Anyone who’s watched the BBC series Top Gear will know some of that show’s best segments centered around hosts Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond buying cheap, interesting cars and setting out on road trips, often spiced up with challenges or activities that pushed the cars to the limits and their drivers to the brink of insanity.
A lot of those segments’ appeal lay in the fact that the cars were truly affordable, meaning theoretically, anyone could gather a few of their friends and set up a similar adventure, if they were so inclined. More than once, my friends and I have daydreamed about buying a few junkers and setting out on a Top Gear-style cross-country road trip, but for one reason or another, we’ve never actually done it.
Whether our schedules didn’t match up, our finances couldn’t support it, or we couldn’t decide on a theme, I could list endless excuses. But, there’s at least one group of friends out there that’s actually making it happen. The gaggle of 10 gearheads, located in the Midwest, recently assembled together in Detroit to set out on a nine-day journey to Las Vegas in five different used luxury sedans, with a price cap of $1,500 per two-person team.
I spoke to the group last week, as they arrived in Colorado ahead of their final leg to Vegas. While things haven’t gone perfectly, and one car was left behind along the way, it seems like they had the time of their lives. We should all be so lucky.
It Starts With An Idea
According to Dariush, the group’s quasi-ring leader and the person who came up with the idea as a way to celebrate his 30th birthday, he told me it popped into his brain last year while watching—you guessed it—Top Gear reruns.
“I had the flu, and I was starting to recover while building a bed frame,” he told me. “I had a bunch of Top Gear specials playing in the background. And [my friends and I] had always talked about trying to do like [that]. I had the idea of doing a Top Gear-esque special where we all bought $1,500 luxury cars from the ’90s, which kind of resembled my first car, a 2000 Lincoln LS. We wanted to be able to luxury-cruise across the country in cars that were kind of equivalent to struggling high schoolers’ first cars—reliving our youth.”
So he came up with a plan and started recruiting his friends. The group, called the Tour De Sale Trente, would travel from Detroit to Vegas but make a couple of notable car-themed stops along the way, including Pikes Peak and the Bonneville Salt Flats. All that was left to do was assemble the cars. Dariush told me he came up with the price limit essentially on vibes.
“$500 cars were just not realistic,” he told me. We kind of came to $1,500 as the good ratio [between] super sketchy and somewhat reliable. I’d say it was also a fluid $1,500. You know, you could spend more, you could spend less. [We] made a point system so you get penalized if you spend more money, but we all came in under $1,500.”
Ah, yes, the points system. What’s a budget road trip without a little competition? In true Top Gear fashion, the group decided to make a game out of all of this. They kept track of initial purchase price, maintenance spending, but also silly things like pieces of debris hit on the road, fastest top speed, drag race finishing position (more on that later), and ultimate sale price in Vegas (more on that later, too), to determine the winner. The one with the lowest points—the group used a Golfing-style metric to calculate scores—would get their flight home paid for.
Meet The Contestants
The group told me it started with five cars (some not so subtle foreshadowing here), each with two drivers, for a total of 10 competitors. Depending on how far you’re willing to stretch the definition of the term “luxury cruiser,” you might be unsurprised or confused by how each team picked its vehicle.
One thing is for sure, at least: There is not one boring car in this group, and each has an amazing story behind it.
Dariush & Garrett And Their 1995 Lexus LS400
The first car in the group—and possibly the most sensible—is a first-generation Lexus LS400, widely considered to be one of the most reliable vehicles ever made. Dariush & Garrett bought one for $1,000, and it ended up needing so many replacement parts that they bought an entire other LS400 to use as a parts car.
“It needed an exhaust, headlights, a front bumper, a fender, a steering wheel—all very expensive,” they told me. “We shopped around online to see what it would cost to repair the car, and that cost ended up becoming a second LS400. We bought a parts car that had caught on fire to replace all the broken bits that we [needed].”
From most angles, you’d never know this car was two LS400s Frankensteined together. Aside from the fading paint on the hood and some discolored center caps on the wheels, I’d even go as far as to say it looks pretty clean. The chrome multi-spokes shine brightly, and the car is all one color.
As a luxury road-tripper, you could do a whole lot worse. The LS400 was a revolutionary vehicle back in the ’90s, offering more comfort and quality than the Germans for a fraction of the price. And because the 1UZ V8 under the hood is so reliable, you still see lots of them on the road today, even 30 years later. This one is no exception.
