My flood 599 is proving IMPOSSIBLE to rebuild

[Music] i love buying cars with terrible histories because i love to minimize my ownership cost i have an intense allergy to depreciation and i like to drive the cars a lot and if you're going to rack up a lot of miles starting with a very low or below market example helps a lot and whatever that stigma is that devalues a car to be quite honest every day you move away from it it matters a lot less but it may not change the value for some sellers and so that's always been my approach and certainly with car trek over the last year and a half tyler freddie and myself have had a lot of fun buying some very very terrible examples of some very cool cars and generally that has worked out very very well for me however it has started to catch up with me with this ferrari 5.99 so today i wanted to explain exactly what has happened over the last six months or so in trying to make that car legal and just how difficult to impossible that has been but first i have a special treat freddie has put together a two minute or so trailer for our upcoming fifth series of car trek that will begin on september 6th on freddy to varish's channel and this is what you can look forward to hello hello i need a very durable condom and zip ties we are here at the amelia island concord elegance and we actually made it because we brought reliable cars this time i don't know about yours it's not known for its reliability is it okay well that sounds missy doesn't it this is the closest i've ever been to a private jet the door's open look at that tyler are you a member of the mile high club well never with a partner your dream cars are safe with us but we have given you a generous budget to buy a duplicate of your first car oh they're right on my tail get him get him get him we need his channel he's the only one that gets views i'm sorry [Music] oh wow tyler just jumped off [Applause] oh my goodness i'm coming on your inside no he's inside you got him you're going to be the first person to get stabbed in the neck by a volkswagen key unless you say something nice about my boat okay okay okay okay okay okay i'm gonna need some popcorn if we're going to keep this going and i'd love to keep this going oh my god today does not suck today is a good day come on [Music] so we had an awful lot of fun making that and i cannot wait for you to see it we had our dream cars we re-bought our first cars we had some more very very dreamy cars and some certainly once in a lifetime experiences but we're now kind of putting the finishing touches on the planning for the sixth installment of car trek which will release sometime around christmas but yes the 599 from car trek 4 has not gone exactly to plan in fact i've now driven it about 6 000 miles illegally including the 4 000 or so miles that i had to drive it going to dallas for car trek 4 doing the route up to gateway canyon colorado and then driving it home of course it had my car trek license plate on it with a valid registration sticker but to be quite honest at the time that was still registered to the maserati quattroporte that i used in car trek 3. now i always want to have the cars ready before we set out on these adventures but unfortunately like most project cars that's not always the reality and so as soon as i got this car i took it to ferrari of atlanta and just told him look we don't have a whole lot of time i just need you guys to get it as sorted as you possibly can now i had been chasing this car and certainly aware of the car for the better part of two years i had tried to buy it for car trek one and tried to make it the price of a c8 corvette i'd actually tried to buy it about a year prior when federico cerifo and i were talking about building a sister car for fiorella his drift 599 and that's still a project that's sort of you know on the horizon potentially we're not really sure when and how that might work but at least having one in the garage can make that a little bit more of a viable possibility and so i was pretty familiar with the history of this 599 and i knew that about eight years prior to this it had been in a fresh water rain flood in reno nevada it had been sold to the second owner at a huge premium over msrp more than 200 000 over msrp including the dealer installed options of the hgte kit so i knew that the car went in the water but i also knew that it had accumulated at about 4 000 miles since that had happened so it went in the water at about 4 000 miles i bought it at about 8 000 miles and so i'd been talking to this dealer for a while and they told me a lot about what they had done to the car in terms of servicing and a few repairs that they claim they had made because they told me they had gotten a rebuilt title for the car now when the title in the car showed up that was not the case it still had a branded flood title now when an insurance totals out a car when you have an incident an accident or it's in a flood they will pay you for the car and the title becomes branded when the car is sold through salvage auctions as salvage rebuildable flood hail vandalism there's a lot of different theft recovery style brands and i've talked about that in a video so once it gets branded you can then in most cases get the car rebuilt sometimes they are branded export only parts only or non-rebuildable meaning that you cannot rebuild the car but in this car's case in a flood you can rebuild