Ed Bolian's Top 10 Car Stories

[Music] [Applause] [Music] over the past three years i've been able to share more than 100 of my personal best car stories that's what this channel is all about and i can't express how much fun it's been and what a true honor it is to have this platform and to be able to share them with so many more people than i'd ever be able to in my normal sphere of influence and daily life so i'm glad that you've enjoyed them but i thought today it'd be an awful lot of fun to look back at our top 10 stories from my playlist on this channel my top 10 car stories and each of these has well over a million views it's absolutely crazy nothing i ever would have imagined but i found it very interesting to see which ones have gotten the most views see which ones you like some of them i'm not surprised by some of them i am but i hope that you enjoy my top 10 car stories [Music] i look at the cop and i'm like what are you doing arrest this guy no response whatsoever [Applause] [Music] around 2011 and 12 we started to get a lot of demand for exotic cars from south america and at that point the dealer network there was kind of underdeveloped and it was still a fairly novel concept that it was actually safe enough to drive cars that valuable in those countries particularly brazil because that's where a lot of the calls were coming from but we weren't being contacted by the end users down there instead it was brokers or businesses in south florida that were exporting the cars and since it's against our franchise agreement to sell cars that we know are probably going to be exported it wasn't really up to me whether or not we took these deals so i would talk to my general manager and at the time he was pretty open to that he wanted to sell as many as we could and so if that's what this meant okay so there was one guy in particular that we dealt with a lot and he was very professional and easy to deal with and made expectations clear and communicated well and he became a great client i would sell him five to ten cars a year and in general he would just call and say i've got a guy that wants a gallardo he's open to these colors what do you have and he would just buy something out of our inventory he would give us a deposit and two or three weeks later he'd have the rest of the money and he would send it it can take a long time to get that amount of money out of south america so it was nice to have this kind of buffer not only for some plausible deniability but to make the transactions a little bit more convenient but about a year into the relationship he came to me and said he had a request for two very specific cars a guy wanted a yellow 2012 brand new gallardo performante and a 2012 bentley continental flying spur speed and i could find the gallardo through another dealer but obviously we weren't a bentley dealer and so i told him let me do a day or two of research i'll find us a car figure out what discounts are available and i'll get you one so the next day i found a white one exactly what he wanted with the right options at a good discount and he was happy but we had to kind of lay down the rules a little bit differently because we told him look in most cases if your deal falls apart we'll be happy to give your deposit back and we had in some cases but in this case we're having to secure two cars and buy them let the warranties start that we really don't want for inventory so we need a bigger deposit and truly in this case it is non-refundable and he agreed with that but he said look i don't have a bunch of cash right now but i do have an almost brand new bmw x6 that i secured for a client he gave me a deposit and then he didn't consummate the transactions so why don't i give you that and the title as a non-refundable deposit on these cars so we agreed to that it was worth about 55 grand so we bought the other two cars and brought them into inventory and a couple weeks later kind of as you'd imagine his deal fell apart so we ended up owning this brand new lamborghini and this brand new bentley that we really didn't want and we didn't know what it was really going to take to sell them and they sat around for a very long time but eventually we did sell the bentley to some professional golfer i don't remember who it was not tiger woods and the gallardo just sort of sat around for a good long while and a couple months later my boss was like guys we have got to move this gallardo and at that time the 200 or so thousand dollar price point that the lp 550s were at those cars sold great but the 280 to 300 lp 570s around for a good long while and he was starting to get nervous about it and so we were trying to call anybody but i didn't have anybody i could just snap my fingers and sell the car to and around that time there was a guy who came in fairly often trying to test drive cars and in general we didn't test drive many cars and certainly not new cars and never early in the process we would already have dealt with when you want to buy how you want to buy how you want to pay what the contingencies are what we've got to deal with before that because we weren't worried about you not liking the way the car drove and if you were just trying to drive a car to see which one you'd eventually want to buy i mean that's what magazines are for so we weren't doing much test driving and certainly i wasn't and i really didn't deal with that many people that were showroom ups that just walked in because about 80 of my business at that point was repeat customers but this guy had come in a few times fishing for test drives and i just kind of deflected it and he'd get a little bit upset but then just sort of leave and he was an exceedingly unpleasant person to deal with he had said that his wife was some professional tennis player and that he had some tech startup that he was in the process of selling to microsoft for like 80 million dollars but he wouldn't tell us who she was or what the business did or what it was called or anything like that and obviously the guy's lying but regardless he would just go away and it wasn't that big of a deal but he showed up one saturday and i was busy doing something else so he started talking to one of my co-workers and a little bit less gracefully than i would tend to he refused to let this guy test drive a car and things got a little heated then they got more hostile then they got a little bit combative and they were shouting at each other and he was screaming profanity across our showroom and i'm over in the corner with some cappuccino and popcorn just ready for the fireworks to start because this co-worker of mine generally kept more firearms on his person or around his desk than a jason bourne movie but my general manager didn't like the circumstance so he stepped in and tried to defuse everything and his solution was let me let you talk to ed so he calls me over and he's like ed knows everything about lamborghinis he'll be happy to help you with whatever you want to do all right hey i'm ed bully and how can i help you so he said i want to test drive that yellow lamborghini right now and i said well you know it's really up to him my general manager here if he wants you to i'll be more than happy to pull it out he said yep whatever you want ed go get the keys get it out of here so we began the 20 or 30 minute process of shuffling all these cars around to get this car out of the showroom because saturdays are the worst possible day to test drive a car at an exotic car dealership the showrooms are full of instagram photographers and everybody's busy doing different things delivering cars to people coming in from out of town so it's just a terrible time to tie up an hour or two with a particular customer especially one that you know is not going to buy a car so we get the car out of the showroom and we head out on the test drive and our test drive route is actually dictated by our insurance provider and it's designed to be an easy way to show someone a car in a very safe way so it's mostly right turns with good visibility no unaided left so we kind of go down a state highway and then we loop around and exit where there's a marta station our local georgia public transit and then back up to the dealership so it's about a 10 mile loop and we drive the first five miles just kind of showing them how all the controls work and this was before all the accidents that would happen in the subsequent years so our insurance company really liked us and we wanted to keep it that way so i was behaving myself although we didn't tend to along that route because that state highway is technically speed patrolled by the georgia state patrol not the local cops and there's no good places for them to set up speed traps and since it's kind of the only road like that on the north part of town there really are never cops on this route and that's kind of strategic on our part because sometimes we really want to show people what the cars can do and as we talked about in the press car video you can go pretty fast along our test drive route but in this case i was behaving myself just kind of showing him all right this is the car this is the speed limit let's just see how things go and keep everything safe so we get to the point where we change seats kind of in a parking deck at the smartest station and he gets in the driver's seat and i make sure his mirrors are adjusted as steering wheels where he wants it everything's comfortable and he starts driving and this guy goes absolutely insane i mean immediately just full acceleration hard braking upsetting the balance of the car i mean there are elegant ways to speed and this was not that it was dangerous it was entirely out of control and i immediately said dude this is not how we're gonna drive like you can try to experience the car and see what you like but this is not how we're gonna behave in this car on this test drive and he would kind of back off and then immediately just speed back up and i'm like sir i got to ask you to slow down like we cannot drive like this i understand that you want to see what the car can do but this is not how we're going to do it and again he kind of slowed down but he kept just speeding up and he's going 130 140 miles per hour weaving in and out of cars and i i finally say sir if you persist like this i'm going to have to ask you to pull over and we got to switch seats and he's like no no no i'm driving the car and then fortunately about a quarter mile ahead i see a local cop driving in our same direction and i said sir there's a cop let's just behave ourselves we need to keep a good relationship with them and he goes no downshifting two gears flooring the throttle and accelerating as hard and fast as he can at the rear of this police car and i'm like whoa what are you doing and he slams on the brakes and comes within inches of this cops rear bumper i mean just tailgating this guy and i'm like well fantastic this is going to save us all he's going to pull him over give him a ticket for following too close and i'll get to drive back to the dealership no the cop doesn't even notice he goes watch this and i go no no no please don't and he downshifts again floors the car barely avoids knocking the cop's mirror off and flies away from him well over 100 miles an hour and of course we got the top down on this performante convertible i look at the cop and i'm like what are you doing arrest this guy no response whatsoever so as he's accelerating away from this completely non-responsive cop he looks over at me and says i am invincible and i said uh well i'm not and i'm like this is how i'm going to die i don't know what witchcraft this guy is capable of but i don't know what's happening in my life at all right now but i know we have a cloverleaf exit coming up in half a mile and this guy doesn't have any clue how to drive a car so we're going to flip over and die right about now and magically we didn't the cop never responded in any way but we made it around that turn and i said sir we're almost back please just drive carefully and somehow we managed to get back with the car in one piece and us all still alive and i have no idea how that happened but of course as you would imagine he immediately said well let me continue to think about it and i'll call you if i decide this is what i want to buy and he immediately departed without saying anything to anybody else at the dealership and i walk back in and of course their first question is well is he going to buy it i said you guys got to be kidding me [Music] and as we might say he was a shrewd negotiator [Applause] [Music] so growing up i was always fascinated by roof i loved the philosophy of their cars of taking a brilliant car in the porsche 911 and then just making it kind of to the moon and back modifying it to be so fast we've all seen the videos of the yellow bird tearing around the nurburgring and most of us played gran turismo and saw that instead of porsche we had roof which we didn't know much about but it was this fascinating brand that were really really fast and stood up against all the hyper cars of really any era they were up against and i just i was enamored with the idea of the cars it actually seemed like a great car for cannonball you know it was lightweight aerodynamic prioritized top speed was generally fuel efficient it had everything going for it but you never saw them but back in 2012 i'd organized a trip from lamborghini atlanta with some lamborghini owners down to the espirianza which is sort of lamborghini's customer facing track driving experience program and we were driving from atlanta to palm beach to go to pbir and drive the aventadors and superleggers and everything else on the track and on the way down one of my guys in a per fermante had had a tire pressure monitor break internally and it was rattling around in the barrel of his wheel and so we stopped at lamborghini palm beach and asked them to dismount the tire and fix it and they were happy to do so but while we were wandering around there there was a car in their service bay and it was a roof and i asked the general manager i was like you know what's the deal with this car are you all selling it servicing he said i don't even want to talk about it i hate that car we're involved in this terrible lawsuit with the owner and it's just getting really really nasty i'd like it never to be here again but it's going to be here for quite some time and i went on to find out that the previous general manager had taken the car in on consignment when the guy ordered an aventador and the wait for aventadors at that point was a year and a half two years and so he had a car coming in late in 2012 they were going to consign the car at like 199 grand and see if it sold but if it didn't he had promised him a trade allowance of 130 000 against his aventador the new general manager had come in without much familiarity about what roof was and he saw that number and said absolutely not i'm not going to put that much money in this car i've got the hottest car on earth in this aventador and i've got this thing that i don't know i don't like and we've been trying to sell for a year and a half and nobody seems to want and so he uh had told the guy look i'm gonna sell your car to somebody else and uh you can keep your roof or whatever but i'm not giving you that he had decided he thought it was worth 75 grand at the time that was probably what an 07 911 turbo would have bought and he kind of viewed it in that light it was a 2006 rt-12 that had been brought into the u.s and then taken back to the factory in germany in 2009 to have the rt12s updates which took it from 650 to 685 horsepower but in reality i think they all pretty much always made 730 or at least that's what i was told and so he didn't really know what the car was he just knew he didn't want it and the owner was obviously offended at this offer and so the lawsuit continued and it went on for a couple of years and i would occasionally check back in and say you know how's my roof doing because i told him you know look i see you don't want the car if you get it traded if you ever own it just call me and i'll buy it from you i had no idea if he'd ever get anywhere near his price but i thought anything close is a great deal and it's a car i'd like to own i've always kind of wanted a 911 but i wanted something a little bit more special and this seemed like the perfect opportunity and it was kind of a weird spec it was matte black with a coco brown interior and that was a popular color when the 996 came out in terms of the interior and what it actually happened was the car was gt silver originally and he'd have it wrapped