Noah & Aaron And Their 2000 Jaguar XK8
I’m not sure a Jaguar convertible qualifies as a luxury cruiser, but somehow, it seems to fit just perfectly in this group of misfit Marketplace finds. As Noah and Aaron recalled to me over the phone, they paid $1,400 for the car, and didn’t even need to do much maintenance to get it mechanically ready for the trip.
“[We] put $55 worth of maintenance parts into the car prior to leaving,” they told me.
Of course, any $1,400 Jaguar is far from a perfect car. But the duo made it work.
“It didn’t need much. I mean, it needed a lot, but it didn’t need much,” they told me. ”The interior was pretty bad, dirty as could be. It was a smoker’s car. I think the guy who had owned it last decided he wanted to try his hand at reupholstery and got five or six interior panels stripped of their leather coating and only one panel reupholstered, and he did a bad job at that. So we just threw all the cardboard panels back in the car. And we ran it, and it’s been rattling.
“It’s not been the smoothest of vehicles, but it does have a working convertible top, and that was really important to us. I think we’ve been pretty good. We’ve spent probably more than half the time driving with the top down so far.”
It wasn’t very smooth because, as Noah and Aaron say, the rubber bushings that sit between the frame and the struts had long since disintegrated, leading to a severely clunky ride.
“I took [the struts] apart, and those [rubber pieces] were mostly gone,” they told me. “After 30 years, just completely deteriorated. So I went to buy new ones, and they were $90 apiece, and immediately, that was going to blow the budget, so we couldn’t afford that. So I went down to the hardware store, grabbed some bathroom caulk and aluminum welding wire, and made a bird cage inside the area and pumped it full of caulk. I let it cure for three months, but it turned out that three months really wasn’t enough time because it cures with moisture, not time. And it’s been slowly extruding out of the strut tops over this drive and getting clunkier and clunkier.”
I give them an ‘A’ for effort.
Adam & Gabe And Their 1993 Cadillac Fleetwood Limousine
Certainly the most comedic vehicle in the group, this Fleetwood needed far more than an oil change and some suspension work to get ready for this trip. Bought for $1,000 from a mom in Erie, Pennsylvania, who used it as a minivan to shuttle her kids around, it came to Adam & Gabe with a misfire. Sadly, despite the car only having 69,000 miles, it turned out to be far worse than a bad injector or spark plug.
“We took it back to Michigan, and we scoped it and found that the misfire was due to a big hole in one of the pistons,” they told me.
Not great! Even worse, the duo attempted to replace just the one bad piston at first, but that didn’t work.
“We were just going to swap out the piston that exploded, so that’s what we did,” they told me. “I spent a whole weekend without pulling the motor, replacing this one piston. In hindsight, it was far more difficult than actually replacing the motor, which we eventually had to do [anyway.] We did all this work. We spent hundreds of man-hours [to] replace this one piston. And it didn’t work.”
The car still misfired, so instead, the duo bought a used engine off of Facebook Marketplace and swapped it in. After that, some brake pads, and a set of “newish” tires, the car ran down the road just fine. It even has a working refrigerator in the back.
Austin & Leif And Their 2000 Lincoln Continental
Taking the crown for most likely to blend into a Florida retirement community category is this beige Lincoln Continental. Like the Cadillac, it had a misfire and a few other small problems when it first arrived, but none turned out to be catastrophic. A battery replacement solved most of the electrical problems, but rust remained an issue.
“A couple of days in, we noticed the smell of gas,” they told me. And when I went on vacation, half of the tank had leaked out. We weren’t sure if it was a fuel pump issue or if there was a hole in the tank, and it is very rusty.”
As it turns out, the tank had a sizeable hole in it, which would’ve been a problem for long road-tripping stints and for general safety. Sadly, replacing the tank was pretty much off the table because the car was so rusty.
“We cleaned it up and put it in a patch panel and a whole bunch of JB Weld,” they added. “We wanted to replace the gas tank, but the straps and the bolts were completely rusted. We knew there was no hope of that.”
The two competitors wanted to ensure the car was ready for the trip, so they installed a set of snow tires last year and daily drove it through the winter, putting over 1,200 miles on the clock. Sadly, that wasn’t enough to ensure victory (more on that soon).
Alex & Sam And Their 1999 BMW 740iL
The stately blue sedan was, according to Alex and Sam, the last car of the group to be purchased. And from the sounds of it, it also happened to be the best buy, as it really didn’t need much to hit the road.