the car so each state will have some form of inspection requirement on how you get the car back on the road so here in georgia you have to take the car to get a salvage inspection from an authorized inspector they sign off on it you pay them about 100 bucks and then you go to the department of revenue where they issue your rebuilt title you then go to your department of motor vehicles for your county and then they get you a tag and so it's a fairly long process that i just didn't have time for beforehand also it would not have passed that salvage inspection generally this involves a safety inspection headlights turn signals brake lights horn things like that as well as making sure that the error lights are off on the dash now when i got this car the airbag light was on and i knew that they had disclosed to me that the airbag light was intermittently on and quite honestly even though they lied to me about having rebuilt the title it didn't really matter because in georgia and in several other states if you bring in a previously rebuilt car you have to redo the inspection anyway so it really didn't make any difference i had to accomplish the same inspection regardless of whether i was bringing in a rebuilt title or a current reassigned salvage title so in this case it was a flood title and i had to have them look it over but they would not pass it with an airbag light on and so that first time that i took it to ferrari of atlanta i had asked them to please clear the light and tell me what was causing it hopefully it might stay off for long enough for me to go get the inspection but regardless i wanted to know what i would need to replace now i'd been told by the selling dealer that it was probably related to the passenger occupancy sensors and that was where the error was coming from however the sd3 computer that ferrari dealers used in order to clear these lights was not working at the time and so they could read it they could tell what it was and yes it was the passenger occupancy error but they didn't necessarily have the ability to turn it off and so regardless i was not going to have a rebuilt title for car trek so i went on driving with my bill of sale with my valid insurance and just hoping that i didn't get pulled over and while i did get pulled over a couple of times not for any serious offenses nobody ever really minded they weren't able to tell that the car was not fully rebuilt i had all the evidence that i was the rightful owner and everything worked out okay so after filming car trek four i get home and it's time to get the car properly rebuilt and so i know that i'm going to need to replace possibly the entire passenger seat but at least the weight sensors that are underneath the seat in order to get this light to go off because i had to list the car for sale on auto tempest because i had lost by our judging criteria the fourth series of car trek and so it is still listed at autotempest.com you can visit it at the link in the description below i don't know that it's necessarily for sale for real but if you have an offer i'm always ears to hear it and so we do love auto tempest for their continued support of card trek they sponsored our first five car trek series already and they're interested in keeping it all going so we very much appreciate that but that can only happen if you like right now click the link in the description below to check out auto tempest and use it to search for your next car we honestly do use auto tempest every day because we're constantly looking for new and interesting cars both for our personal collections and for upcoming series we think the six series you're really gonna like it's not just one car from each of us it's in fact three cars from each of us but regardless we're excited about filming that fairly soon but yes please do check out auto tempest it's all the cars in one search and it's one of our absolute favorite sponsors here at vinwicki so i needed to get the car titled in my name so that i could then transfer it to someone if i did sell the car but that was proving extremely problematic so i got a set of the weight sensors out of a crash car on the west coast and i myself took the seat out took the carpet out took all the trim out got to those replaced the sensors making sure that i'd taken the right number of pictures to know exactly where everything went and i put the thing back in but of course once i had it all back in even though i had the battery disconnected and everything the airbag light was still on because it was on when i turned the car off so i get everything buttoned up and put back together and i take it back to ferrari of atlanta and say look i need you to clear this code and in fact i'm going to be gone for a couple of weeks so you can spend that time making sure that everything else is buttoned up and of course on cartridge we discovered a handful of other issues that if we could keep the airbag light off it made sense to start addressing so it's with them for a couple of weeks i get back and apologetically they say we just cannot get this light to turn off and so i believed that i had replaced these sensors properly but i didn't really know what i was doing and it was possible that i had done it incorrectly and so i decided that i needed to turn to the aftermarket world and the best option for that was art from eag i had driven his manually swapped scooteria and i knew at the time that