I suck at selling cars

I assume many other car people have owned those two types of cars that I have; the ones that were boring or otherwise generic, and the ones that had something interesting about them. It could just be a life-changing story that happened with the car, or it could be a 10-year build with all your money and spare-time put into it. Or it could be that the car was simply interesting straight from the factory.

I’ve actually owned only two of these generic cars; first one was a Mk4 Golf 1.4 that was an utter pile of crap. I tried bonding with it on a human level by 3-step polishing its sun-ripened red paint and giving it a good service, but it responded to me with a multitude of mechanical problems and pissed its coolant on the garage floor. I decided to sell it quite quickly and ended up never quite getting to know the car or bonding with it in any way.

The other one was a pretty generic e39 530d Touring which was a completely different story. It had relatively good equipment, but nothing special to make it distinctively “mine” or special in any other way. It gave me some wrenching to do, but didn’t bankrupt me and rewarded my efforts with a total of 90 thousand kilometers of “Sheer Driving Pleasure” – as BMW puts it… I drove it fast, I hauled tons of stuff in it, I made summer road trips as well as winter trips to Lapland where I would see the outside temp gauge drop to -37.5 centigrade! But even though the diesel was more like peanut butter at those temperatures, the e39 soldiered on. I turned the traction control off and Ken Blocke’d my way around wintery Jyväskylä with it… All in all, this generic car gave me a lot in return for a 5000€ investment and a couple of late nights wrenching.

So as you can probably imagine from the length differences of those two earlier paragraphs, the other one was harder for me to sell than the other one. Both of them I sold quite cheap so they didn’t hang around the pages of nettiauto.com (the Finnish autotrader, I guess) for too long. But there was a significant difference: it didn’t matter to me who’d buy the Golf or where it would end up. I’ve dealt with the problems that it gave me fair and square. Now it was someone else’s turn to either enjoy the fruit of my labor or go through the rest of the red pile of turd. But the BMW... I didn’t want it to end up lowered on cut coil springs or plasti-dipped in bright green. First of all, it was in way too nice of an example to have a date with angle grinder and a rattle can. And second; I cared for it. I know, I’m a dumb f*ck.

Long story short the 530 went to a good home. A young couple who actually needed a big estate (unlike me) bought it, and now its hauling their first-born child and a huge dog. But if I had a tough time saying good bye to a generic 5-series estate, you can only imagine what I went through last week when I sold my first track-day car that I’ve actually put some thought, sweat and tears in to.

Yep, it’s the 206 RC that’s featured on our YouTube channel. I created a listing on nettiauto, and within two days I had two potential buyers for it. The other one wasn’t local, so I spent hours on the phone describing every little thing that I’ve done with the car. He had had an RC himself, so he knew what he was getting in to. He was very interested but said he wouldn’t pay what I asked for the car but approximately 10% less. The other potential buyer was a local who didn’t know anything about 206 RC or hot hatches in general, so I told the other guy that I’ll let this local dude test drive the car first and get back to him later the same week.

                          And I did. After a test-drive with a top speed of 95km/h and a maximum of 4000rpm, my mind was made. I didn’t care if the local guy offered me 1000€’s more; he wasn’t getting the car from me. I didn't like the image in my head of my precious 206 going under the speed limit being upshifted 3k before the redline! The dumb f*ck that I am, I called the other guy and told him exactly that. “Please come and pick up the car as soon as possible, so I know it’ll be going to a good home!” So we agreed on the price, which was about 400-1000€ less than I would’ve maybe gotten had I gambled on it for a while and refused his offer. But for me it wasn’t about the price; it was about the car being used to its intended purpose and the owner appreciating it for what it is.

I admire people like Savagegeese (YouTube channel, obviously), who are in to cars simply because of the driving experience and don’t form any kind of relationship or feelings towards it. I’m not like that. Whenever I try to be emotionless and cold towards a car, I start thinking about all of the things it has given me; the road trips, the track days, the lessons in heel-and-toe or lift-off oversteer… The moments of almost sinking in to a full darkness of despair laying under it on the garage floor with only one thought keeping me going; “when it is finished, it’ll be awesome to drive!”

When the car left my driveway, I started gathering some videoclips and old photos of the car and made a short tribute film for the years it spent with me and posted it on my personal social media. I’ve listened to a lot of old prog-rock lately, and thought that putting one of my favorites, “Sylvia” by the Dutch band Focus, as a background music was a brilliant idea. It would perfectly capture the spirit of simple fun I had driving it. But later the same week something strange happened: I was coming home to Jyväskylä from a car show in Helsinki by bus and was listening to an album from Focus on my headphones and what do you know; “Sylvia” started playing. All of a sudden I started feeling really emotional and had to really concentrate on not looking like I was about to burst into tears in a fully packed two-decker. I had ruined a perfectly good song for myself.

I'm not good at selling cars. I know, I’m a dumb f*ck.

-Joona