matte black when it came into the us but then when you sent it back for the updates you had to repaint it so it's like another 50 000 euros for the updates in the paint to me there's kind of a quintessential spec you can customize it in any way you want but i wanted a narrow body car that was rear-wheel drive stick had their integrated roll cage and all the aerodynamics and everything and so this car even though it's kind of a quirky combo and certainly it had a tough life for the last couple years sitting outside in south florida i just thought it was fantastic it had the adjustable moton suspension and on paper it was just perfection but as the years went on i got worried and i figured i was never going to be able to buy it and then that general manager that i knew well got moved to a different dealership and i didn't know the new guy and at that same time they had settled the lawsuit in a way that he didn't know about he wasn't sure and so the card left and i was kind of upset about that and i had left lamborghini atlanta back in november of 2015 to just take some time off of my family and look for something else to do i didn't have anything particular in mind eventually we ended up starting then wiki but i was kind of just sitting around through the holidays and around christmas in 2015 i was browsing around craigslist and i saw a 2006 roof advertised on craigslist in upstate new york i'm like it's an 06 matte black roof and the mileage was consistent with what i thought it had and there wasn't an asking price but there was a phone number so i called the guy and i said do you actually have the car and he said no i don't i i know i'm friends with the owner and he wants me to find him a real number for it and you know he's it's in florida but he's he's kind of nervous about things and i said well this is what i know about it and i gave him the whole rundown of the car's history for the last few years and he was dumbfounded that anyone would have this amount of knowledge about the car or that car in particular and so we went back and forth a little bit and i said look the car's got enough of a stigma because it's set outside and so many people have seen it why don't you just uh take the ad down and you and i will work something out i promise you i'm a check writer i'll be an easy deal i know the the lamborghini dealership wanted to offer him about 75 grand for the car i also know it's going to need a lot because it's been sitting since they made him that offer and so why don't we uh just you and i talk a little bit more about it but just take this this listing down because i didn't want anybody else to call about it and uh we'll and we'll figure something out and as we might say he was a shrewd negotiator and so we went back and forth and i offered him 69 000 dollars and he wanted a 1500 commission for managing the deal or whatever and i was obviously happy to pay that and as much as he tried to get me to come up i just stuck there and ended up owning the car for 70 500 with his commission the owner wanted to run the deal through lamborghini miami because he wanted to kind of stay out of it and i was scared because i knew brett david well he's a consummate car enthusiast and i figured you know when he sees this car come in through his inventory he's going to notice that it's dirt cheap and he's going to try to buy it out from under me and i'm like what am i going to do but i didn't really have an option and so i said all right well we'll just do that and i flew down there with a certified check and showed up to buy the car and i get there and they're kind of hiding it from me i'm like where's the roof and it was in the back they had multiple battery chargers on it it wouldn't start the check engine lights were all on it was just a mess but i uh i said it's all right it's okay i'll get it figured out let's just put a new battery in it and i'll i'll try to drive it home my brother had actually flown in and we were both going to drive the car to atlanta the next day so we had an awesome road trip home it was it was a little bit problematic because the you know the car was acting up a little bit it really hadn't been driven at that point i think about three or four years and so the wheels were leaking because the seals had dried out and the three-piece oz wheels and roof used the seats out of the ferrari enzo in the car and they didn't really fit the cockpit as porsche had designed it so your knees were a little bit too upright and they weren't terribly adjustable it was very hard to drive it without your hands hitting your knees but we made it home and the car was supposed to make 730 horsepower and go 228 miles an hour but i think on the turnpike i was only able to get it to about 182 or 85. so i was a little bit disappointed and i figured it was a little bit down on power but i had no idea so i got it home and started going through fixed the wheels fixed some paint things and went through a few things on the car and ended up getting some standard carrera seats that just fit the car a lot better and or at least were a lot more comfortable but i could not get the car to pass our georgia obd2 emissions scan so i ended up getting in touch with the former mechanic of the only roof dealership in the u.s for the last 15 years that was in dallas and he said to make sure they're using the right obd2 port and i said well we're using an obd2 port and i don't think it's legal to have two but he said nope nope there's absolutely a second one you pull this trim panel off on the passenger side and plug right into it and i guess one runs the 996 motor and one runs the 997 body so the rt12s were a little bit peculiar because they didn't like the variable vane turbos for a while that were on the 997s and so they kind of kept working with the cars but uh eventually i got it back to the emissions place with the proper obd2 port and it would not pass for secondary evap or catalytic converter so i called the factory and they said well you got to send the ecu's back and we'll send them over to bosch and they'll program it this was right around the time of volkswagen dieselgate so i knew bosch was up to the task but the car was down for like two months when i uh sent it off but finally got it back got it registered everything was good but i i just never fell in love with the car it wasn't that comfortable it definitely wasn't stable and there were probably some issues i think one of the shocks was starting to go but it used this really complex moton system with some kind of front-end lift and it definitely was not making that kind of power i think it probably made 600 on its best day and i was terrified to actually know what was wrong with it because there was nothing going to be cheap about trying to fix this car that was like i think it was 260 000 euros new and then 50 000 for the update so somebody had over 400 grand invested in this car at some point and so i finally just got to the point in fact i after i had bought the gray merciled and gotten rid of the green one it was down for a couple of months as we were doing some cosmetic things and reconditioning it because it had lived kind of a tough life before i got it and i ended up trying to trade the roof for another mercilego and it's one of those times where you sort of look in the mirror and you go ed why are you like this and it's just you know it just wasn't really the car for me it made all the sense in the world it couldn't seem better on paper but in practicality i just never fell in love with the thing so i i drove it a few thousand miles and had some fun and ended up talking to another dealer that had some experience selling some roof cars and i sold it to him for 154 grand so did a little better than doubling my money on it and a little over a year i guess i had that car but really enjoyed it for what it was and the experience of owning it i think there were three rt12s's in the u.s and they still are as far as i know and it was cool to use venwiki to track the other ones and figure out where they were popping up because this was a true w09 vin car where porsches were generally wp-0 and so you can either send your porsche to roof to modify and they'll keep the vent or they'll build their own as they have oem manufacturer status and they'll assign their own vin so this was one of those and it was very very special people would come up at car shows like is that an ruf or a rough or whatever but it is roof and i had a blast uh you know kind of learning more about the cars but i have certainly not missed it i had my fun i made my money and sent it on down the road but sometimes you just never know until you meet your heroes what they're actually going to be like [Music] kimmy do you have blood in place kimmy do you have button plants kimmy do you have body implants kimmy do you have blood implants and i said to her i said kimmy do you have butt implants last week was my hundredth car story here on the channel and i've got plenty more to tell but i was asking a few friends like what should i do to kind of commemorate that body of work or whatever it means and the overwhelming consensus was to retell the prostitute lamborghini story so without any further ado early in 2011 i was working as the director of sales at lamborghini atlanta and we had a flatbed come in on the back of it there was a 2004 blue che loom lamborghini gallardo and these two guys got out they didn't really speak much english but as best we could understand it they wanted us to tell them what it would take to get the car running and it was as rough as a car that still in one piece could be the tires were bald the wheels were curved every panel had some ding ding scratch whatever the taillights were broken the door handle was broken off and it obviously didn't start or run and so we get it off and put it around back and a couple days later we get it checked out so we put it in the shop and we could tell that it needed a clutch and a throw out bearing and a rear main seal and all the obvious wear and tear items so it was a good 20 to 25 grand worth of stuff and so we put it out back after diagnosing it and we called the number that these two guys had left but of course there's no answer and so we try every morning but don't get anywhere but a couple days later this guy walks in and he says hey do you all have a blue lamborghini here for service and we said yes do you know anything at all about it can you tell us do you want us to fix it is it yours and he says no no it's not mine he said it belongs to my girlfriend's daughter and she's very attractive and i said well thank you that won't impact our level of service sir but it's always nice to know the information in the periphery you know can we talk to her or something like that he said now she's she's not available right now but let me see if i can get in touch with her mom and we'll see what we can do okay great so the next couple days we keep trying the number no answer but then the mom shows up and she says yeah it belongs to my daughter i don't think she's going to be able to pay to fix it and she is in jail right now she says she got arrested for going 180 miles per hour in this car i was like okay well can we get in touch with her is she going to get out she's like yeah she should be out pretty quick okay well that doesn't make a ton of sense but she said she'll probably want you to buy the car because i don't think she's going to fix it we said well we you know we can do that it's what i told her and she leaves and we continue trying to get in touch no response from anything even the numbers they had left the boyfriend the mom nobody so a couple days after that kimmy shows up and kimmy is a prostitute and it might be politically correct to say she's allegedly a prostitute but that would be a disservice to the three metro atlanta municipalities that had convicted her of such things in the prior years so she shows up and as best i could understand it kimmy was half black and half vietnamese and certain parts of her appeared to be rather augmented you might say that she had some aftermarket parts and she was a very charming girl probably one of the most interesting people i've ever come to know but i suppose what kimmy would say is her most marketable feature is her backside i actually saw on one of her now banned social media profiles that kimmy has 50 inch hips so the girl could take a break while hula hooping and so she shows up and she's telling us a little bit about her car and she bought it about a year prior to that at lamborghini miami paying all cash and it'd actually been about nine months and during that time apparently somebody had bumped into it in a wendy's drive-through her mother was correct she couldn't afford to fix the car and so she asked us if we would buy it and i had already talked to my general manager and he had pretty much said look we don't want the thing for inventory and he wasn't really comfortable representing it to other wholesalers because he didn't really know what the car was going to need beyond what we could immediately diagnose because once you put the clutch and everything else in it then you could figure out if it needs a 17 000 shift actuator or an 8 000 front diff or all the other things that are kind of the time bomb problems on early gallardo's also you never know if it's been run low on oil it was a pretty low vin so there were a lot of kind of monsters in the closet and so i had asked him you know look if you don't want it can i try to buy it because about a year and a half prior to that my wife and i had bought one of t-payne's rapper's 360s it was in a similar circumstance it needed about 10 grand worth of junk to be fixed enough to then drive and we hope nothing else happened and it hadn't so we had made some good money on that i figured hey this might be a good way for lightning to strike twice and so i was talking to kimmy and i said all right yeah we can buy it but actually it's going to be probably me buying it because honestly there's nobody else bidding and i asked her kind of what does she want and so her thinking she paid 100 grand for this car and it needs 20 25 grand worth of work she's like well i want 75 000 i said well i appreciate that but there's all these things that it could still need it's not worth that but i will give you thirty thousand dollars for the car and i knew i wasn't really bidding against anybody but of course kimmy was a very shrewd negotiator so we met right smack dab in the middle at thirty thousand bucks so she comes over to my desk and we're kind of getting everything sorted out but she says you know i'm going to need another car i said okay what would you like she said i'd really like a pink bentley like the one paris hilton has i said well they didn't make an awful lot of pink bentleys but we could probably buy you a continental gt not for 30 grand maybe for 50 and for 10 grand we paint a rapid pink you know it's possible and if we've got 30 000 as a down payment we could probably get you a loan for the other half that's fairly reasonable would you like to try to get a loan she says yes so that meant that we got to talk about kimmy's credit and fortunately she had her social security card with her at all times she pulls it out i write all the information down get her driver's license and we get to talk about where she works she gives me the name of some pornography company and she i noticed her address was kind of at a peculiar place in town and i googled it and it was actually a local spa and i confirmed that with her she said yes that's my official address then we got to talk about her income and i said do you you know how much do you make and she kind of shook her head and i was like well is that because you don't file a tax return or you don't report it all and she said i don't i don't do any of that stuff well okay and so she kind of estimated and she said you know it really varies i said i'm i'm sure it does and we came up with a number that was kind of very fair to justify the loan that she would need and i took everything into my finance guy's office and he uh immediately entered it in and then just threw it back at me said you got it wrong i said no i'm quite sure i didn't he said well that's the case then this girl doesn't have a credit score has never had a library card a cell phone in her name a bill anything no one has ever trusted her to repay them a dollar and we didn't have any banks that were going to become the first to do so so i had to go back with the bad news to kimmy and say i'm sorry but we do not have a way to get you a loan for your bentley so you and paris hilton will not