Our country's used-car market is unreal. New cars of pretty much every segment can be optioned over $20k, and midsize sedans can be specced well into the high 30s even with modest spec (I'm looking at you, VW passat), but for a little over $20k, you can get your hands on a machine that only a few years earlier was a rich person's pride-and-joy, the toy they rewarded themselves with for managing financial stability and reaching middle age even though they knew it was a poor investment.

For less than $20k, you can still get great machines, but they won't be the ones that caused you in your middle-school or high-school stupor to sprint across the mall parking lot to catch a glimpse. It's puzzling, this unheard-of value, because we all know that with a modest amount of investment, these cars can essentially be returned to practically-new status, and the miles can just keep on turning, and yet, even if it means paying for a car twice over, almost nobody ends up spending as much as the car has already lost in depreciation. This expectation of analogizing "used car" as though it meant "spent condom" is a remnant of the effect of current middle-aged-people's buying power in our car market. In our lifetimes, (I heard this next part from my neighbor last week, so its of dubious quality) 70% of the corollas sold, ever, are still on the road somewhere. Warranties regularly promise 100k miles of troublefree driving, and those don't pay off unless the car can be fairly certain to hold up its end of the deal.


[EDIT: my next post should fit here... I tried to add it but went over 10k characters...]


The first car that I can think of that fits the mold for being a "great donor" for kits is the VW type 1 beetle. There was (and is) a whole garage-industry of people tearing those apart and making dune buggies and sandrails and vans (brubaker box) and porsche replicas, and you could half-ass-argue that Porsche started out as a kit car company, in that Ferry Porsche tore up type 1 beetles to make 356s.

But later, there was a less-innovative period where the hot car to start with was the Pontiac Fiero, a car whose only virtues were being cheap, mid-engined, and kinda good looking in a "aww, cute" way at the time. Obviously it hasn't stood the test of time very well.

So what made these two vehicles in particular such targets for customization and scavenging? Obviously something different is going on here from ordinary levels of modification, because you never really see someone attempt to make a civic look like a lamborghini. There must be a list of characteristics that allow prediction of what makes an excellent donor.

There may be some revealing truths in what happened when the fiero disappeared... what were ferrari-replicas based upon then and now? MR2s. Facially, this makes sense, since the mr2 and fiero were once "competitors" in the same way that the miata and the recently-departed solstice were considered competitors, but the mr2 was available at the same time as the fiero. The fiero's first year was 1984, and the mr2 came out a year later in 1985. However, the kits all adhered to tearing apart the fieros and rather not the mr2s until the fiero disappeared. So in the presence of two concurrently similar cars, why the fiero and not the mr2?

I think that the answer lies in a public understanding of a car has some truly remarkable and admirable characteristic, but for one reason or another, is so obviously flawed in another way that the car ceases to be a compelling overall choice once its novelty wears off. So in the context of a "low-price-mid-eighties mid-engined sports car" market, the fiero was the weak choice, essentially allowing the mr2 to be thought of as "best among its competitors," even where it has a single competitor. In that scenario, the lack of also-rans essentially fling "fiero" into "obviously worst in its category" and make it something of a pariah to those who considered buying a car in its category.

It becomes the butt of jokes, a car whose mid-engine configuration labels its owner as impressionably aspirational to the extent of ignoring the fact that the motors available are either embarassingly small and buzzy or that it isn't really a sports car if the available v6 is only available with an automatic. If you were attracted to the concept of a cheap mid-engined car, but live to see your abstention from that segment or to chose specifically not to buy a fiero, you could only have satisfaction at your good fortune not to have purchased one.

The Fiero then, despite being cute, cheap, fun (so I've heard), manages to become an 'inferior good' even against its peers. Depreciation accelerates, and suddenly someone who is plotting to build a sports car kit realizes: "hey, that little shitbox fiero already has a big space in the back for a transverse GM motor and axles, I bet I could fit a chevy 350 in there or a cadillac northstar and have a running machine with wayyyyy less real engineering to figure out if I wanted to make a Ferrari 348/testarossa/f40/f355/.... replica. Sure it won't really look like a fiero anymore, but I'll get to take advantage of some of the great parts of that car that are going unappreciated, and maybe it'll look sexier when it looks more like a ferrari, although it probably won't be able to be confused with one....unless I cut'n'weld-in a longer wheelbase...."

So let's go over that list of attributes inherent in my hypothetical mindset of how someone selects a donor:

1. fails against a competitor or similar car to make itself the butt of a joke or somehow attributes itself as "less" than a more visible car of which there are only a few of that type

2. cheap, and then, because of the "shame" value, becomes cheaper-than-the-typical-price-for-what-virtues-it-has.

3. the build of the car or the parts are somehow particularly amenable to modification for a relatively high purpose to someone with modest resources

4. Someone either has a reason to be illogically drawn to this car that nobody would care if you start cutting up OR someone has a wild-ass fantasy project for which the car plays a surprisingly good starting point when the fantasy starts becoming organized and develops into a series of "what's the easiest way to...."'s.

