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Month: July 2019

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2019 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S

The new 992 Porsche 911 is starting to trickle into dealers and this past weekend I went to check it out. The local dealer had exactly one, a 2020 911 C4S, that was a demo car until the actual dealer stock arrived in a few weeks and I have to say, I was impressed. It’s no mistake that it is a 911 and looking at it, you’d maybe confuse it with a 991.2. Well, maybe until you got around back. The single lightbar will take some getting used to and the odd little third brake light was clever, but I think a bit repetitive. When the rear wing moves up, it also carries a brake light. However, that doesn’t “count” for regulations standards as the 3rd brake light has to be on a stationary body part. (You’ll see what I mean in the photo after the jump.) The interior was wonderful outside of the little shift knob that people have been griping about since it was introduced and I can see why. It is downright dainty compared to the hunk of the knob in the 991 cars and I don’t even believe you can shift the PDK with it. The old school center analog tach is a cool feature and I’m glad they didn’t go all digital with the dash like most of the cars in the price range. So everything was going swimmingly until he told me the price.

CLICK FOR DETAILS: 2019 Porsche 911 C4S on eBay

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2003 Mercedes-Benz SL500

A few weeks ago I took a look at probably the best R230 Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG I’ve ever come across. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who felt that way before it sold shortly after we featured it. That of course had me digging in the R230 rabbit hole and it looks like I hit gold today. This 2003 up for sale Oregon is a pretty standard example. First model year, has a couple dings and scars, 133,000 miles, but overall what’d you expect. It isn’t a flood car or two SLs welded together. Just a used 2003 SL500. Then I saw the price and wondered how insane an idea it would be drive a 16 year-old Mercedes convertible across the country. It’s that cheap.

CLICK FOR DETAILS: 2003 Mercedes-Benz SL500 on eBay

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Regan-Man: 1979 BMW “645 CSi Turbo”

Update 7/08/19 – After raising and lowering the price several times, this very unique “645i Turbo” is back on the market in 2019 for $19,900 today.

I really love how these cars sometimes send you down the rabbit hole. What attracted me initially to this E24 was that it was a European-spec car and it had a pretty high asking price at nearly $23,000. Alone that wouldn’t be enough to warrant a post, especially given that from the first photo I glanced at, it doesn’t look spectacular.

But there’s a lot more than meets the eye when considering this car, and it has a lot more to do with the personality behind it than the current condition.

The name Albert Mardikian probably doesn’t mean much to you. Mr. Mardikian is a partner and the Chief Technology Officer behind ReGreen Organics, a company which deals with a lot of shit, for lack of a better term. I’m not being flippant. They’re an organic solid waste management company.

And it is in this capacity that Mr. Mardikian’s philosophy is particularly interesting when considering this car. He proclaims that he has a “passion for bettering our world”, yet his past would seem to have little to do with environmental improvement. That’s because in a past life Mr. Mardikian was also the proprietor of Trend Imports. Ring a bell? If not, perhaps a perusing of the Tom Cruise movie Rain Man would help you out. Mr. Cruise’s character’s subplot – an importer of exotic cars held up by the EPA – is based upon Mr. Mardikian. Because if you were in L.A. in the early 1980s and you wanted a gray market car, Trend Imports was where you went. And just like the main character in the movie, Mardikian got in quite a bit of trouble for the Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Rolls Royce and other models he imported by skirting EPA emissions laws.

Though his troubles with emissions laws dated back to 1981, Mardikian continued to be the turn-to source for ultra-exotics in the early days of importation. He also built custom convertible versions of some of the most famous 80s icons – Mercedes-Benz 500SECs, Lamborghini Countachs, Ferrari 512BBis, Porsche 930s. How about those replica Daytonas for Miami Vice? Mardikian. And he made more more neat creation – he married the turbocharged M102/6 from the European version of the BMW E23 745i with the slinky shape of the E24, creating his own “745CSi Turbo”:

CLICK FOR DETAILS: 1979 BMW 645CSi Turbo on eBay

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2010 Porsche Cayenne S Transsyberia

In one of the more bizarre models in Porsche history, we have the Cayenne S Transsyberia. What the heck is it? The Transsyberia Rally was known as a “raid rally” that ran from 2007-2009 that started in Moscow and ended in Mongolia. No big deal, right? Well considering you had to drive through Ural and Altai mountains, the Mongolian plains, the Gobi Desert, and whatever else Siberia could offer up it wasn’t so easy. The route was roughly 4,500 miles long and needless to say not every vehicle that started ended up finishing. Some stages we so dangerous they would just end up getting cancelled all together. Porsche offered assistance with a handful of Cayennes – 25 of 34 registered teams drove them to be exact – all being slightly modified production vehicles. After realizing that this marketing event really didn’t appeal to anyone, Porsche pulled the plug on factory support.

However, someone sitting in a cubical in Stuttgart came up with the brilliant idea to slap a few stickers and extra paint on some Cayennes and call it the “Transsyberia Edition”. Thankfully it wasn’t just some cosmetics, it did feature the 410 horsepower engine from the GTS and some extra skid plates for all the gravel parking lots at the soccer fields. Porsche made 600 of these in total, with 102 coming to North America. Four colors were offered, black with orange accents, silver with orange accents, black with grey highlights, and grey with silver highlights. Today’s example up for sale in Alabama of all places, is the least offensive of the colors offered: grey with silver highlights.

CLICK FOR DETAILS: 2010 Porsche Cayenne S Transsyberia on eBay

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1998 Volkswagen GTI VR6

‘It’s like déjà vu all over again!’

Only a week after looking at another example of my favorite GTI – the Montana Green 2.0 16V – we get another of my personal greatest GTI hits. Again, it’s one that’s pretty hard to come across at all, never mind in good shape. In this case it’s Ginster Yellow last-year Mk.3, and yet again after claiming it’s hard to find one, one popped up pretty recently:

1998 Volkswagen GTI VR6

Since I just covered what made the Mk.3 tick, I won’t do so again, but let’s dive a bit into this example. The last one, as it turned out, may have had some issues which prevented it from really being a top-tier example. Is it the same with this pristine and lightly modded one?

CLICK FOR DETAILS: 1998 Volkswagen GTI VR6 on eBay

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