be moving along the road in the same way tomorrow but she was a little bit disappointed but just said okay you can just pay me for the lamborghini so i went back to my accounting controller's office and got a check cut for thirty thousand dollars for the car and i hand it to her and as a you know generally a glorified used car salesman i got looked at as i was being dishonest to people fairly often even if it weren't the case but in that case she looked at me with such a lack of trust i've never seen it in another human and i hand her this check and she says what am i supposed to do with that and i said well it's a check you could deposit it into your bank account or you know you could take it to our bank and they'll give you money and she had never held a check in her life girls in her early 20s i said well i promise you it's like money she said well could you just give me money and she said we don't have that much cash so she took it extremely reluctantly and and went on her way so i spent the next few weeks fixing up the car we got it running and i drove it for about a year almost daily in fact i ended up selling a mercedes that i had that i had been daily driving i was just very pleased to have this you know low budget lamborghini gallardo that could drive as much as i wanted had a ton of fun took on some great road trips took it to shows just had a blast i loved the car but the problem was kimmy had told me during this negotiation that she had a second key for it and obviously it wasn't with it when it was towed in and not to judge but i wasn't entirely comfortable with someone in her profession having a second key to my car and so i kept kind of pinging her calling her texting her asking her like can you bring me that second key and i wasn't getting any response a few months later kind of just out of the blue i got a text from her and it said tomorrow is my birthday do you still want that second key i said well i don't understand what those two things could have to do with each other but yes i do still want the second key and the immediate text that was queued up was can i get a hundred dollars for it and i said well i'm the only person that has any legal right to this key but yes you can extort another hundred dollars from me i'll be happy to pay you that but you have to have it here by 5 pm today because i didn't want this just hanging out there if i'm going to pay for it then bring it on so of course 5 o'clock comes and goes and i don't see kimmy the next day we close at about 7 o'clock at about 6 50 kimmy comes in and the best way for me to describe what kimmy was wearing is that it was a basketball net it was literally more holes than white fabric nothing at all left up to the imagination so she walks in out of a rainy day and there's a woman with a young child at our parts counter buying something i don't know she drops whatever she had on the counter grabs her child and runs out of the building screaming after seeing what kimmy was wearing kimmy was kind of oblivious to this and she comes over and i said kimmy what are you all dressed up for and she said it's my birthday and i said well you're halfway to that outfit but i don't think she understood what i meant and she comes up and gives me a great big hug kimmy loves to hug and we sit down at my desk she's got the key of course the battery's dead i try to open it from my desk i have to walk out make sure it works i come back it works i give kimmy 100 and you know given her attire and kind of the extent of our relationship at that point i've kind of felt like certain questions were not necessarily off limits and so i said to kimmy i said to her kimmy do you have butt implants and she was excited i'm really proud to answer i guess she'd put a lot of energy or money or whatever into the achievement there and and she said no i don't i had a fat redistribution i said kimmy would you tell me more about that she said yes she said they maybe gained 30 pounds and then they liposuctioned it all out here and then they injected it right right here she pointed the scar there wasn't obviously anything covering it and they must have used something between like a turkey baster and a jackhammer to insert it back in there and i said well kimmy does it feel peculiar is it is it strange no no it's just there like like when you sit on it and now it's just all it's just part of me now well that is that is absolutely fascinating and so kimmy went on to celebrate her birthday in whatever way she saw fit and i went on to drive my gallardo obviously we had thoroughly disinfected it there was a lot of glitter to vacuum up and some exotic smells to mitigate and of course after that kimmy followed me on many social media platforms and she was banned from a lot of them but she was able to comment on my instagram and she was particularly fond of pictures of my large albino snake for some reason and my wife would notice these things and say you know who's this kimmy girl and i was like don't don't click on the profile and you just don't worry worry about her but you know she is where the lamborghini came from and you know as we released the first copy of this story about a year and a half ago and a popular quest is can we have kimmy on here to tell her side of the story and unfortunately she is indisposed on another period of confinement for professional reasons for the next 10 to 20 years so we can't have that happen but she's a very fascinating girl and i wish her all the best and i was very pleased to have met the recipient of such a pioneering medical procedure [Music] i'd be a whole lot better if you hadn't made me into a fugitive from justice [Music] when you spend a lot of time driving cars that go really fast there's always this curiosity of what would happen if a cop actually saw me doing this am i going to be pulled from the car and beaten am i going to get arrested am i going to get a ticket i can't get out of am i never going to be able to get insurance again i mean certainly we've heard stories from anywhere including this channel of what happens when you get a terrible speeding ticket but at the same time in the u.s there's a lot of variation it's not like it is in a lot of european cities where there's just traffic cameras and speed cameras and if you do this that happens it's not a one-to-one correlation so it's always a little bit of an unknown and you know i used to speed a lot more than i do now i'm not saying it's a responsible thing to do but if you do want to go fast in a fairly reasonable way on a public road rallies can be a really good way to do that because you're kind of insulated from some of the risk either you're in the back and the people in the front kind of take the brunt of whatever police attention's out there or you're in the front and whatever you stir up might just impact the people that are behind you and in either case you've got some plausible deniability to say you're not the one that they're looking for so if you want to get out there and see what your car can do usually there are some opportunities in these kind of events to do that and so about a month and a half ago i was doing the lux rally event from nashville to las vegas and i was excited it was kind of a long rally nine days my wife was gonna come with me for the first half and a friend of mine tom park was gonna come in and pick it up from dallas and so we got in nashville and you know they do a great job it's a you know perfect food dining experience everything's perfectly organized it's kind of just an arrive drive and have fun kind of program so we were really excited my wife was excited to be going we were driving the 430 scuderia that i had bought because the lamborghini didn't have air conditioning and because most of my cars are you know about half the time not working in in their entirety so i was excited to take the ferrari out even though it wasn't the most comfortable grand tourer for a trip like this but it was going to be a lot of fun and the first day went great we led the pack so we arrived in memphis we have a great dinner we stayed a great hotel everything's very perfectly organized and we head out the next morning towards dallas so we're out in front in a three-car pack and it's me and the scud a porsche 911 and a ferrari 599 and we're keeping a pretty good pace but the thing about these rallies is even though there's the perception from most of the people involved that everybody's constantly going these insane speeds usually at the front if you maintain a pace about 90 or 100 and don't slow down generally you're gonna stay out in front of the people who kind of get bunched up or caught as people are making passing maneuvers or whatever the case may be and then they need to go 130 150 periodically to be able to keep their average at the same pace i mean very rarely is true exotic car rally pace that much even in the vicinity of cannonball pace and so no big deal i had done exactly the same thing on their miami to mardi gras event a few months earlier and just generally driven 90 100 miles an hour out in front and had no issues and everybody else is having a fun time kind of playing in the background it was a great time and so i'm doing the same thing in this ferrari and we're out in front we're using walkie-talkies to communicate and i've got a valentine one and i'm running ways that's all i had time to set up in this car since i bought it the day before the event but that's usually enough for me to make pretty good time along a road trip and you're seeing a lot of noise on the v1 but that just kind of happens now it's a very noisy kind of spectrum of radio frequencies that radar use and and some of the newer devices reduce the number of false positives and things that you'll see but regardless it tends to work for me i've been using it for 15 years and so i see some stuff and i see one signal that probably indicates there's a cop pretty close and at about that same time jovian who's two cars back in the 599 says hey guys i think we just passed a cop going in the other direction now at that moment that's not a huge bother we're on a divided highway two lanes in either direction and there's kind of a median divider with cords and like guard rails in the middle so he can't just spin around and come after us so the only two options really are do we go insanely fast to try to get away from whatever the threat might be or do we just drive a little bit more prudently for the next few miles and see if he's alerted anybody up ahead and so that's kind of what we do on a rally that's usually the best bet you know you just kind of slow down let everybody else catch up and then you you know might start again in a few miles so we do that but right around the next bend we see a charger on the side of the road and it's a police car and he's right at the entrance to a rest area and as he sees us he pulls out in front of us and turns his lights on at this point we're going maybe high 80s low 90s you know worth some attention but nothing alarming it shouldn't be to him and so all three of us obediently and immediately acquiesce we pull over on the side of the road and normal protocol for getting pulled over turn the car off keys on top of the dash windows down hands on the steering wheel just don't reach for anything don't do anything that might alarm him but from there things escalated rather quickly because this cop kicks his door open and jumps out of his car gun drawn and i'm like whoa whoa whoa hands on top of the steering wheel at this point and he's like get out of the car i'm like whoa whoa okay okay i'm unbuckling this hand here and then at this point he's already pulling on my door handle which doesn't unlock until i pull the inside handle at that point he pulls the door open pulls me out of the car and immediately handcuffs me now keep in mind my wife is in the passenger seat and she's like what's going on i'm like it's gonna be all right just relax he goes get behind my car goes to matt in the porsche behind me handcuffs him with his spare set of handcuffs goes back to his car gets an extra set of handcuffs and goes back and handcuffs jovian so we're all in standing kind of around behind his car and at this point the rest of the cars are kind of coming by so about half the field went by us at a very low speed noticing that we were all there and the other half kind of snuck into the rest area so they could look through the trees to see what was going on and i guess be there in case they needed to get our cars because it didn't look like things were going all that well and so he never says that we're under arrest never reads us our rights just immediately starts kind of detaining us and restraining us and and just asking what are y'all doing and i'm like you know okay sir sorry about this we're just driving to dallas with some friends you know we got all these stickers you can see it's at an event you know we just left from memphis we're in nashville the day before we're not trying to hurt anybody or do anything crazy and he's like well you just passed a state trooper going 111 miles an hour well if you say so but i really don't think we were going that fast and you know certainly we're not trying to i mean i understand that you know that's that would be totally unacceptable but also trust me that the car is going off a lot faster than that so if we'd been trying to go fast it would have been a whole lot more than 111 and i've had actually pretty good success with that line it tends to kind of lighten the mood a little bit but he's just heavy breathing like super amped up and you could tell that he had just gotten a radio call from this guy saying there's three exotic cars coming your way you're just about to have a high speed chase and he was a young cop and i you know probably was really excited and you know adrenaline pump and everything in this you know emotional high at what was about to happen and then anticlimactically we all just kind of pull over and are perfectly obedient now your best strategy in any pull over regardless of what's happening is keep the cop talking the more he talks the more it humanizes you the more he gets reassured that you're not out here as some menace to society and it just ends up always resulting in a better outcome now at this point the cop that we'd passed has gone to an exit circled back and he pulls up behind us and a couple other police cars are showing up as well including one older cop that's in like this paratrooper uniform this like full dark green army look at that i don't know what it was and he started spouting off hey look at all these cool cars like it's like an old cannonball i mean i remember these days and all this stuff and talking about his cars and how fast he drives and all the fun he has so i'm like okay we're at least moving in the right direction but of course we're still handcuffed here and you know of course if you're being restrained by a cop you can always ask them am i under arrest and if not they're supposed to let you go either with a ticket or whatever in this circumstance we weren't going to do that because i think the answer in that circumstance would have been oh yeah you are and let me read you your rights and throw you in the back of my car so we're all just kind of talking i explained that we do this sort of drive sometimes for charity talk about the cannibal memorial run raise the money for the families of fallen officers and talk about our itinerary a bit that we're just out having fun and enjoying some good cars and most cops are car guys we've seen and talked about that a lot here and so when you start talking about cars in most cases they're ready to reciprocate that i think he had some kind of a mustang or something like that and you know it was all getting more and more friendly and i can see his heart rate and respiratory rate dropping as we continue talking of course jovi and matt don't really say much of anything they're just kind of wide-eyed not sure what's going on and i i do most of the talking and so i'm still handcuffed and i'm leaning in his car he's typing in all of our informations they've he's taken our wallets out of our back pockets or wherever they were and has gotten everything and it's very awkward and strange but you know we're just kind of along for the ride at this point and if he's finding out there's any warrants or crazy tickets or anything that he needs to be worried about and of course there's no issues there everybody's insurance is valid no no alarm bells going off and i'm talking to him and you know just giving him some insight about other cars and what we do and all this stuff and just whatever