As I mentioned two weeks ago, while I was in the middle of my epic E30 seat-dyeing adventure, I bought an Agave Green 1972 2002tii—sight-unseen—in Louisville, Kentucky. The car reportedly hadn’t run in a decade. I had to figure out a safe and cost-effective manner to get it home; the seller was in no particular rush for me to move it, but these things are best ended cleanly.
First things first: The car acquired a name.
You have to understand that for decades, I didn’t name cars. I thought it was a little too cute. I’m not a cute guy, I’m a functional guy. But with the number of cars that come and go, names are actually helpful. However, my functionality is often at odds with creativity; I’m the guy who loves the fact that Ernest Hemingway named his black dog Black Dog. I’m the guy who named his shark, the 1979 Euro 635CSi, the most intimidating weapon in his arsenal, Sharkey, the way a two-year-old would name a gerbil.
So it was only natural that the car in Louisville became Louie.
After all, Louie is in Louisville, where all the Louies come from. Then my friend Scott Aaron took note of the car’s color, and offered that, “Louie Agave would be a great name for someone you don’t want to cross.” So Louie Agave it is.
At first there seemed to be two options: Ship Louie home, or fly in and try to revive the car on-site and then drive it home. Those who read this space know that for years I’ve been obsessing about doing exactly that: buying a 2002 sight-unseen, flying in, doing the minimum sort-out to get it moving down the road, and nursing it home. I imagined that this would involve stopping along the way, crashing on friends’ couches, fixing the car in Motel 6 parking lots, that sort of thing.
I wrote about this thought experiment at great length in the Vixen article. In my mind, the enabling factor of such an adventure seemed to be that you would need to be able to drive the car off the seller’s property, and then drive it or tow it to a friend or relative’s house that’s not too far away. If those two conditions aren’t met, it’s difficult to see how you’re going to pull it off, because it’s a pretty tall order to think that the seller is going to let you set up shop in their garage for several days and sleep on their sofa for several nights.
Louie already violated the first enabling factor by not only being dead and dormant for a decade, but by having several known issues (a non-functional clutch, a completely detached center support bearing, and a brake fluid reservoir completely bereft of fluid). So it seemed natural to ship Louie home.
I’ve written quite a bit over the years about the ins and outs of shipping a car. If you go the inexpensive shipping option, then you’re not hiring a shipper, you’re hiring a broker who hires a shipper—possibly several. With inexpensive shipping, the car is most likely shipped on an open multi-level transport, and may be loaded and unloaded a number of times. This may be perfectly fine for a car that is a daily-driving commodity, but it is a bit risky for a collectible car. For that, enclosed point-to-point shipping is usually advised, where you’re hiring a company for whom the driver works directly, and he or she is delivering your car in an enclosed trailer from Point A to Point B without a handoff to another company in the middle. The cost of enclosed point-to-point shipping can easily be double that of open transport, so it all depends on where you want to pick that point on the cost-versus-risk curve.
When a car is dead (inoperative, or inop, as they say), it may still be able to be shipped via open transport, but it’s inconvenient for everyone, as the car has to be winched on and off the transporter with a tow cable. Therefore, open transport of an inop car typically carries a surcharge. You also need to consider how inoperative the car is; if neither the brakes nor the emergency brake work, there’s certainly some risk involved in open transport of a dead car—it’s much safer to ship it point-to-point. Again, it’s a question of cost versus risk.
In Louie’s case, this was anything but an academic issue, as the seller reported that Louie’s brake pedal had no effect on slowing the car, and that only one of the emergency-brake cables appeared to be functioning properly.
Nevertheless, I wanted to know what the cost envelope was to ship the car from Louisville to Boston. I put Louie up for bid on UShip as an inop car and got surprisingly few bids. Those that came in were north of $850. Note that I was only testing the waters, so I did not use UShip’s “set a price and see who wants to meet it” feature.
A friend recommended that I try the website AutoTransport411, which is like one of those “fill out this form and have banks compete for your business on a mortgage” sites. It certainly generated a lot of shipping quotes, but I really wouldn’t recommend it. Despite my having filled out the on-line form containing my e-mail address, my phone rang incessantly for the next week. I patiently explained to all callers that I requested that they submit an estimate via the e-mail address I’d specified in the form so that I could collate and compare them, but the phone calls came for weeks. There was occasionally some amount of hard sell (“I have a transport leaving tomorrow”). There were calls that said “DON’T HANG UP we’re sure you’re inundated with calls” that then turned out to be robocalls. Some brokers bugged me so frequently that I actually had to block them.
But I did my due diligence on the quotes, checking out reviews of the companies online. Since open transport seems to involve multiple brokers hiring shippers from the same pool that probably has a few low-performing participants, it’s not surprising that most of the brokers have mixed reviews. Those brokers who gave me the lowest quotes either had a preponderance of bad reviews with a clear big red flashing, “You’re an idiot if you use this company; they quote you a low price up front, then charge your credit card without asking,” or had absolutely no history whatsoever. It didn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling.
So I looked at point-to-point shipping. I don’t own the Suburban anymore, but a number of folks have offered to loan me their truck and trailer, and I still have access to the rig from my sort-of-ex-geophysics job. Unfortunately, Louisville is about 900 miles from Boston. If it was, say, 500 miles, I probably would’ve just gone and gotten the car myself, but a two-day drive each way with borrowed equipment is a lot of time, and also some amount of risk. Plus, I estimated the cost of gas for the round trip at about $500. For that price, I could probably have shipped the car, had it been operational.