he was working on a ferrari 599 manual transmission swap and so i asked him knowing that a lot of his software requirements mean kind of piggybacking on top of the existing ecu and tcu structure on these late 2000s ferraris i thought he was probably the right person to ask and in fact he was and at the time he was the next day flying through atlanta on a layover to go from san antonio to a project that he was inspecting down in florida and so he said look i'll just extend my layover you bring the car down i'll bring my computer and we'll try to clear this light and the computer that he had with him was one of two that he has and unfortunately it would not clear it so we spent some time in the airport parking lot he went on his way but he said he would come back through the next time with his more powerful computer i didn't understand what computing power could possibly have to do with clearing a simple error light but whatever he said i was ready to hear and so the car just sort of set around i drove it periodically but a couple of weeks later he came back and his computer was successful in clearing the light and so i called the salvage inspector who i knew from having already inspected the gallardo last year and i said look i'm gonna bring it and it's now working now i had actually talked to him prior and i said hey look it's got an airbag light on that is intermittent it goes off sometimes but i need you to pass this car can you do it if the light happens to be on when i make it about an hour and a half from my house to his inspection facility and he said no if it's an airbag light or an abs light that's a big enough deal that we just cannot pass the car and so now i am months into trying to make this thing work and finally we have the light off we go through several key cycles we drive it around my neighborhood around some of the nearby streets everyone is happy so i take art back to the airport now i get back home and then i get into the 5.99 start it up to move in the garage and the airbag light comes on for the next couple of weeks i try different experiments because it does kind of come and go but i just don't really see a pattern in exactly when i could expect to be at the inspector's place and know that the light would be off so in general if i have a passenger in the car for five or ten minutes the airbag light will go off but that's a difficult circumstance to simulate when i need to just give the car to an inspector and hope the light will stay off and so i'm trying to figure out and in continued discussions with the ferrari dealer they said pretty much we know that it's between the seat controls the weight sensors the airbag control module and the dash but without replacing all of those ferrari is kind of not willing to help us from a corporate level and from there after sales care in helping us make it work and obviously that's 20 to 30 000 worth of components and i was not about to do that on this car that i was already kind of teetering on owning it for more than i really wanted to and so i keep experimenting i keep driving it i drive it around with a five gallon gas can seat belted in and you know that amount of weight did after the same amount of time five or ten minutes get the light to go off and if i got the light to go off and then continued to drive the car for 20 or 30 minutes sometimes when i went back to the car even without a passenger in it would stay off for the next immediate key cycle or at least for the first few minutes so that was encouraging but again not entirely predictable so i really just got to the point of like i need this thing to at least fail i haven't even tried because i haven't gotten a lot of confidence that was going to behave itself so i asked a friend to come with me we had about an hour hour and a half drive over to gainesville to get the car inspected and we had to get there super early because they're only willing to inspect 15 cars per day at the location that i was planning to use so we get there and we're about fourth in line so we know we're gonna have a little bit of time to wait and i have to say it is one of the most interesting places that i have been surrounding the automotive hobby the first person in line has a chevy silverado that he had bought out of another state that he didn't realize had a branded title he'd been doing some work to it and he was excited to be first he'd been there for two hours i think at that point hoping to be the first person to pass that day and so he goes in there once they open and they learn that he has unplugged his airbag light and so they have to turn the ignition on in order to make sure that you haven't done this and that revealed his flaw and so he was kicked out he uh did not pass that day so the next person up was in a cadillac escalade and he had actually been there the night before getting some repair work done at the same shop and he had hoped to be early in line for his inspection unfortunately in keeping the car overnight they had locked his keys in the car he didn't have a second set of keys so there was a locksmith on the way trying to break into the car in order to get his ready and so they did that and so he became the second and i think he had been missing a turn signal bulb or some other stuff and so that second time he did pass now the next person was a woman who'd had her car towed in now you're supposed to have your car towed into these