i can say to keep him talking and eventually he's like all right guys i should take you to jail but i'm not going to i'm just going to give you the tickets it'll be for the 111 for each of you and a reckless driving charge and i'm like man we were kind of all by ourselves like can it not be a reckless driving charge because in some states if you're over a certain speed they have to call it reckless driving it's like by definition over whatever 100 is reckless driving but arkansas is not one of those states and so i'm like all right well you know i can't talk him out of it my shrewdest of negotiations were unsuccessful we didn't meet right smack dab in the middle at a warning and a handshake and so it takes a little while probably 30 45 minutes and the the girls are all freaking out as to what's going on but everything gets calm again snaps a few pictures and you know eventually we're all happy and having fun they let us out me and matt out of the handcuffs they couldn't find the key to jovians for a little while so he hung out in handcuffs for a little while longer than the rest of us but eventually they do just give us these tickets they tell us we're going to be able to pay them online we don't have to appear or anything and we can just go on our way and so that's exactly what we did obviously it kind of tempered the pace a little bit for the next little while but eventually we got into dallas and the first thing that i did was called the ticket clinic because a few days before leaving on this trip i had closed a sponsorship for ticket clinic to be our monthly presenting sponsor for the month of september so eventually you'll start to see their ads but i had told him when i signed him up i said hopefully i don't require your services in the next couple of weeks because i am about to do this rally across the country and back and what they are is a company that helps you locate a local attorney in whatever jurisdiction where you get a ticket because you always want a local attorney with a chance that they go and play golf with the judge every thursday and they'll usually have a better outcome and just a friendlier negotiation than if you have a local lawyer show up and regardless of that you never want to just show up yourself and try to argue it because if they see you and make you answer for whatever you did they're just going to throw the book at you and even if you have a license in a state where there's no reciprocity you really don't want to pay a ticket going 111 miles an hour or a reckless driving charge because at the end of the day it's going to keep you from getting insurance unfortunately the only issue that's ever kept me from getting insurance was big diminished value claims in the past that weren't my fault and some uh really expensive cars and so sometimes insurance doesn't like that so everything like that was fine but i really did not want this to play out as a full conviction so the guys at ticket clinic found me a couple different lawyers in arkansas and got me in touch with the one they recommended as being the best and i started talking to him and very immediately he was like man this is kind of a bigger deal than i think even you understand apparently the they've gotten a lot harsher on speeding arkansas was historically pretty lenient but now a reckless driving charge apparently carried a minimum sentence of five days in jail and i'm like so you're telling me i'm gonna have to go back to arkansas to go to jail for five days he's like well maybe i mean i i'd like to think we can get it knocked down to like a lesser fine or a lesser circumstance a lesser speed and not have the reckless on there but at this point yeah that's what i expect to have happen and he said also there's no way they're going to let you just pay this thing online like that you can't pay the fee for a crime reckless driving is a criminal charge not just a you know a citation or a fine for speeding so he's like that's not how this is going to go but about 10 days later it did show up and at that point he had been like well i'm going to enter a not guilty plea remotely so we don't have to show up and then they'll assign us a trial date tell me what the prosecutor is and then i'll start negotiating but he's like you know he was going to be surprised if it showed up and when it did he was very surprised and one of the guys had a pennsylvania license he just felt like paying it he's like i'm not you know i'm not going to worry about this it won't come back on points and his insurance is already very expensive so he wasn't bothered by it the other guy got a different attorney and so we were both going to see what we could have happen and in most cases the hope is that you can kind of move it to like a non-points violation or a lower speed that doesn't transfer whatever in general if you spend the money on hiring a lawyer pumping some money into the local economy and you're willing to pay some fines usually they'll play ball and so the trial date was coming up it came and went and i he had said that he had submitted everything so i was just like all right whatever but a couple days later i decided you know what i'm going to check their little online system and see what it says now and it says failure to appear conviction of the misdemeanor class c or dear whatever it was for reckless driving and i'm like whoa what the heck and so i screenshot it send it to him and he's you know furious he's like i sent it i've got proof all this stuff it'll be okay and i'm like well figure it out dude like this is not acceptable and it's probably going to reduce our leverage for negotiation moving forward so let's see what happens he tells me that he's on it and that everything's going to be okay and eventually shoots me a text says your license isn't suspended i'm like well that's good to know and he's like i'm working on the rest and so he calls me a couple days later he said how are you doing i'm like well i'd be a whole lot better if you hadn't made me into a fugitive from justice but he said i know you're all right it's good everything's gonna be fine i've got it knocked down here's your new court date and i'll either have to go down there and appear or hopefully we can just work it out between now and then and so that date was a couple of days ago and he called me afterwards he said all right i was able to talk to him and i got it down to negligent operation and i was like well i don't know what that means he said well it's a county ordinance violation so it's not really even like a highway moving violation there's no points done transfer carries the same fine coincidentally they're still going to get their money but at the end of the day it doesn't go on my driving record no insurance will know about it other than this video nobody will ever really hear another word about it and so that's why you do these things i mean obviously i had to pay something for the attorney but it paled in comparison to the increase in insurance premiums that i would have enjoyed over the coming years if i had something like that on my driving record so i guess all's well that ends well or at least ends okay and we enjoyed the rest of the rally had an absolute blast of course ticket clinic got another very very satisfied customer and i was pleased to have had them available for something like this and managed not to get into too much more trouble but we did get pulled over three more times and they involved some a little bit more successful but shrewd negotiation and uh one of them was an interesting story and we'll just have to save that for another day [Music] in a pawn shop with a strange lien and a weird buyback clause so we've all got our weaknesses and one of mine is bentley's and over the years i've tried to buy dozens of these cars and i'm actually kind of proud of myself to say that i haven't bought any of them because bentley's initially they occupy a pretty high price point and they don't depreciate all that much for a couple of years and then they have the catastrophic traditional depreciation that's inherent to all luxury cars but i you know if i'm gonna spend as much money as they are new i'm gonna end up buying a ferrari or lamborghini but when i wait i start to get scared like anybody else would of the impending maintenance liabilities and so i've looked at them and i've come dangerously close to owning a bunch of them i remember one was a flying spur speed that had been in an annual accident for four or five consecutive years like almost to the day this previous owner would crash it in some way and it had been repaired pretty well but for whatever reason i didn't end up buying it but the most interesting one that i ever came across was a 2004 bentley arnage t and those late 0304 arnages are just the quintessential perfection of british bentleys because after that you started to have the interference and kind of the meddling of volkswagen as they tried to make them more reliable and they brought in the gt cars it was you know it's great for the brand but it wasn't as pure and essentially british as these cars were you know you had the four inch thick wool carpets and the rich leather and just that smell and everything about them that was so bently so when i see one of those i'm always hooked but i've managed to avoid it but this is about as close as i've ever gotten so i found this listing on craigslist my favorite pastime to look for strange and interesting and untoward exotic cars and this car was an oh for arnage t here in atlanta and i recognized it because we'd actually had it for sale on consignment a couple years prior at motorcars of georgia while i'd work there you know we hadn't sold it then because the guy wanted on consignment like 90 000 bucks and the car wasn't worth that then and at this point that i was looking for it you know a couple years ago it was probably worth 55 to 60 grand but the asking price in the ad was 35 000 and so i was kind of intrigued because it was cheap but not so cheap that it seemed too good to be true and bentley's you know as they age are hard to sell so i was kind of excited at this prospect that i might you know have a good shot at this car so i contacted the owner and asked him what the story was and he gave me a little bit of information but he really knew very little about the car he hadn't really serviced it and had no idea what had happened to it before but he said at the moment everything was sort of functional but he went on to tell me that there was a little bit of a strange financial situation with the car no surprise there it's craigslist and it's cars that i'm looking at so this stuff happens but he told me that he had recently got a title pawn loan on the car so he had given the title to a local pawn shop and they had given him a loan on it you know a reasonably common practice on 2 000 cars but not really on bentley's but what he told me was that he wanted someone to go and buy the car from the pawn shop and give him another 90 days to buy it back so he said i'll let you buy it for a good deal because i can't buy it back right now but i'd like the chance to buy it back from you at whatever you end up having into it so i'm like well that's pretty cool and he said he would give me you know any registration fees and further cost or maintenance that i had to spend so i'm like the worst case scenario here is that i own this bentley for free for about three months and the best case scenario is i get a good deal on this car or drive it a couple years and sell it like i normally would so i said sure let me go take a look at it so he had arranged with this pawn shop for someone to come and look at the car for him and you know it got kind of strange but i showed up and they said yeah well mr bowling we're happy to show you the car and the woman who was working there actually took me to a nearby public storage building they hadn't stored the car in their local sort of lot they'd put it somewhere i guess a little bit more safe because it probably cost as much as all the other cars they had there so we went over there and obviously the battery was dead but i brought a jump box and so we got the car started and i sort of drove it around the block of storage buildings and it was okay you know it needed a little bit there were a couple lights on but kind of what you'd expect from an older bentley that had been sitting for a little while so i thanked her and left the car there and said let me go make some calls and i'll i'll call you back with an offer but first i talked to the owner and i said you know it's it's really not in the perfect shape you told me it is it needs some things but you know i really think the car is worth about 20 grand and i don't think they're going to take that i mean but maybe 22 23 and he said well that's actually what they gave me for it so it's always nice to have it reinforced that you're low balling properly because if i want to pay what a pawn shop is going to pay then i'm usually pretty safe in a car but i went on say all right well let me think about how much more it's worth to me i really like these types of deals because part of being a shrewd negotiator is not in necessarily the exchange but it's in the circumstance it's in setting yourself up to have the fewest competitors as possible when it comes to buying a car so when you have circumstances like an old bentley in a pawn shop with a strange lien and a weird buyback clause and all these other things things that really don't have anything to do with the car they devalue it immediately but over time that story doesn't matter anymore so once i owned this thing i would just be selling any old bentley not one out of a pawn shop that i might have to give back to this guy months later so that type of circumstance tends to be a great way to buy a car if you come across the right opportunity at the right time so what i told him was all right let me think about it and i ended up saying you know i think it's worth 25 grand let me call him and he had said that with all the fees and with all the interest he technically owed them 28 but i knew they might not think they'd get all that so i said all right let me see if they'll do 25. so i called the owner of the pawn shop and i said hey i'll give you 25 grand for the car and he said no no i'm not going to do that i said all right well that's okay so i kind of left it there but a couple days went by and i said you know what i'm not going to lose the car with three grand i called him back and said you know what 28's fine i'll come in and uh i'll bring you a check whatever you want and i'll buy the car he said you know what ed i'm just i i appreciate that but we're just not going to worry about it this has gotten too muddy you know he was technically past the point where he was supposed to be able to buy it back so we're just going to send it down to a florida dealer and they're going to deal with it okay whatever you know here's another bentley that i somehow avoided owning fantastic so a couple of years go by and i truly think nothing else of it but i get a call from some ambulance chasing personal injury attorney and he says are you ed boley i said yes i am he said did you try to buy a bentley off craigslist a couple years ago i said that could have happened he kind of gave me some more details and i said yep that absolutely did i remember trying to buy that car and they wouldn't let me at the pawn shop so i really never worried about it again he said well my client has filed a lawsuit against that pawn shop saying that they should have sold you the car because they had told him they would and that he was damaged through this process i'm like well that's kind of weird so what do you mean he was damaged i mean he couldn't buy it he said well he's saying that since you were willing to buy it and willing to let him buy it back he missed out on the true value of the car i said all right sure whatever you need me to do he said well we'll probably need a deposition at some point and if it goes to trial we might need you as a witness i said well that sounds like fun count me in months go by i hear nothing but then i get a call from a lawyer representing the title pawn company okay he says well we're still kind of wrapped up in this lawsuit and i just want to kind of get an affidavit of exactly what happened in your own words and i said i kind of walked him through what it was all right well i'm going to make some notes and i'll send something out to you so he sent me some paperwork and said you know if this is what you recall happening sign it it was so i did but in the process of talking to the pawn shops attorney i was