead-car-road-trip adventure begins.]

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Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.