The most expensive daily driver EVER?!

part of that was I needed a new engine this would be the fourth engine this car would have [Music] had prior to coid um I commuted into Boston every day for work and doing that I took public transportation I took the bus every single day to work and as a car guy that's both a blessing and a curse so taking public transportation is awful but allows you to have a car that you really don't have to worry about commuting in so my daily driver at the time was uh 2015 GT3 which was a great car and a great daily driver they don't have to drive to work but once Co hit my wife and I decided to move away from the city and out to the suburbs and I wasn't going to be going into the office every day but she still felt that I should have maybe a a little lower key a little bit more reliable car to drive around the suburbs in so I reluctantly decided that you know I'll buy another car that I can drive around looked around a little bit everything I thought was kind of boring but then I finally decided on what my reliable low-key car would be it would be a yellow Range Rover and as you know Range Rovers are very reliable and very lowkey so I started looking around I wanted specifically a 1997 P38 Range Rover vitess they only made 250 of them half of them were red Monza red and the other half were AA yellow and the vitess was the top of the Range Rover they only made it for one year in 1997 and people consider that maybe the the best version of the P38 with the yellow interior and the yellow piping inside the car so I knew it was going to be hard to find so I went out looking for it and I found one for sale in Clearfield Pennsylvania right outside of uh Pittsburgh it was for sale for months I kept looking at it looking at it hoping that maybe it would disappear and I wouldn't end up buying it but it never did so I decided I'd make the trk out there and at least look at it and see if if it was in good condition this was the only one for sale I could find in the entire country the whole the time I was looking so I drove out there met the owner of the dealership uh who had been using it as kind of as daily car it looked like it was a little rough shape but took a look around it there's no check engine lights but there was a lot of Steelers stuff in the car there was Steeler stuff all in the back seat underneath the seats there was a Steelers sticker on the back so I kind of asked him like you know H you a huge Steelers fan what's up with this and he said no no he's like this car was owned by the Rooney family who owned the Steelers they had it before me this was their car they used it for tailgating this is all their stuff and I was like wow I'm like this a cool story I'm not going to pay extra for that but the least decent know that it was a car that had been in the area and so he's like oh come with me I'm going to show you the stack of receipts I have from the Rooney family they took very good care of this car so he brings out a binder full of receipts that are maybe like 3 in thick and I start flipping through it and I noticed a lot of receipts from the uh Land Rover dealer there and Land Rover dealer down Florida and a lot of them on the bottom they just said Put it on the black card that was just written on the bottom of all the receipts because p38s are not necessarily known for the reliability having this stack of receipts was I thought pretty good especially some of the big ticket items were replacing the engine not once but twice in their ownership of it so I thought Alisa's got a new engine there's no check engine lights fine the love of Range Rovers is a difficult thing to explain I'm not exactly sure what it is I do love them my wife has a newer one which has been slightly more reliable than mine but there's just something about them it's the ability to drive them anywhere and get there comfortably and like Jeep the ads are you can go anywhere but for like Range Rovers it's not just going anywhere it's getting there comfortably there has to be something special because so many people just empty their pocketbooks to keep these things on the road for for no other reasonable or rational explanation for that so he decided I'm going to start negotiating with a guy at the stealership he wanted a lot of money for it because it was to him a museum piece I think of you know Steelers history the Rooney owned it and to him that was worth a lot of money to me that was worth no money and we finally agreed on a I think much lower than he wanted amount after I convinced him that I was probably the only person coming through the door looking for a 20-year-old yellow Range Rover we agreed on the deal and he said well you have to take all the Steeler stuff with it you have to leave all the Steeler stickers on the car it's part of the car and I'm like no I won't I won't be doing that if I try to drive this car around Boston with Steeler stickers on it it's going to be destroyed much of his channy finally agreed that I could take the car and soon as I got home all the Steelers stuff came off and it was great I enjoyed driving the car around it was very reliable at first a very comfortable car and I was used to having older cars I had BMW e30s before I had some older Jeeps so I was like I'm used I'm ready for classic Range Rover ownership I thought I knew everything that was to know and I was ready for any particular issues that could pop up I was not quite ready for what was about to happen almost immediately I started to get a lot of oil leaks from the front of the car some of the suspension started making some weird noises the air suspension would only go up on one side or not at all and it would ride around on his bump stops which was not great so I made an appointment at a local Land Rover independent mechanics to take a look I was then greeted with a bill for about five digits worth of repair that it needed which was more than I paid for the car when I bought it about a month ago and then they had the car for 3 months to perform all the repairs so in that my first 6 months of ownership I only physically had possession of the car for about 3 months I only fixed about half of the things that they say were actually wrong with the car and I decided I could probably fix the rest of them myself part of that was I needed a new engine this would be the fourth engine this car would have had and thankfully our friend and his dad run twws Motors in Rainham and they are known for their Rover Motors so I asked them to build me an upgraded 5 L for it which is still in the process of being built to install in the car I've also completely refabbed the air suspension I wanted to keep it on air suspension for as much as humanly possible I know a lot of people rip that out cuz that is far away the cheaper more practical thing to do but it's part of the range Rover's DNA to have an air suspension so I wanted to keep it and at great time and aggravation I think I've worked out all the Kinks to the air suspension the next thing was the becm which is the controller for all the body equipment in the Range Rover started to freak out and fail the P38 was one of the first cars that had a central computer that controlled everything in the car and it consisted of this box that was mounted underneath of the passenger seat it has about 15 to 20 plugs plugged into it everything in the car runs through this box underneath the passenger seat which is not waterproof and is underneath the cup holder for the car so I took out the seat took this out and it had just coffee spilled all over it trying to find someone in the US to fix this was non-existent and Range Rover will not help you at all so I had to send the computer to Wales for them to fix it someone that's independent over there they send it back to me and completely changed the car it's much more reliable now except for the slight issue of the car only came with one key and it has an immobilizer that allows the be c m to talk to the engine's computer and if you don't have the key coded by Land Rover the engine will not turn on so if you ever lose that one key the car will be bricked and it will never run ever again and you cannot buy a spare key from Land Rover they don't make them anymore they won't sell you one they'll sell you like a regular key without the immobilizer in it I've had this car now I'm walking on eggshells with my one and only key hopefully I never lose it and it's getting more reliable every day as I've put more money into it I've now spent about triple what the original purchase price of the car is on maintenance and that's after the Rooney spent probably double to Triple what their purchase price of the brand new car was back in 97 maintaining it so this car has cost probably four or five times in its original purchase price in maintenance over the course of its life but it's still going strong and it'll be better than ever when I finish it adding up the receipts that I have for the car plus what I've put into it and assuming that there other receipts I probably don't have I estimate that it's probably cost over the last 25 years $1,000 a month to keep this car on the road and that's on top of over $100,000 of depreciation from the new purchase price of the car I am away collecting my next bad Automotive decision but in my absence I told the team from glossett that we needed to bring back the free gloss that was your favorite promotion a couple of years ago and so the next 500 of you can get a free bottle of their amazing award-winning detail spray all you have to do is pay the shipping and handling so check it out now at the link in the description below I love it I love their DIY ceramic coating but I use the detail sprays all the time you'll love it so check out the link now get you some gloss at goodness and thank them for their support of then Wiki

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 64,524

Keywords: vinwiki, car stories, automotive, car enthusiast, storytelling, car trek, ed bolian, vehicle history, carfax, car guy, automotive adventure, exotic cars, supercars, car story

Id: U7XtYWs8WSs

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 11 2023