How Not To Sell a Car…

Since I was a kid I dreamed of owning a classic car. I remember the very first classic I went to see with enough money saved to actually buy one: a 1966 Dodge Monaco. A boat of a car, the Monaco could easily sneak a whole group of friends into a drive-in movie, hidden in the trunk. The interior of the car? It was massive. The front bench seat was like a couch and the back bench seat even bigger. Talk about a gas guzzler – I bet a Monaco would struggle to get more than 16MPG with a tailwind downhill. And it had air conditioning…

Upon a first inspection, the car’s body seemed to be in decent shape – not perfect by any stretch, but certainly not horrible. The seller claimed that the car was a barn find and hadn’t been driven in many years, aside from him taking it for a test drive through a local field. That’s where the trouble started. He was running the car from a portable gas can, the kind you’d buy at your local filling station, not the actual fuel tank. This was out of a (justified) fear of sucking something from the tank into the carbs. He kept telling me how easy it would be to put a new tank in. As I walked around the car looking around, he seemed to have an answer for everything and it everything that needed fixed would be easy. Those rotted out back fenders? Oh, no problem. Replacing the gas tank? Easy as cake! And that huge AC box under the dash that didn’t work? No problem to remove if I didn’t want it there. If the seller hadn’t bothered to try getting clean fuel out of the tank, I had no doubt that he didn’t check the brake lines, ball joints, and other possibly worn parts, too. But, I’m sure all of that would be an “easy fix,” too.

Though I had enough money in my account to scratch the seller a check, it would’ve left me high and dry – I wouldn’t have even had enough left to buy a new fuel tank. Drat. So I asked if the price was firm? He was not going to budge one bit, saying that with the “easy” stuff fixed, the car would be worth far more than he was asking. At this point, that was fine with me. His calling every repair “easy” and his constant pestering and encouraging me to buy the car already had my guard up. Not to mention, if doing all of these supposedly easy repairs would drive the value of the car way up, why wouldn’t he just do them himself?

I then asked him about the transmission, a 3-speed automatic. I asked if it shifted through all three gears? “Like a song,” he told me. That was my final straw. How on earth would he know that the car shifted into third gear running it through a field? Either he was being dishonest about having had the car in third gear or he had driven it through a field at speeds over 25mph. I didn’t want a car that had been treated like that! I thanked him politely and that was that. He reminded me what a great deal the car was and how I should buy it now because it might be gone tomorrow. I had a feeling, given the way he was selling, that it wouldn’t be. He messaged me a month later asking if I was still interested. No man, no.