like you know look this seems like a really weird lawsuit i mean what did you all end up getting for the car and he said we sold it for about 31 grand after some reconditioning and stuff like that and i'm like well i'm sure you've offered him the 3 000 between the 28 and the 31 and they're like oh yeah yeah we offered him more than that but he's going after these crazy punitive damages i said that's weird i don't really understand that so when i talked to the previous owner's attorney i was like you know forgive me for prying but are you doing this on a contingency basis or is he paying you for this legal work and he said no it's a contingency basis which was obviously kind of common in that legal world and i said well can you just explain to me how you're justifying the damages and i said well in order for him to be damaged he had to come into the ability to buy the car from me within 90 days of when we were trying to buy it so how are you proving that with like bank statements or paychecks or liquidity or something like that and he said well i don't think i could prove that i said well then you don't have a case if you can't prove that he was able to buy it back you can't prove he was damaged and he goes did you tell their lawyer that i said no i didn't tell their lawyer that they're but they're lawyers they understand this kind of thing and they know what damages mean they want to settle it clearly because they don't want to keep spending time and money on this process you know he's like all right well i'll start working on that so a few months go by and i get a subpoena in the mail and they've gotten a date on a trial calendar for some local court and they were coming up and they needed me to testify because essentially their whole case rested on my willingness to buy this thing and then sell it back to the guy a few months later and they tell me that i've got like a five hour call so they're going to let me know when i need to show up so days go by that week and i never get called and it turns out they were a low priority that never got hurt so i talked to the lawyer on the customer's side and he just kind of said well we're kind of back to the drawing board we'll keep going until we get another trial date in a few months and obviously i've never heard from them i don't know what'll happen probably a whole lot of nothing but you know it just goes to show you that sometimes the most interesting stories are not about the cars you actually get to buy it's the ones that you don't my boss comes across and walks me into his office and said don't try to sell him any more cars today you sell someone an exotic car usually something they've thought about or dreamt about or shopped for for a great deal of time it's usually a great experience but that's not always the case and you know if you shop for a car remotely on the internet or by phone and you take delivery by having it shipped to you technically you have three days to refuse it but if you come to the dealership negotiate a deal in person pay for the car and then drive it away it's yours at that point you don't get to bring it back but as you'd imagine selling hundreds of cars a year sometimes people would like to and i remember one guy in particular because he had rented the yellow gallardo that i had for supercar rentals and he had driven it around for the weekend and loved it and you know showed me at the time the lotus esprit that was in his garage that he never drove and meticulously detailed and as he came into the dealership a few years later he said that he hadn't sold the lotus but he wanted another sports car and so we started looking around and he really had his eye on an aston martin vantage but he wanted a stick and at the time probably 2012 they were starting to become more and more rare but we had one that was gorgeous had every carbon option and all the updates for 2012 and on we reached something that was agreeable but the whole deal took a long time and in fact we didn't really finish up everything and have him signed and financed and all the paperwork done until after we would have normally closed at about six o'clock and at that point it had kind of gotten dark and so he drove off to head home and was actually really kind of nervous about it because he never wanted the car to have any imperfections and you'd imagine driving it 40 50 miles to his house it was going to have the chance of something like that happening we said you know what just keep some distance drive slow you'll be fine and we're closed the next day on sunday but the first thing on monday that vantage comes rolling right back in he had kind of wrapped it with like a temporary style clear bra to protect it as he would drive it back and as he got out of the car he had a big piece of paper on it was a handwritten list of every single imperfection in this brand new car that he had just bought and he was furious about it and as i went through kind of the things that he was upset about they were all really the product of it being a hand-built aston martin because while astons are unbelievably high quality cars with quality materials that are built by people who are meticulous they're hand-built so it's not a stamped out japanese or american car that comes off an assembly line every 17 seconds and obviously his first request was just giving my money back take the car back and we'll think about something on another day and we were not going to do that we weren't going to give him his money back and unwind a deal and not have the profit that we had in it so over the course of the day he's just distraught going back and forth i ended up taking him to lunch just kind of trying to talk him off the ledge and love the car that he loved 48 hours prior to that and it really just was not working so as we got back i said you know what look maybe the one that you bought is a little bit below average i'm not sure that's the case but let's look at some other cars and just see if maybe you want to trade into something else i mean certainly there's been some depreciation because we'll have to title the car we've punched the warranty and everything else has started on it but let's see what we could do to maybe move you into another one and we had a very similarly spanked black on black vantage s and so we ended up taking that other test drive just to let him see would you prefer the paddle shift and he did kind of like that and thought well maybe this car that was developed a little bit later somehow it is in higher quality or better condition and there was no good way to expect that but we let them look around we kind of said look just make sure that you're comfortable with it but again the whole negotiation and trying to figure out the trade value of a two-day old car on another new car that we certainly did want to sell took a good while and so that went into the night again after we normally have closed but he agreed to buy it he paid for the difference and then we just kind of did a collateral swamp on his loan i think and he drives off into the night but as you'd expect the next morning he comes back and he's spent all night with his bright lights in his garage finding every single imperfection in the car every panel gap that's slightly different side to side or trim piece that's a little bit misaligned or a little speck in the paint whatever he finds he's just live it again and so as you'd expect i move him to another car let's look around this one see if it's any better maybe it'll live up to your expectation we'll do what we did like yesterday and let you write us a little bit of a check and have a different one and as we were walking around the showroom looking at other cars trying to find out the most perfect one of the bunch my boss comes across and walks me into his office says ed don't try to sell him any more cars today whatever ends up happening which will not involve us giving his money back and unwinding these two deals let's make it only involve these two cars rather than another one and at some point you just kind of have to look go drive your car enjoy it when you bring it back and trade it back to us on whatever you decide you want next we're still going to give you all the money anyone will because it's going to be above our standards we want to be respectful of your own but at the end of the day it's a hand-built exotic car that's built in very low quantities and we ended up finding out that about a week later he traded it in on the gray maserati brand new from a dealer down the street and you know all the power to him i cannot imagine that any maserati was going to be a better quality car other than by random happenstance then this vantage was but i know that they ended up running that vantage through the auction and i would imagine the reason he did that is they were the only people who had enough spread on their new car to over allow him enough to make him reasonably content with the deal he got on the trade value but perhaps the most interesting story i have about immediate buyer's regret was also a different gray maserati but there was a guy who had been coming around for the last few months kind of looking for his next sports car and he mentioned that he had had a maserati grand sport an 05 or o 6 can be a corsa car and he loved it which was kind of a unique sentiment for a grand sport or any maserati of that vintage but we ended up getting in on consignment a 2005 maserati spider can be a corsa paddle shift car and it was pretty nice i mean it's one of those things you get kind of nervous about selling because there was a pretty good chance something bad was going to happen not long after he buys it because it's pretty good chance something's going to happen every day you go out and drive a maserati i think he's probably i don't know early 50s italian guy lived in atlanta for a long time and was really excited it did fit what he was looking for so didn't take long he agreed everything we got it all set up signed the paperwork and i pulled the car around after we had it kind of cleaned up and ready to go we walked through all the things and kind of just left him there to leave in the car so i went back inside and was doing something at my desk and i see him kind of pull around to a different part of the parking lot and park in front of a different door and walk inside and he wanted to ask something about his temp tag or something else and the slant in our parking lot was not very steep but it was slight and certainly if you put a car in neutral and didn't engage the parking brake which is precisely what he had done it might roll backwards and it rolled backwards about 20 feet into a parked jaguar that we had on the front line in inventory ready to sell so he comes in just freaking out after he's gone out and observed the damage and seen that there's some scratches and you know a little bit of a dent on each of the cars and it wasn't going to be that major but obviously the idea of having to repaint part of your new to you italian sports car is not something that makes you wildly pleased so he's like i don't know i shouldn't leave in it today i can't do this and i you know you need to take it back it's your car that's you you know you all that get damaged and we're like no i mean you parked it in a way that allowed it to damage the car we're not that upset we'd like you not to be upset and as we went back and forth we kind of like look we don't want to sour the relationship over this let's just say we'll fix ours you fix yours it's going to be a few hundred bucks to repaint each bumper nobody's going to worry about it we'll move on down the road and he reluctantly and after a few hours of groveling and whining he did leave and again we were closed the next day on sunday but first thing monday morning a woman walks in elderly woman pretty italian looking tons of makeup just a painted on face and huge rhinestone glasses dressed far beyond how someone normally would to come to a car dealership on a monday morning and she comes in and she asks if she could speak to the general manager and it was one of those days that i was very pleased to not be the general manager there were lots of days like that and so i directed her to his office and she walked right in set herself down and this woman was the mother of the person who had just bought the maserati and she had come in i guess to rescue her son probably after he had whined and groveled to her about the regret he had for having become so emotional and bought this italian sports car over the weekend and she felt like we should just unwind everything give his money back and not blame him for the mistakes of his i guess youth in his 50s or whatever my boss was having none of it and continued to kind of indulge her in her need to express whatever sentiment she had about our business practices of you know selling cars to people who test drove them and wanted to buy them but she did not prevail so after probably an hour or so she left a little bit perturbed and throughout the afternoon she would call back several times trying to find someone who could make a decision and also give her a different answer to her question we all told the company line that when you buy it it's yours if you do buy your next exotic car do think about it test drive it and you know think about what it's going to be like when you wake up with it in the morning because most of the time you love it but sometimes you don't but either way it's still yours [Music] it's sort of like having james bond dog sit for you or having kimmy do your taxes [Applause] i'll never forget the first magazine article i read about the it mercifuls in 2001 and it was a road and track article where they had taken a press car to nardo race track and they had broken the fastest hundred miles fastest hundred kilometers and the furthest distance driven in a car in an hour and i just fell in love with the car i thought it was so dramatic and it took everything that was awesome about a countach and a diablo and it brought it into enough of a modern context that it was something that could be driven but not so far into it that it had so much crazy technology it wouldn't be reliable years from then and i just i felt like i had to drive one and i was 16 17 years old at the time and i had the habit of sort of talking car dealers into letting me test drive cars but i couldn't get the local atlanta dealer to let me test drive one the dealership that i would end up working at not too long afterwards but i ended up calling lamborghini carolinas and i explained to them my business at the time and i had started an exotic animal breeding practice i had an albino iguana business out of my parents basement and it was not that profitable but it was able to sort of weave the illusion together that i might be much wealthier than a 17 year old ought to be and so i convinced them that if i would come up there they would let me test drive one of their new cars and so we took this gorgeous red example around and drove it all over the back roads around the dealership and i remember the only time the sales person told me to slow down i think we were doing about 110 through a school zone now the school zone was closed but they had a terrific relationship with the local law enforcement in fact the only other person i saw in the dealership that day was the local chief of police that was getting to drive whatever he wanted in whatever manner he might choose and i you know was in no position at that point to afford one but i kind of you know filed that in the back pocket and set out in my life to find a way to have the means to do so and i started the exotic car rental company and it wasn't really the right car for that type of fleet and i ended up you know proceeding on to work at the dealership and uh not long after that we got in an orange manual lp 640. so the second generation of the mercy only go and that was really what i wanted it was so timeless had the gated shifter and everything that you could love about a big dramatic sports car and i knew long term that it would be much more reliable than the paddles because we were already starting to see you know the occasional shift actuator failure or excessive early clutch wear that you might find with an e-gear car so i really wanted a stick but the rule of thumb with the manufacturers had always been that about five percent of new sports cars particularly from the italian manufacturers were demanded as manual transmissions so it wasn't the lion's share of the market it wasn't something you saw all that often so i kind of started casually making a list of the vends of the cars that i would see