“Really, the only things that it needed were the bolts that connect the headers to the rest of the exhaust—those bolts that rusted out years ago,” they told me.
“So we drilled those out and replaced them,” they added. “We put new tires on it and fixed some cosmetic things on the inside. [We] did ball joints because they were there. It’s been pretty much a dream. Very floppy and hard to control in the wind, but it is, in fact, the Ultimate Driving Machine.”
Why can’t all $1,500 cars be like this? The world would be a better place.
How It’s Been Going
As I mentioned earlier, I spoke to this group last week, when it arrived in Colorado and had completed most (but not all) of the trip. By then, they’d had an eventful few days filled with drama—some good, and some bad.
Let’s get the bad out of the way first. On the tour’s second stop, the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, the group was planning to travel to an airport to link up with a girlfriend of one of the group’s friends, Gary, who had hitched a ride along in one of the cars. Getting to that airport meant climbing a small incline—a piece of road that would end up becoming the Continental’s grave.
“About 25 miles before the catastrophic failure, Austin was driving, and we noticed that [the transmission] popped out of gear and then popped back in gear, but seemed to be going okay,” Leif told me. “[So] we drove another 25 miles, and we got to this steep hill leading up to this airport parking lot. We’re repping to 4,000 rpm, and we had no power. Somehow, we had enough traction to get up the hill, but we knew we were in trouble at that point.”
Leif suspects that at some point, the dipstick for the transmission popped off, leading the transmission to slowly leak out fluid until the torque converter seal gave out.
“We thought about whether there was a way we could yank [the transmission] off, but it’s a transverse layout, and none of us wanted to have to deal with it for how shitty that car was.”
Instead, Leif and Austin decided to call it and reached out to a scrapyard, which agreed to pick up the vehicle sight unseen and pay the duo $200.
“[We] just sent him pictures of the car, sent him pictures of the [catalytic converters], because I think that’s really what he wanted. We signed the title over, left it in the car, left the keys, and he sent us $200 via Venmo, and that was it. I never saw it again.”
While things didn’t exactly work out for Leif and Austion, the rest of the group’s cars were doing well when I talked to them last week. They had just climbed Pikes Peak, albeit some slower than others.
“The Cadillac was crawling towards the top at full, full tilt at 13 miles per hour or so,” the group told me. “We don’t know if it’s factually correct, but it’s possibly the worst power-to-weight ratio [vehicle] to have ever climbed Pikes Peak. It did not make the posted speed limit, but it did make it.”
After our talk, the group headed northwest through Wyoming and into Utah, where they took all four cars on the Bonneville Salt Flats for a little high-speed, straight-line fun. The four remaining cars even did a drag race, where the BMW and its mighty 4.4-liter, 282-horsepower V8 was enough to propel it to victory.
The Final Results
The plan from the beginning, according to Dariush, was to sell the cars once they arrived in Vegas. Some teams even listed their cars on Facebook Marketplace ahead of time in the hopes of making a quick deal upon their arrival. Obviously, that didn’t happen for the Continental, which ended up in last place, as it sold for the lowest amount.
The rest of the teams made out a bit better. The Lexus was sold for $925, while the Jaguar team managed to score $1,024 for its car. After the trip concluded, the BMW team went on to drive the car to Los Angeles to visit the famous Portofino Inn, where many a cross-country cannonballer has concluded their cross-country trips in the past. It was then sold for $500.
By far and away the biggest profit-driver of the squad was the Cadillac. Adam and Gabe managed to sell their extended-wheelbase land yacht for a staggering $3,000, which is an insane amount of money or next to nothing, depending on how valuable you think all that work swapping a piston and then an engine was. I’m not exactly surprised—the market for limos in Vegas is probably pretty strong, so I could see this car being a solid rental for tourists, or similar.
Either way, the trip looked like a blast. This is the type of fun that enthusiasts dream of—getting your buddies together and going on an adventure, just for the hell of it. Sure, not everything worked out as planned, and only one team probably made a profit after all of this, but still, I’m sure it was all worth the effort and time spent fixing these cars up. These folks will have memories to last a lifetime, and their story will, hopefully, inspire others to go on similar quests. I’m already drafting up a group text to all my friends to see what they’re doing in the fall.
Top graphic image: Tour De Sale Trente
The post This Group Of Friends Just Proved That Anyone Can Do Their Own Top Gear-Inspired Cheap Car Challenge Road Trip appeared first on The Autopian.