As I thought about it, I realized that there might be a third option: flying in, laying eyes and hands on the car, figuring out what it really was and what it really wanted, doing what was reasonable and possible within a given time period, and shipping it home if it indeed required the kind of major surgery that is best done in my garage—but perhaps, if a few more days would turn the tide, leaving the car in Louisville and coming back in a few weeks for Round II. I could then drive it not north, but south, to MidAmerica 02Fest at the end of April.
Coincidentally, Jake Metz, whom I’d met last year at the Vintage, lives in Louisville, and had already looked at Louie with a friend who had some interest in it. Jake recently built a good-sized pole barn, and offered that I could have the car towed there and store it for a period of time. We also talked about him looking the car over for me, so I could have as much information as possible prior to coming down, if that’s what I decided to do.
I, the man who is preternaturally enamored of options, really liked the sound of this.
So about a week after the sale was completed, Chris (the seller) had Louie towed to Jake’s barn.
About a week after that, Jake and I did the iPhone Facetime thing while he was at the car. I had him open up the gas tank. There was some light rust and a little sediment, but nothing scary; the gas smelled like gas, not like shellac. He pulled off the valve cover. The valve train looked varnished, as it would in any non-rebuilt 45-year-old motor, but it was free of corrosion. He opened up the radiator and there was no visible coolant, which was a little odd, but perhaps better than seeing a milk shake indicative of a blown head gasket.
Both Chris and Jake had already reported to me that the car had no fluid in the brake reservoir, and that the clutch pedal went right to the floor. I had Jake fill up the reservoir and pump the pedal a few times. He said that the rubber brake lines looked awful, but he didn’t see any Exxon Valdez-like fluid spill anywhere.
While we were Facetiming, I resisted the temptation to have Jake jump the car and see what happened. As the Wicked Witch of the North said, “These things must be done delicately.
I kept coming back to the idea that if I could just get down there, I’d know so much more.
So I looked at airfare. Boston to Louisville isn’t a high-volume run on which you find $79 tickets. If you book two weeks out, a one-way is as cheap as $160, which I was willing to do. However, it is still winter, and the weather is difficult to predict (Boston was hit by several snowstorms in this period); working in Jake’s unheated pole barn and possibly driving the car into the howling maw of a winter storm weren’t terribly appealing. Jake also advised that, while his barn was up and hosting cars, the electrical service wasn’t in yet, so perhaps, both electrically and weather-wise, end of March might be a better time frame.
Then, a couple of things happened. My friend Scott Aaron jocularly reported that winter appeared to have been cancelled in the Louisville-Cincinnati region. Sure enough, I looked online and saw a weather forecast that literally had a big arrow labeled “warm and mild” sweeping from the Mid-South into the Northeast.
The second thing was that, while I am still unemployed, the possibility of a week or two of well-paid geophysics work was dangled in front of me by my sort-of-former employer. I asked when it started, and they said, “Don’t know, could be anytime, but probably soon.”
I thought, “You want to go get Louie and road-trip him home? You need to do this right now.”
I considered a few options. I seriously thought about driving down in Kugel, my white ’72tii, because, let’s face it, there’s nothing to help you sort out a decade-dormant tii like the parts from another one, and there’s no more space-efficient container for those parts than an actual tii. I could even swap Louie’s driver’s seat with one of Kugel’s Recaros, giving me a good seat for the drive back. Of course, if I got Louie running, I’d need to leave Kugel there—or drive back in it and leave Louie. That only made sense if I was committed to flying back down and driving one of them to MidAmerica. I even thought about driving Old Blue—the ’73tii I bought two years ago and got running in one feverish weekend—instead, because if you’re going to risk driving one completely unsorted, unproven tii a thousand miles, why not double your fun and do it with two?
Part of my personality seems to delight in keeping options open. I realize that this tendency is, in fact, death—you need to be bold, make decisions, make the leap, figure it out on the fly, burn the ships on the shore like Alexander the Great, and all that, but I am a guy who likes to think things through and have a plan. I didn’t want to lock myself into either flying back if the car was capable of being driven, or having to pay full fare for a return ticket if the car wouldn’t cooperate, or committing to return to pick up another car.
I kept thinking. If only there were some way to get down there with all my tools and parts and stuff at a reasonable cost, and get back if I needed to… like if a friend drove me down and hung around for the entire time… or if I could borrow a car and leave it there.
And then I had an epiphany. It said: You’re an idiot. You can rent a car.
Suddenly it all came into focus. My sort-of-former geophysics job has a good deal with National Car Rental. I checked the rates and found that I could pick up a car in Boston and return it there a week later for $266. And, applying the two free days I had from my long rental in Denver, the price was closer to $210. I could simply load up the rental with all my stuff, including the driveshaft and the spare Recaro, and drive it down. Two days to drive down, two days back, gave me three days to work on the car. If I couldn’t get Louie running and sorted out enough for the trip in three days, I could simply drive home in the rental, and if I was successful at the sort-out, I could simply return the rental at the Louisville airport and pay a drop-off charge.
It was on. I was off.
In fact, I’m there now.
(Next week, I come to grips with the fact that sorting out a decade-dead car a thousand miles from home is an inherently bad idea.)—Rob Siegel
Rob’s first book, Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic, and his new book, The Hack Mechanic Guide to European Automotive Electrical Systems, are available through Bentley Publishers, Amazon, ECS Tuning, and Bavarian Autosport—or you can get personally inscribed copies through Rob’s website: www.robsiegel.com.