and as i was adding them up and calling people and sort of searching classifieds and databases i only wound up finding 26 cars and as i was doing that i started to develop these relationships both with the owners but also with the people who wanted to buy them and they were starting to recognize particularly around early 2014 that these cars were a lot more rare than people gave them credit for i got a call from a friend of a friend and that mutual friend we had had a manual lp640 he said i know ed's looking for these cars kind of keeping tabs on him why don't you call him and he'll find you one to buy because this guy had decided this was his dream car and he wanted to pay really whatever it took to get a nice one at that point and this was right after nicholas cage's old car a balloon white car that i had sold about 2011 had sold again for 329 grand so it was kind of a new market setting price but people weren't sure if they should attribute it to his celebrity status or the fact that the car was so rare and early in 2014 at the amelia island rm auction someone had paid way more than anyone imagined was possible for a manual 599 and the reason they did so is because the added stated there were only 19 ever brought to the u.s now in fact there were about 30 that we've got on vennwiki now but they're plenty rare much more rare than any of the modern cars that we're told are rare you know 599 gtos 16ms porsche 911rs that are built in much larger quantities than anything that was rare historically and so as i was building my list i ended up being able to source another car because i called everybody i knew that had them and i said look i've got someone who's interested in paying up for one and i ended up selling an 07 orange car to them for about 281 grand and that was a very strong number for the time but definitely evidence of where the market was headed but there weren't a ton of people out there at that point recognizing them now at that point i'd own two lp 640s myself i bought an orange roadster in 2012 and a red coupe in 2014. and so i was looking to trade into a manual car and was just kind of surveying the market that i could find and i ended up finding a green 08 that was like the nicest example of a coupe that i could find and i got it for 215 grand i had sold it a year or so prior for not much more than that but it was at a moment when i couldn't buy it myself and so i was very pleased to get the car back from the guy and he was ready to move it so i had my one of these 26 cars that i could identify as the lp 640 coupes and roadsters for the u.s market and i'd also seen how many of them had been damaged or hurt in some way and that the number was fast dwindling each year so i called the factory to kind of verify my findings and i said hey do you know how many lp640s with a stick you brought into the u.s and they said now we have no idea we don't keep records like that what are you talking about i said well if you go into your sales system and you type this then prefix you'll be able to tell me how many vins it puts out and that'll be how many are in the us oh yeah i guess that would work so what's the vin prefix i said well zhwbu 37m for the coupe and zhwbu 47m for the roadster according to their records there were 23 in the u.s and i had already found more but the factory has kind of a way of disavowing any knowledge of cars with a sordid past or anything like that it was just the perfect driving experience for a hyper car supercar that you could actually use and as i've talked about it really is an utterly useless car you know it doesn't fit anywhere you can't see anything behind you it's sort of like having james bond dog sit for you or having kimmy do your taxes that's really not what they're for but it would be wildly entertaining to watch them try and so if i take this car to the grocery store or out in some crowded parking lot it's stupid it's worthless and it doesn't work in that context but it makes every driving experience an awful lot of fun and so i love the green car but it was appreciating so fast because i was spreading the word of how rare these cars were even to the point that rm referenced and selling another car my website to say how rare they were and it was working and the values were skyrocketing and every month or two there was a new precedent transaction of how expensive the cars were and how valuable they were and it was legitimate because people were finding that these are so much more rare than anything else they might look at in terms of an investment exotic that they made a ton of sense to own but there was something about having owned the perfect one that was kind of a good and bad for me because i want to be able to drive the car all the time and as i have this perfect example of exactly the right spec and it was the only green 640 coupe stick in the u.s i got kind of worried about putting so many miles on it so i drove it about 4 200 miles in a year and i ended up selling it to roy cats at cats exotics and i sold it to him for 350 grand and he ended up selling anything for 365. the reason i let it go is that i'd been contacted by the owner of another one and i said you know look i have to have one of these cars i would just rather have one that's not as nice you know it's sort of like the end of gone in 60 seconds where nicholas cage has just had this profound experience with his dream car the 67 shelby gt500 and he ends up obviously doing away with this perfect example and at the close of the movie angelina jolie's character gives him a really rough example that's kind of a project of his dream car and so i found this guy and he had one with a bit of a story but he'd owned the car for a little while and spent a bit on maintenance but he said you know it needed a few things he was not very good at describing the condition of the car or the car's history and so that didn't make him much of a shrewd negotiator as you might imagine the car had a previous salvage or theft recovery title while it was in canada and it had been sold new in canada but then it was listed for sale around 2009 and the dealer that was representing the car had taken it out joyriding one night drunk what i came to understand is he had sort of spun it around and ended up on a curb and he had broken the front wheel and broke in the rear control arm and so the car wasn't drivable but he was trashed and he didn't want to wait around for the cops to get a dui so rather than doing that he took his dealer tag off and got a taxi home and reported the car stolen when he got into work the next morning and so his insurance paid out for the theft and i don't know whatever happened to him in terms of that fraud but the car was issued a branded title in canada but for some reason when it came into the u.s around 2013 the brand washed off now that doesn't tend to happen so i'm not exactly sure how they did but now as i've got it in georgia it's got a clean georgia title it had a clean florida title in nevada when i bought it as i placed my green car with roy katz and i had made about a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars owning it in about a year and fortunately since i had financed all of it with woodside credit i'd done so with really no money out of pocket so this was all profit and all cash that i could use to buy the next car and he had wanted 150 grand for this car in its you know current form and it had some needs and so it seemed like the perfect thing it was my dream car that i could spend some time fixing up but at the very least i could drive guiltlessly as many miles as i'd ever want to well i agreed to buy it for 130 to 140 grand but i'm like we'll finalize the exact number when i get out there and so i flew out to vegas with a friend it's a little worse than he's described and i'm kind of pot committed because i've got two guys in a one-way ticket in vegas and i was planning to drive the car home but the air conditioning didn't work the check engine light was on the airbag light was on the seat belt alarm was dinging constantly it was miserably out of alignment there were a few little cracks in the leading edges the rockers and the bumper that he hadn't disclosed and it was just filthy so we take it to a car wash to really discern exactly the state of things and i end up having to obviously talk him down a bit on it and i end up buying the car for 120 grand so i've made 135 on the green car and i buy the gray one for 120 so this is my dream lamborghini that i'm able to get for free just by curating the history of all these cars because there were the 26 us cars and this was one of five canadian cars it was also one in mexico but i've now got one and this is the first lamborghini that i've ever been able to own without a gigantic loan on it and i'm just on cloud nine i take it to lamborghini las vegas we get the seat belt dinging to stop get the air conditioning recharged which becomes generally sufficient for the drive home and we get it aligned so it'll at least go straight and so we finally get the car home it's about 20 300 miles from vegas to atlanta and we just have a blast you know get to see the country and really experience it in a different way than we had on the cannonball record runs but it was not perfect it had blemishes everywhere but it was perfect for me because it was just a great driver car the same way that the prostitute gallardo was one that you could just own and drive guiltlessly that was this in the context of my dream manual lp640 and so over the next few months i got everything cleaned up and made it just a great driver example i've had it about a year now and i've driven it about eight nine thousand miles on it but i just love it at the moment the cl is down for suspension issues the 2904 s-class is down i just sold the limo so it's the only registered car i have that run so i've been daily driving it for a couple of months now and loving every second of it i mean certainly it's a caricature of what a car ought to be or do but i just love it and as much as i have that car guy itch to trade for something new every day of my life i just can't find something that i think i'm going to enjoy more particularly when you couple it with the fact that the car is paid for it's not depreciating it's actually appreciating i think today the cheapest one that's on the market is 309 and certainly it's a nicer car than mine but i love having the worst example of the coolest car i could ever want and so i just i'm having a blast and daily driving my dream car and not worrying about a thing [Music] will you bring a lamborghini and just come pick me up around the corner at the waffle house [Applause] [Music] so about four years ago i got a call from a few guys in tennessee who had gathered up some seed capital from some family members and they wanted to start an exotic car rental company and i get a lot of calls like this and i've helped a few companies kind of in a consulting capacity kind of get their feed under them help with the first few problems that you have to solve and just kind of hit the ground running with these types of businesses they did a good job i sold them five or six cars that they could use that were kind of the right cars with some miles or some stories that were the right things to put more miles on and add more stories too and it did okay but like most exotic car rental companies they started to run into some issues some car crashes some accidents some difficult customers and things like that and so eventually their investors decided look i'd kind of like whatever money is still out there to come back and so they liquidated the cars but they wanted to stay in the business and what they told me they wanted to do was to start renting out other people's cars and anytime you're in the exotic car rental business i mean i know every day literally i would get a call from an exotic car owner thinking they were doing me the biggest favor in the world by offering to let me rent their cars out as part of my fleet but there are really three problems with this idea the first is that there's really not enough money to go around we talked about how the rental rates that you can charge today are so far less on a percentage basis of the value of the car that there's no money to be made in the industry anymore and turo's done this and people who have done this type of thing have just driven the prices down and it's just a very very hard way to earn a living so even if you can convince an owner to take too little for the time and the miles you're going to use your car there's just not enough money to go around the second issue is that in the event that a car gets totaled the renter's insurance is going to pay out what the car is actually worth not what the guy owes and generally the people that ask you to rent their cars out have huge loans against these cars that have faced some depreciation and they're just trying to keep afloat and make their payments and so they'd have to write a check to make up their negative equity in the event that the car gets totaled but both of those issues pale in comparison to the third issue and that is theft by the renter like we learned about with lucky and the 612 and the gallardo when you rent a car and you do something other than just go drive it around that is considered theft by conversion and in the scenario where someone else owns the car and you act as an intermediary to rent it to a customer you don't carry insurance on that car it would just be too expensive and the policies just don't exist the owner's policy won't cover it because it's a commercial activity and the renter's policy won't cover it because that would be like me calling my insurance and saying that i stole my own car that's not a real thing so a few weeks ago this company who was renting out other people's cars had an audi r8 go missing and it went from tennessee they brought it to atlanta and they told me where the tracking device had stopped working and the car was nowhere to be found the customer wasn't answering his phone the credit cards had been canceled everything was going poorly and they were going through the steps with the owner of trying to figure out how they're going to recover it if it can be recovered offering rewards around and things like that but the car hadn't turned up so last week on the 4th of july i got a bunch of phone calls from the owner of this company at about 12 30 12 45 in the morning and i didn't answer the first few but eventually i saw who it was and i answered and i said hey what's going on he said ed we just had somebody rent our lamborghini eurocon and they're driving as fast as they seem to be able to towards atlanta and we're worried that it's about to go away so well that's a valid concern i think you should call the cops they're like we're not having any luck with the audi with the atlanta cops i don't know what we're going to do can you please just go try to figure out where they're taking the car because they were probably 20 minutes out of atlanta at that point so as i left from the northern suburbs of atlanta i sent out a glimpse a location service through an app to show them live where i was and they had their updates every 30 seconds to maybe two or three minutes at a time just depending on the granularity they were receiving from their tracking device which i later found out was an obd dongle that at any moment this guy could look down see hanging there and just throw out the window and we'd have nothing that we could do to find the car and so as i got down towards about atlantic station on 17th street i exited and that's about where they were and so i was probably two minutes behind them but it was very hard for us to get to exactly the same point because they would just send me an update in all new direction wherever the lamborghini was going so it kind of zigzagged around towards west midtown and then up towards buckhead but then went over towards i-75 and was headed almost back north towards tennessee but around 285 they remarked as watching the satellite feed it looked like they were trying to figure out in the lamborghini if somebody was following them because they went around some access road and some loops and cloverleafs around the interchange there but then they went back north on 75 and so i was following them up 75 still a ways back certainly not in visual range but i knew we were fairly close they're trying to direct me as to where to get off and in fact they missed the exit that i should have gotten off and i went and exit further so they went off on some side streets in the lamborghini and they said all right he stopped and it looks