cars

Sold the Porsches, Got a Maybach.

September 19, 2026

I always thought I was a sports car guy. Dad managed Goodyear dealers while I was growing up, so I was always around cars and IndyCar racing. I loved the beauty, noise, and power of sports cars. As an adult, I just kinda assumed that was always what I was into – and who knows, maybe it always was, but I changed over time. This summer, a perfect storm of little coincidences all hit at once, and as they kept coming and coming, they made me stop and question whether I was actually really still a sports car guy or…

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More Thoughts on Owning a Rolls-Royce

July 30, 2025

cars, Rolls-Royce

I’ve been dailying my new-to-me 2017 Rolls-Royce Dawn for a couple months now, and I’ve noticed it really changed the way I feel about cars. People are overly friendly to me. They wave, take pictures, and constantly compliment both the car and me in a way that doesn’t happen with any other car I’ve driven. The compliments have a common theme: “You look happy, and I’m happy for you.” It’s happened so often that I can’t deny the commonality – especially contrasted with my other cars, where the comments are appreciative of cars, the styling, or their cost, but I never…

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Bought a Rolls-Royce Dawn.

May 6, 2025

cars, Rolls-Royce

I decided to do a little shuffling in the car collection. I sold a few cars, basically consolidating 3 cars into 1: I sold my Porsche Speedster replica because I’d had some great adventures with it for 3 years and I wasn’t driving it as much anymore. Yves’ hair is really long now, and she doesn’t like going out in a convertible that doesn’t have side windows or a wind deflector. We tended to use the 911 Targa instead. For short solo errands in a convertible, I have my Honda Beat, which I adore. I sold my Cadillac Brougham because…

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Starting a Car Project: The Porsche 986 Bergspyder

March 3, 2025

bergspyder, cars

In 1968, Porsche wanted to win hill climb races, so it built a one-off experimental car called the 909 Bergspyder, which translates to mountain spider. I was absolutely smitten with it when I saw it in the Porsche museum in Stuttgart back in 2018: The 909 Bergspyder was one of the lightest Porsche race cars ever produced, weighing in at just 847 pounds (384kg). For comparison, a tiny Smart Fortwo weighs about twice as much! The Bergspyder could do 0-60mph in 2.4 seconds – a feat most cars still can’t pull off today, even electric ones. Here’s a modern Porsche…

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I Bought a 1991 Honda Beat.

January 22, 2025

cars, honda beat, wraps

Kei cars are the smallest cars allowed on expressways in Japan. They’re physically tiny: less than 11.2 feet long, with engines under 660cc (40 cubic inches). Most motorcycles in the US have bigger engines than that! Popular kei car designs include the retro Nissan Figaro, gullwing door Autozam AZ-1, and adorable workhorse Daihatsu Hijet trucks and vans. Kei cars were never sold in the US, but now that they’re over 25 years old, they’re eligible for import. Even better, they’re dirt cheap in Japan because the government has tapered off the kei car tax benefits. You can buy imported kei…

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Wrapped the 911 Targa with Hello Kitty and Kuromi

January 16, 2025

cars, porsche, wraps

Behold! My Sanrio wrapped Porsche 911: And the other side: It’s split down the middle so that both sides transition to different colors front to back: So, how does something like this happen? We’ve had great results with Purple Flare Wraps doing our Speedster replica in metallic pink, Defender in black camo, and the base Gulf blue wrap for our Graffiti Gulf 356. I sent them my goal for the 911: I wanted to give the car a split personality. I wanted one side red, the other side black, with geometric shapes breaking it up like shattering glass. On the…

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I Custom Ordered a New Porsche 911 Targa.

September 4, 2024

cars

Since I was a teenager, I’ve loved the Porsche 911 Targa. It’s an iconic design: I had posters of this thing on my wall all throughout high school and college. The right color was always Guards Red with a black roll bar and black wheels. That right there, so 1980s. 5 years ago, I fulfilled that childhood dream when I bought a new 2019 Targa off the showroom floor. Porsche of Downtown LA had done a really cool job speccing that car: chalk paint and all black accents. A couple years later during the COVID car price boom, nearly-new cars…

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Graffiti Paint Job on My 356

May 23, 2024

cars, porsche

Last night, Doctor Ziso painted my 1964 Porsche 356 SC: To the purists screaming at their screen, relax, there’s precedence for this: Janis Joplin custom painted her SC too. Anyhoo, lemme explain how we got to this point. About a year ago, I bought this 1964 Porsche 356 SC from a man in the San Francisco area. His wife had owned it since the 1970s, daily drove it just like any other car, and put about 145K miles on it. In the 1990s, she bought a convertible, parked this SC in the garage, and … never drove it again. It…

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Big American land yacht. Super comfy, great for cruising to dinner or weekend road trips to LA.

Bought a 1992 Cadillac Brougham.

April 13, 2024

cadillac, cars

Last year, I bought a 1983 Caddy, and I loved it. Unfortunately, that model year had one of the worst engines ever made, the infamous HT4100. Many of them are okay – but some of them are not, like mine. After a couple months of ownership, we figured out that it couldn’t handle the heat of stop-and-go Las Vegas Strip traffic in the summer. I looked into replacing the engine with a stronger one, but it’d easily exceed $20K, which isn’t sensible. I sold that car, but I had a Caddy-shaped hole in my heart. A very big hole. I…

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Sold the Ferrari 328 and VW Type 3.

March 4, 2024

cars

I bought the 1971 VW Type 3 Squareback off Facebook Marketplace. I wanted a Porsche-ish car that I could take to cars & coffee events during the winter, while the Speedster replica was in the dining room. The VW had been abandoned in Vegas about 20 years ago with a bum engine, and the buyer put in a Porsche 914 engine and transmission. The VW was offered for sale in LA, so I flew over to take a look, and I was sold as soon as I saw the paint job. It’s so much better than it looks in pictures.…

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cars

Hi. I’m Brent.