(I'm particularly interested in this fourth point because this is why I think most kit cars can't really work as value-added machines. Technically you'll end up putting in a lot of man-hours of assembly work for any project car, but in the case of a kit car, it's definitely a losing proposition unless you're building a pretty accurate replica of a collectible. It seems safe to assume that most of the price paid for the kit will evaporate while the supplied parts will retain their depreciated value. i.e.- a factory five roadster will end up costing 2nd hand what the previous owner put into the driveline (and paint), not the parts unique to the "kit", because there's nothing saleable about "work I managed in my garage" where an ordinary car can claim millions of man-hours of development work. )

5. extending from 4, a project can't become a kit unless the wacky idea manages to appeal to the public once its been completed. I.e. There has to be a final outcome which has a far broader appeal than the unmodified car, which by itself was considered an "inferior product" by the same people.

6. The process of modification must be relatively simple for the money

7. The final outcome has to be a significant cost savings over the non-kit equivalent

8. In spite of the donor being so deficient as to repulse at least a wide segment of its own target market, the degree of modification must be only a modest level of time and investment, because (brace yourself for one hell of a mixed metaphor) nobody wants to polish a turd, and even if they did, they aren't going to go to the trouble to produce a mirror shine even if the reflective quality is manageable for cheaper than a modest-quality mirror.

9. The outcome itself has to be something that reflects the owner in a positive light, at least from the perspective that the owner believes is a positive light.

10. The selection of the car as a donor puts someone attempting a build at either a cost or project-specification's advantage. I.e.- the entire driveline can come from one car -or- everything but one or a few particular parts worth paying a disproportionate amount of the overall budget to be able to include can all come from one depreciated vehicle.

and finally...more focused upon a car becoming a widely-used donor car and not merely a good one to start with for a single project:

10. There has to be a body of relative experts either already available or people with the available time, interest, and enthusiasm to become experts,

AND

11. The donor car itself has to be fairly capable of suiting itself to a wide variety of end results, because nobody enters into building a kit car just so it can be like every other kit car the builder might come upon, since that holds as little value as just buying a car in the first place, and the wager of offering a kit is that someone wishes to imbue themselves into a vehicle rather than merely portray themselves as an owner of a 'kit' vehicle, where a 'kit' implies that someone other than Mercedes or Porsche's R&D engineers caused the car to end up the way it did.

So, do you guys have anything to add? have I missed anything? I'm gonna post cars that I think may turn out to be viable candidates for the next wave of kit cars...

[Edited on November 8, 2009 at 4:27 PM. Reason : read my next post where I indicated its contenxt should have fit, above.]

11/8/2009 4:20:01 PM

Veyron?

11/8/2009 4:25:14 PM

paragraph to have been read as the third paragraph of the initial post:

(It ties together the 'used-car-value-pool' premise with the 'find-the-best-donor' comments)

Quote :

" the upshot of this realization is that there is a lot of reliable transportative and performance value in the used market today, possibly more than any other point in history, and as our government keeps showing us how incapable it is of appropriately tailoring legislation that affects the design of vehicles, I think we're ripe for a kit-car renaissance, given that it allows for a vehicle to be produced without having to become a "production car," and the amount of donors available for such purposes is just so wide. So I want to pinpoint how to sift through the muck and identify which cars are best suited for a starting point as a donor car."

11/8/2009 4:29:13 PM

jesus christ

11/8/2009 4:42:52 PM

^^^that's funny, obviously, but perhaps you too flippantly mention the bugatti, since it fails everyone one of those tests, and yet it has definitely been a subject of modification, not only by VW itself in the various special editions and Grand Sport variant and endless levels of personalization, but by some truly wiseass "customization houses," , the worst of which is a group called Mansory.

While I haven't seen a single thing done to a veyron or aston martin that made it better looking yet, Manzory's mods simply make a distinctive car more shouty by slightly changing the appearance of a car that is otherwise extremely overexposed. These are people who not only need the ultimate but still want people "in the know" to make dumb "wha wa zat?" noises when they phwoar by. It's easier to understand Mansory's exorbitant and empty modifications as closer to the rose-tinted traditional concept of "coachbuilding," wherein a car that has proven itself as some sort of quality machine is handed over to a stylist for an aesthetic makeover. The Ruf RK coupe, the various Zagato Astons, Ferraris, and Bentleys, Pininfarina's transformation of an Enzo into Glickenhaus' P4/5 and their SP1, SP2, and SP3 "owner tailored special ferrari models" fit into this mold more gracefully, and what groups like Mansory do is basically the Phantom Motorsports equivalent of that genre.