like he went into kind of a building let me give you the address and they gave me the address and it was next door to a body shop that i used to use a lot i don't know why i remember this body shop's address but i did send a lot of cars there through the dealership and through the rental company so i said all right i know exactly where that is i come around in probably 12 minutes or so after they pulled into this warehouse i arrive and there's lights on on the 4th of july at 2 45 in the morning in this warehouse and it's a wrap company it's got a there's an aston martin repeat outside and a mustang and some pretty legitimate looking cars but it's weird that there's people in there working so i kind of pull back out on the street and i tell the guys look we're not talking about any amount of money that's going to compel me to knock on these guys doors and interrupt these would-be car thieves right now i said now is the time we know where the car is you need to call the local police in marietta and see what they'll do and so a few minutes later about six police cars very quietly with their lights off pulled down this street that no one else is using at this hour and i'm parked a few driveways down just kind of looking at the driveway to see what's happened and they come up and i sort of explain the circumstance and they say all right well this is not really a criminal matter i said i know that but you know this is a circumstance where they're just about to lose a very expensive car based on what seems to be happening here and i said could you just kind of give me some kind of help in sort of figuring out exactly what's happening to the car right now they're like no no i mean it's really not our thing you know obviously it's not illegal for somebody to drive a car from tennessee to georgia we understand this against some rental agreement or whatever the case may be but that's a civil matter that's not for us right now eventually it can become a theft by conversion circumstance but that's not really where we're at at this moment so we don't really have any jurisdiction or probable cause to do anything and i'm like yeah but you know it's kind of weird that a lamborghini just pulled in here and there's lights on in this shop in the middle of the night to work on a car that's not allowed to be worked on i mean i know it's not exactly a criminal circumstance but can we at least just go see what's going on so they kind of talked amongst themselves for a little while and in the meantime i'm getting calls from the owner of the rental company the owner of the car their lawyer everyone's saying ed you just have to figure out some way we can't lose this car and i told him i said look i get it i know this is the worst nightmare you could ever imagine and i'm not here to say i told you so but this is a very difficult thing to proceed through because i don't even work for you i don't have any legal grounds to repossess this car and if they try to make things sticky we're not going to have a whole lot of outs here so i keep talking to the cops they say all right let's just kind of drive around there so we do and their lights off very quiet and they kind of surround the building so i get out one of the cops gets out and we walk in there together and as we walk in it's like business as usual in this rap shop they've got a bunch of nice cars a new r8 and an nsx and a bunch of stuff they're in progress working on and there's five or six employees there at three in the morning on the holiday just working like it's two in the afternoon on a weekday in the middle of the shop there is a red lamborghini huracan and there's this guy pulling wires out of it he's got the dash out of the car the whole front trunk liner's out he's got all these tools out and there's things laying out my goodness gracious and so i walk over there and i'm like what's going on here and he said this guy just sold the car and he's looking for us to take the camera system out so he can put it in his next car i said well this is actually a car he rented a few hours ago and there's no authorization to do any work and there's not a camera system in the car he's definitely not allowed to do that and we'd like you not to give him the car back and he's like look i see all these cops i'm not here to do anything wrong if that's what the circumstance is by all means you know i'm not here to put up a fight but i need to talk to this guy and just see what's going on so he does a facetime call with the person who had dropped the car off who was different than the female with a california driver's license who had rented the car just a few hours earlier in tennessee and he's like oh yeah man we just went out to get some dinner at uh waffle house and we'll be right there and i certainly couldn't fault waffle house as being the best choice of atlanta cuisine at three in the morning on a holiday but he said he was going to be back he was calling an uber or something like that but he said well you just told me that you sold this car and you wanted me to remove that and this guy's saying it's a rental car he said well well yeah so i said and so i kind of took the phone from him i said hey i'm with the rental company we're going to be taking the car back right now you're welcome to come back and we can discuss it we've got the police here everything will be on the up and up but we're not going to be taking things out of the car anymore just so we're all clear he's like yeah yeah i'm on the way i'm on the way hangs up the phone so i'm like if you don't mind i don't know what he was going to pay you for this job i'll make sure that you're made whole beyond that but just go ahead let's try to put this thing back together and then i'm going to end up taking it out of here i'm gonna park it in my warehouse and they can come pick it up in the next few days so he gets it buttoned up and the car starts and this guy calls again and i pick up his phone because he's been working and he had no problem with that and i'm like look you know i'm about to take this car back let's not worry about this anymore you can take anything up that you have outstanding with the rental company they'll be awaiting your call and he's like wait wait wait wait ah my my uber just got cancelled because my card got declined will you bring the lamborghini and just come pick me up around the corner at the waffle house i said yeah yeah you just ordered me around to hash browns and i'll be right around the corner so obviously i did not go around the corner and pick this guy up at the local waffle house i'll just leave that to him and the owner of the rental company to sort out but i was able to get the car home safe and sound of the vinwicki warehouse and a couple days later they sent their guys down to pick it up but i think we were really probably 15 or 20 minutes away from that car disappearing and never being seen again and as you think about these types of businesses all these interesting things that you can do with cars a lot of times the risks just really do outweigh the potential reward that the industry has to offer but fortunately in this circumstance then wiki was able to come to the rescue and save another stolen lamborghini but next time i can't imagine we get that lucky [Music] i need five thousand dollars to have it back i said you mean you want me to pay you for the return of my stolen property he said yep that's the only way i can give it back to you [Music] [Applause] i had a customer who had rented my car several times in fact he was an ex-atlanta police officer and he rented the gallardo a few times so he wanted to rent that again but in addition he wanted to rent my ferrari 612 sky yeti so that his friend could have something to drive around while he was in town and so about i'd say it was on a wednesday or thursday they picked up both cars and began paying for the the rentals and gave us a credit card we verified the insurance and went through all the normal steps over the next few days they kept renewing the rental saying we're having so much fun we want to keep it and i'm continuing to make a good deal of money renting the cars out and i've got a you know good customer in them so i'm pleased with all that but around monday i stopped hearing back from them and i began telling them well it's time to either turn the cars back in or pay us for another day and they wouldn't answer and so i believe it was tuesday night i was out at my bachelor party because that saturday i was getting married and so we were out racing go-karts and having a good dinner and i got a phone call and it was peculiar there was a woman on the other end of the phone and she said my husband is the guy who bought your ferrari today but we've decided we don't want it in fact we'd like the bmw we gave you in the fifteen thousand dollars in cash as a down payment back and uh we'd like to undo this whole deal i said well ma'am literally every part of that sentence is a problem and fundamentally incorrect because i didn't sell your husband my car and whoever did uh was not uh authorized to do so and she said well he's told us that he was one of your employees and he worked for this rental car company i said well that's absolutely not the case and she proceeded to tell me that well i'm a lawyer and possession is nine tenths of the law i said ma'am it's a rental car so possession is literally zero tenths of the law and by saying that i highly doubt you're actually a lawyer but i'll need you to return to me this stolen property and understand that the police will very soon be going to find it so she got upset hung up the phone and i had to return to try to enjoy what was left of my bachelor party before spending the next day and the next several days trying to work this all out so i tried to contact the rental customer again no answer and i go on to track the cars and i see that the lamborghini is in a parking lot in midtown so i take the other key go to midtown find that the car has had the front knocked off of it and say well we found it at least and so the next day i had a tow truck take it to my preferred body shop and begin the process of repairs and we filed a claim with his insurance company still he wouldn't answer the phone and we could not find the ferrari because the battery had gone dead because like many of the ferraris i've owned the 612 was one of these cars that if you don't drive it every day or every two or three days the battery will be dead next time you return to it and so the tracking device was not functioning because the capacitance had worn out and i had no idea where to find it but i'd continue to have a little bit of luck getting in touch with this woman who was still not understanding that i didn't have her bmw or the money or access to the customer but that she did absolutely have a car that was stolen i came to find out that this is called theft by conversion meaning that you had the privilege of use of this car but that you converted it in a use that you were not permitted so selling it was something that a rental customer was not allowed to do so in converting it to a asset that they made for sale that is the theft now the problem is when you know who has your stolen property the police don't do a very good job of trying to find out where it is they seem to think that uh you'll go about finding it or that it's not the same thing as throwing out an apb and having everybody find it or at least everyone try because we had i had delivered the car in one county and a few miles over in the next county is where the car was being used and they were still occasionally driving it around because i'd see the tracking device work and it would be at the valet lot of some restaurant or a mall or anything like that but i could never get there in time to take my other key and repossess the car so i had spoken to the police they said well yeah we see it but the you know you've reported it stolen in your county and it's here so we don't have a system that allows us to just understand every car that's stolen in the world it seems like a market failure and something someone should explore but they were very very useless at the time so i continue trying to express to this woman uh exactly the gravity of the situation for her but she continues to be unwilling to return the car so my groomsmen and i we're all going around we've got the rehearsal dinner coming up and everything's happening and even as we led up to it i still couldn't get in touch with the rental customer but on friday literally the day before my wedding i was finally able to talk to him and i met him at a waffle house of all places he for some reason had convinced himself that i might be pleased that he had sold this car even though he had not specified a term of the loan any interest terms a selling price or anything other than the fact that he had taken this guy's bmw taken fifteen thousand dollars in cash as a down payment and agreed to some sort of payment schedule additional unfortunate news is that he didn't have a phone number an address an email address or literally anything other than the guy went by lucky so he was a very little use trying to get us the car back even once he realized that he had made such a mistake and so the police were starting to question him and trying to figure out things but they weren't moving at all quickly and i had my wedding the next day and then i was leaving on my honeymoon the day after and so the whole morning of our wedding i'm constantly on the phone we're trying to take photographs with the bridal party and everything like that and i just can't you know literally i cannot afford to have this go anyway other than perfectly and the reason for that is that the most difficult thing about setting up an exotic car rental company is managing the insurance and trying to get an exotic car rental insurance policy is nearly impossible and keeping it is also pretty much impossible particularly if you ever file a claim because even though the insurance is legitimate and it's in place and it will pay out a claim the accepted understanding on all parties is that if you file a claim you will not be invited to renew the policy and so while i could probably get the insurance company to pay for the theft i would be invited not to renew and so all the other car payments that i would need to make would not be possible because i would be out of business so it was a very much a rock and a hard place situation and as you'd imagine my new bride and her family and everybody else around the circumstance is pretty worried for me because they understand that this is a tremendous amount of money at risk and all the cars are completely financed it's not as though i own them and can just lose the money it would be a long-term debt situation to try to recover in the event that things did not go so well so we go through the wedding and i'm wondering all the time what do i do if my phone rings during the ceremony do i answer i mean certainly i can't afford not to but that seems like a bad decision and fortunately that didn't happen or i suppose unfortunately because the next morning i still had made no progress i called my lawyer and i said look i've got to leave this in your hands there's nothing else that i can do but please please please have my car by the time i get back from this week-long honeymoon in st lucia and so he says he's on it and i'm literally texting with lucky's wife trying to express to her the significance of the situation and the importance that she returns said stolen property as we're taking off from the airport so somehow i did manage to enjoy our honeymoon without too much stress and anxiety but it was certainly there in the background and uh when i got back i got back in touch with lucky finally i convinced his wife to have lucky call me and lucky said i've still got your car i understand sort of what's happened but i need five thousand dollars to have it back i said you mean you want me to pay you for the return of my stolen property he said yep that's the only way i can give it back to you i said well um let me see what i can do so i called the police officers that were in charge of the case and i explained to them what had happened they said well you want to pay five thousand dollars i was like well i mean five thousand dollars at this moment particularly at the prospect of everything else that i'm gonna have to spend is a little bit daunting they say well ask if he'll take a check i said are you insinuating that i should stop payment on said check and therefore bounce a check to someone for five thousand dollars because i believe that's a felony they said yeah