VINwiki found another stolen Lambo!

will you bring the Lamborghini and just come pick me up around the corner at the Waffle House 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 feet 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've sold them five or six cars that they could use that we're 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 to and it did okay but like most exotic car rental companies they started to run into some issues some car crashes some accidents and 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 Toros done this and people who have done this type of thing have just driven the prices down 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 in the 612 in the Guyardo 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 owners policy won't cover it because it's a commercial activity and the renters 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 cancelled everything was going poorly and they were going through the steps with the owner of trying to figure out how they're gonna 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 had we just had somebody rent our Lamborghini Huracan 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 yeah we're not having any luck with the Audi with the Atlanta cops I don't know what we're gonna 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 glimps 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 men it's behind them but it was very hard for us to get to exactly the same point because they would just send me an update LeeAnn all new direction wherever the Lamborghini was going so he kind of Zig zagged 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 were marked as watching the satellite feed it looked like they were trying to figure out in the Lamborghini if somebody was following them because I wouldn't have some access road and some loops and cloverleaf surround the interchange there but then they went back north on 75 and so I was following them up 75 but 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 shops 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'd pulled into this warehouse I arrived and there's lights on on the fourth of July at 2:45 in the morning in this warehouse and it's a rap company it's got a there's an Aston Martin Rapide 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 gonna 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 explained 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 happening to the car right now 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 even 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 because 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 saying edge 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 gonna have a whole lot of outs here so I keep telling the cops they say alright 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 3:00 in the morning on the holiday just working like it's 2:00 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 - out of the car the whole front trunk liner is 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 you 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 out 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 a 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 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 3:00 in the morning on a holiday but he said he was gonna be back he was calling an uber or something like that they 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 is it well well yeah so I said it so I kind of took the phone from him I said hey I'm with the rental company we're gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna pay you for this job I'll make sure that you're made whole beyond that but just go ahead and let's try to put this thing back together and then I'm gonna end up taking it out of here I'm gonna park it in my warehouse and they can come and pick it up in the next few days so he gets it buttoned up in 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 my my uber just got canceled because my card got declined will you bring a Lamborghini and just come pick me up around the corner at the Waffle House yes yeah yeah you just order me around two hashbrowns 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 VIN Wiki 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 rule or 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] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 1,377,962

Rating: 4.8761997 out of 5

Keywords: 2016, Lamborghini, Huracan, LP580-2, LP580, LP610, LP610-4, Stolen, Auto, Theft, Grand Theft Auto, Ed Bolian, VINwiki, Car Stories, exotic car rental, risk, V10, car thieves, theft by conversion, rental, rent, Lambo, Steal, Recovery, search, hunt, holiday, atlanta, tennessee, georgia, nashville, supercar, entrepreneur, insurance, rental agreement, ferrari, business, strategy, partner, assistance, help, exotic car, top gear, rwd

Id: KYLTVqbrcJc

Length: 11min 27sec (687 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/SergeantBacon101]

gotta love VINwiki stories.

[u/invertedblue]

The more interesting story is why all these cars were being worked on in the middle of the night.

[u/Eeroheinonen]

I just need some more Rob Pitts stories!

[u/MID-SHIP]

What if VINwiki is hiring car jackers to rack up the views?

[u/pyros_are_op]

He's a great storyteller

[u/loko76]

That sounds like a really sketchy wrap shop as well

[u/Komcor]

/u/edbolian, how many years of stories do you have still?

[u/Information_Animated]

Why steal when you can buy ;)

[u/legiterati]

Get your stolen car wrapped while it's purged of tracking devices. Seems like a complimentary business model.