inspections but no one had and so she was the only one with i think a metres fan and so she was getting hers inspected but unfortunately she had forgotten her 100 in cash that was required and so she was going around the lot trying to convince everybody of how much money she had so they would let her borrow another hundred dollars in cash but quite honestly none of us had brought an extra hundred dollars in cash and we weren't going to leave to go to an atm for her and possibly lose our place in line because it was a very inconsistent amount of time that we were seeing these inspections take and so she ends up being kind of kicked down the line and i'm up but again while we're kind of waiting i'm trying to figure out how i'm going to keep this light off and so i keep turning the car on the airbag light's on i've got my friend sitting in the passenger seat he's shuffling his weight around trying to make sure that it'll go off because we've already noticed they are attentive to airbag lights and so fortunately they were not comfortable driving my ferrari onto their lift and quite honestly i wasn't sure it was going to clear but i was very excited to be the one driving it so hopefully by the time we got on there and they needed to get in the car everything would have cycled through and my airbag light would go off and so we pull on there and then both of the people that are in charge of the inspections end up going into the office to do some paperwork from the previous inspection so we're set there to wait for about 10 or 15 minutes which they would have anticipated we turned the car off but we were just waiting on this light to go off unfortunately it doesn't for about five minutes i'm like look we need to start this thing over and so i'm like shift your weight around turn it off turn it back on light's still on but we're just waiting and literally about one minute before they returned the light went off and it was an absolute miracle i cannot say how happy we were in that moment i was able to show them look here it is it's running there's no check engine lights on there's no airbag lights on there's no abs lights on there's no traction control lights on all the things you could possibly be worried about you can't have to worry about because right now this car is as perfect as we always knew it was and so they do that and then of course he has to turn it off but rather than going all the way back on all he does is turn the ignition on so he can see that i have not unplugged the airbag light i had tried that but unfortunately it is on a board i was going to trade it with another light that it wouldn't matter if it was on like a tpms sensor or something like that that's not necessarily involved in such a safety inspection but the car passed we were over the moon elated we went back in while they filled out some more paperwork we got to learn a little bit more about our co-inspectees it was a man with a motorcycle being rebuilt he was talking to the woman who was still looking around for her hundred dollars in cash they were having a discussion about what really qualified as domestic violence and there were a lot of very very racist jokes and honestly it was just quite a wild place to be in for a few hours and my friend was just wide-eyed and he had no idea what he'd been in for i didn't really either but i have to say it was a lot of fun and the perfect outcome we came away with an approval we went down to the department of revenue and we were able to get a title in fact i was even able to get my diablo treated as the trade credit that was obviously part of the plot line of card trek 4 that i used what i effectively made selling the diablo to patrick adair and i used that to offset what i had to pay an 80 grand to make this a 40 000 599 and so that was great i didn't have to pay any sales tax on the car and i got a license plate so the car track license plate is now fully legally registered to the 599 the airbag light comes and goes but it's very safe it's very drivable and i have absolutely been loving having another legal ferrari in the garage and so that was an absolute blast and i cannot thank auto tempest enough for the opportunity to shoot another car track series with that car and i do absolutely love it and so thank you guys so much for watching the car trek series so far i hope you'll love car trek 5 coming in september to freddy's channel and again thank you to this month's sponsor avalon king avalon king ceramic coatings are something that i've been using for the last four years on my cars it's a great diy product that even an idiot like me can put on a car i have it on all my cars it makes them so easy to clean shinier than you could ever imagine and a whole lot easier to own and enjoy so visit them at the link in the description below as well they've given us a 25 discount with the vin wiki code so you can try it for less than 50 bucks on your car i know that you'll love it on yours i love it online so be sure to check them out and thank them for their support of vin wiki [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 280,856

Rating: 4.9201994 out of 5

Keywords: Ed Bolian, VINwiki, Car Trek, Ferrari, 599, Top Gear, V12, 2007, flood, title, rebuilt, inspection, cheap ferraris, branded title, iaai, copart, project, dmv, registration, exotic cars, supercars, road trip

Id: yJ-lLqxXHhI

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2021