yeah but don't worry about it it's okay it'll all be fine well okay so uh called him back lucky was happy to take a check lucky's got a bank account so go to meet lucky where he's told me the car is and so we go to this parking lot in downtown atlanta and the car is obviously completely dead so i've got to call a tow truck to come and get it and uh because you really don't want to be jumping off a ferrari ever and certainly not in that circumstance where you know the battery's been drained and even the alternator is questionable so i uh get the truck headed headed that way and uh you know at the time lucky and i are talking he's hanging out he has a friend actually drive up in this seafoam green atrocious maserati quattroporte and the paint which had obviously been a repaint was falling off in chunks and so he was asking me for advice on what body shop he might use so i made a great recommendation to him i don't know if he ever took me up on it then we parted ways i followed the tow truck home lucky went away with the check so as i'm headed home predictably i get a phone call from the bank they say hey we've got this check and it looks a little bit suspicious and the guy looks a little bit suspicious and so we just really want to know what's going on i said yes that's an extortion payment for the return of stolen property please don't honor it there should be a stop payment in your system oh great thank you so much mr bolion i hope you have a great day well it hasn't started out that way but it is what it is so we make it back to my warehouse and go on about trying to get the car charged back up and evaluating the state of things and fortunately it was in pretty good condition a little curb damage on a wheel and a scratch in the clear bra but nothing to be too terribly concerned about but a few minutes later lucky shows up his wife i guess had found our address and even though we generally delivered cars to customers and didn't have a whole lot of customers here he came to the warehouse to express his displeasure with the fact that he had not received his five thousand dollars i explained to him that's a felony what you've done is uh extort payment for the return of stolen property and i'm not interested in participating in that what'll be best is if we part ways and never speak of this again i've never seen or heard from lucky or that customer since then but it was definitely a very very dramatic week in my life where the ferrari got stolen and the lamborghini got crashed he said well it sounds like it's probably a stolen car [Applause] [Music] so for six years i was the director of sales for lamborghini atlanta and during that time i sold a few hundred lamborghinis many of which stayed local and i think when i started one year we checked and there were 93 lamborghinis registered in georgia i certainly increased that during the time that i worked there we had others were registered in montana and elsewhere but over time i became pretty familiar with just about all the lamborghinis that were in town and so not long after we launched then wiki last summer probably sometime in july i was driving home from the office and i looked in the parking lot of the target near my house and i saw an orange 2008 super lugera and i didn't think there were any orange 08 superleggeras registered in town and i was going to post the car to then wiki like a lot of exotic car spotters do so i drove down into the parking lot and it was sprinkling rain so i snapped some pictures through my window but then i noticed that the car had a dealer tag on it a reasonable explanation why it had shown up and i didn't know anything about it but it meant that our plate to vent system wouldn't decode the ven from the license plate so i decided well i'll get out and i'll actually get it off the car so as i walked up to the car it was fascinating it was a normal option super lugiera but it had ceramic brakes which were about a fifteen thousand dollar option back in 2008 it was a rancio borealis the pearl orange color it had the large rear wing the extended interior carbon package the backup camera and presumably navigation those four options were pretty much universal to super luxurious but when i looked at the vin there was something peculiar about it and it was printed in the wrong font now most people wouldn't know the font that lamborghini prints their vends in but i did and i knew it was wrong so that was a little bit strange and when i typed it into vinwicki it didn't immediately validate the vin so in the u.s thens use a check digit so the vehicle identification number just like a credit card number has a check digit that you can run an algorithm through and it'll immediately tell you if it's a valid vin now that doesn't work in some parts of europe and in other parts of the world but in the us it does it's a law that cars sold in the u.s have to have a mathematically validating then so that didn't validate but i snapped a few pictures walked around and got back in my car and went home but the next day when i was looking back through the pictures trying to figure out what was wrong i noticed why the ven wasn't validating in fact it was only 16 digits so in the u.s a gallardo superleggera then for 2008 would start chw like any lamborghini then g for gallardo u for the us 43 is for gallardo superleggera coupe t for an e-gear transmission then it'll have a check digit then we'll have an 8 for model year 2008 then it'll say la 0 and then i'll have four digits that are the build number and so in this car's case the u wasn't there so there was no country identifying character and that's why the then wasn't validating through our system so i thought that was pretty peculiar so i called a friend of mine who's the chief of police in a local town and told him about it he said well it sounds like it's probably a stolen car well that's fascinating let's see what we can find out he said let me ask around to the auto theft unit see if anybody's looking for the car and we'll have somebody get back in touch with you so i thought we were onto something interesting and i wanted to keep digging through and it turned out that a couple other people had already spotted that same car around atlanta and so we were able to sort of compile the history of when it had come in on a truck and what parts of town it had been seen driving in and within wiki one of the interesting things you can do is build a list of cars so you can add all the examples of a certain car like 2008 superleggeras in the u.s and and one vinwicki user who aspires to one day own one of these cars had gone through and done just that so pretty much all the us superleggeras were in venwiki already and we could browse through and see which ones made sense which ones didn't have ceramic brace which ones were orange because in 2008 they didn't allow any ad persona orders they were all standard range colors they were either white black gray orange or yellow obviously in their italian names so we ruled out all the cars that weren't orange we rolled out cars with cosmetic modifications and we rolled out cars that had been exported and we rolled out cars that didn't have ceramic brakes and we got down to about 25 cars that this one could be assuming that it's vin was wrong and we knew it's that even the suffix the build number of the vin was wrong because it wasn't in the range of super legere events so after that we went through and i ran the carfaxes and looked across all the information that i could gather on each one and we found out that only one of these cars had ever been reported stolen and it was then i think 6668 a few days later i got a call from an officer with the department of revenue and they had been looking into this car and i told them that we had done some digging and we thought that the car was probably 6668 and he said yeah we think that too but we were a little surprised that you were able to figure that out i said yeah and i told him how we'd done it and stuff like that and he said he didn't really know much about it but it wasn't stolen strictly speaking but it was probably misrepresented to an insurance company not a wildly uncommon thing particularly back in 2008 and 2009 because at the time these cars were just depreciating catastrophically and prior to that banks had been financing way over sticker so it's not uncommon for the owner of one of these cars to be 100 150 000 upside down in equity so it was a hard thing for them to get rid of and the most convenient solution it seemed at times was just to call their insurance and say it had been stolen and collect on their insurance and potentially gap coverage as well so he didn't have a whole lot more he said they were going to continue looking for it but that wasn't really good enough for me i wanted to find out more about the car so i went down to our local tag office and i said that i had found this car with a dealer tag on it that i wanted to buy not untrue i'm always interested in buying a cheap gallardo and so i gave her the dealer tag number and i asked if she would just give me the dealer's name so that i could contact them and see because obviously the car wasn't listed for sale online or anything like that and she was very reluctant but i convinced her to let me know what the name of the dealership was and i found out that it wasn't terribly far from where i live so i drove by the place where it was and walked up and knocked on the door and i i said hey do you guys have an orange superleggera for sale and the guy who owned the place wasn't there but there was a guy subletting some part of the building for detailing and he said oh yeah it's right back here and you want to come and take a look at it and absolutely so i walked back there and got to have a little bit more of a look around the car and the guy didn't care he was happy to let somebody look he assumed the car was for sale because he knew that it was in the building owned by a dealership but next to the car was another 2008 gallardo it was a spider and so we were looking around both i opened the car it had about 39 000 miles which i think it had been stolen with under 5 000 or under 3 000 miles when it when it left california and so someone had put a lot of miles on the car it had cheap tires and some little scuffs around the carbon diffusers and things like that it wasn't in great shape but it was definitely a cool orange 08 superleggera so i looked on the door jam where there's the then sticker with all the manufacturer data on it and it had also been altered you could kind of see where someone had gone in and changed it but on that one they had put the u so it was 17 digits and wouldn't mathematically validate because the check digit was wrong but it was a full 17 digit lamborghini looking vin that was probably passable to all but maybe me i can't imagine anybody else in the state would have ever taken the time to look or have any about a knowledge to be able to say that it didn't make sense for the car to be as it was but i get uh looking around the car and i knew there's no real other place for me to find the car's reel then without getting it up on a lift and looking at the frame rail but i look in the glove box and the owner's manuals are there and whenever we got a new lamborghini from the factory we would take out the owner's manual and there's a warranty and maintenance book and on it there's boxes 17 of them to write in each character of the vin and whoever had gotten this car or purchased it as a stolen car and was using it hadn't bothered to throw that away so i opened it up and look and lo and behold that's exactly which car it was the one we thought the one the department of revenue thought it was and so i uh took a picture and told the guy hey you know have the owner call me i'd love to talk to him about buying the car stuff like that obviously i never heard from him but i followed back up with the department of revenue and gave them the information that they had and also told them about the other car which had an identically replicated then and someone had really gone through some trouble here you'd have to have removed the windshields to install the new vin plates but they were thrilled with this silver platter case of auto theft and to discover and i guess they didn't have to worry about you know trying to corroborate any of the other information because it was all presented to them nicely packaged so i talked to a another friend on the police force that was in that area because it was a different area than the chief of police that i knew and he said that they were going to go in and uh and get them and so i tried to talk to them a few days later and they were obviously hugely grateful that vinwicki had been such a help collectively to figure out what the plight was of these cars and i asked him you know did the guy tell you like how he came about them or what he had found or whatever the case may be because over the years i mean i'll be honest i've been offered to buy some stolen cars stolen exotics and they don't tend to bring much money because there's not that much you can do with them i remember i got offered a stolen 03 360 spider it was when they were worth probably 130 grand and he said it was in south georgia wrapped in aluminum foil because he wasn't sure if there was a tracking device that might have been telling the people where to come and find it it was exactly the same case as this where he had been upside down couldn't sell the car and rather than um getting it repo'ed he just reported it stolen got it paid off and then hid the car he he said you know you can have it for 25 grand but you have to go and pick it up and uh obviously i was not interested in doing that but you know for plenty of people that might want to track car to export something or whatever the case may be there's a lot of fun to be had for 25 grand and that was certainly what had happened here but the guy who'd had the car for so long was in trouble for a lot more so in fact i don't even believe he was prosecuted for grand theft auto because the cops said that when they got there there were all these illegal drugs and weapons and other things like hidden in the walls of this car dealership lot unit whatever the case may be and so they didn't really bother too much with the lamborghinis but i i was curious who i could try to buy these things from because theoretically they were going to be owned by insurance companies so i called lamborghini newport beach and i asked them to run the the actual then and to see who the title owner was and they told me that it was titled to manhattan leasing and that the second lien holder was all points capital all points capital is one of these banks that does secondary lending through the different leasing companies like manhattan leasing they'll do balloon loans with a 35 to 55 residual in a 60 or 48 month term and so i was familiar with them if we had someone with not quite good enough credit to go with any of the other banks we'd sometimes call manhattan so i called them up and i talked to the president and i said hey are y'all missing an orange 2008 superleggera he said you know we're missing a few cars let me check he said yep that one's mine and so i explained to him the circumstance that i'd found and he was extremely grateful he seemed and uh told me that you know he'd send me a five thousand dollar check for finding the car which i was thrilled with um unfortunately he never did that i never heard another word from him and after following up he seems to have decided that it wasn't worth that to return his car but it was a cool experience it was a demonstration of the power of vinwicki the way we can crowdsource information to achieve an outcome that other platforms other sources of information never could the cops were grateful they've asked us to find other stolen cars and we've made progress to that since then but it was a great experience a great time and a fun little chase again thank you guys so much for watching i can't express my gratitude enough for the chance to tell the stories here and to continue doing fun things in cars i'm sure there'll be a lot more to come but thanks so much please subscribe and have a great day [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 1,103,475

Rating: 4.8177128 out of 5

Keywords: Ed Bolian, VINwiki, Car Stories, Free Lambo, Stolen, Scam, Crash, Driving, Cannonball, Ruf, Lamborghini, Murcielago, LP640, storytelling, YouTuber, Bentley, lawsuit, Top 10, interview, story, comedy, vehicle history, exotic car rental

Id: YfZU6Xmh9Vs

Length: 118min 3sec (7083 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020