[Edited on November 8, 2009 at 4:53 PM. Reason : needed an extra "^"]

11/8/2009 4:52:56 PM

just a few candidates off the top of my head, and I'm trying to exclude cars that are already HEAVILY pulled for kit duty, (and are hence already "donor heavies" like Fox body Mustangs, c5s where you need a porsche transmission to make it rwdmid-engined, miatas, Mr2s... )

A. smart fortwo
B. Pontiac solstice/ saturn sky (and Chevrolet C5 and c6 vette, although they're a bit high-end)
C. Ford mustang v6.
D. Porsche boxster
E. honda fit
F. hybrids
G. korean cars
H. its been tried and failed a lot, but mainstream sedans that have manual transmissions.
I. Cadillac and Chrysler rwd models
J. Used cop cars, starting with the crown vics
K. Big displacement scooters
L. Dodge Caliber/Jeep Patriot/ Jeep Compass
M. Mazda Rx8

[Edited on November 8, 2009 at 5:06 PM. Reason : "[s]"]

11/8/2009 5:05:30 PM

fucking a why do you write such long god damn posts

11/8/2009 5:40:03 PM

so let me get this straight... basically, you've just come up with every justification possible for you to to buy a fiero and you want us to justify it for you as well?

11/8/2009 7:01:19 PM

is this going to be like last time where you spend months assembling parts to build your own car and engineer turning headlights and everything only to have to sell off the parts a couple years later for a loss?

11/8/2009 7:23:36 PM

I love Tww.

^^^Schep, Is it that my post is too long or is your attention span too short? Ask yourself, did you really log on so that you could see every wiseass comment, or were you hoping for genuine exchange of ideas? Don't be afraid to answer either way, because I'm sure both members of both camps are present on TWW.

^^no. a smart, probably :-). It has the best chance of being reduced to the lightest car possible without being a complete ground-up job. All the components are already tiny. Too bad its form factor is wrong. The first thing to go will be the tridion frame. But nearly everything else sticks around. One group in Germany has already done a smart kit, called the michalak c7.

^not necessarily. But I think zero-net-work-wiseacreship has gotten more verbiage out of complaining about my posts than I ever did in making promises. And who cares? Talk is cheap, and typing is only slightly more invested, so we can hash stuff out here. As far as failing to build a supercar, I don't remember what my net loss was, but it was only the value of my shipping costs for the motor, so I think that was like $200? Pretty good as far as supercar burnout goes, from what I can tell.

11/8/2009 7:37:54 PM

even failed projects can be fun and educational, didn't mean for my post to come off as douchy as it did. just curious really if it was something you were actually going to try or just talk.

11/8/2009 7:45:28 PM

I vote...







Chevy Astro AWD

11/8/2009 7:51:03 PM

roll me over in my grave when this is finished.

11/8/2009 8:10:18 PM

^^

Give us more details. Sounds epic.

11/8/2009 8:12:04 PM

^^"Hi my name is big blue ram and I have no idea what this thread is about."

It's a fucking conversation, ass.

11/9/2009 12:29:00 AM

^^^^ opt, I thought at first that maybe you were just throwing out a bad suggestion, but taking it seriously, a chevy astro might actually be a pretty good donor... I have reservations, but I'll tackle the tests one by one, as I set out in the first post.

1. There is no question that for the purpose that the Astro was to compete in, minivans for middle america moms, it lost. It was a truck in a car-based segment. The only van that seemed more out of sorts for the task a few years after the caravan was launched was the Aerostar... no one is treasuring the Astro for its designed purpose. Check. Sufficiently embarassing.

2. cheap because its old and they're all bound to be destroyed by now, and its been so long since they even remotely resembled an existing configuration of van that nobody is gonna feel that "market price" has anything to do with how much they ought to have to pay for the van. Check. Worth less than it even ought to be. hack it up for all the market cares

3. It's a chevy truck! compatibility ought to be through the room, and parts are definitely available. check. But higher purpose? I mean, an epic tow machine and surprising drag strip performer would be pretty cool, but those are enhancements of the car's stock configuration. Even a 350 installation is merely to make the astro a faster astro. What other vehicle, larger-than-life-let-alone-astro, could the Astro be? I got it. Anyone remember the Suzuki PX concept? If Suzuki was going to build it, they'd probably have to start with a Vitara, and then it'd end up no more successful at being a "ubermanvan" than a mazda 5. But on a chevy astro scale, that could be a serious van that skirts any risk of "mommy mobile." Here's a pic of the Suzuki PX. You get the feeling that the original sketch of the Astro might have looked the way the Suzuki concept actually turned out.


more pics here: http://www.automobilemag.com/auto_shows/tokyo/0511_suzuki_px/photo_04.html

parts are amenable to a separately appealing higher purpose. ideal for a rwd/awd "man-van" platform. Check.

4. hmmm... I guess this is part of test 3 in this case. If you already wanted a suzuki PX, you'd probably scan the classifieds for where to start, and there you'd find a chevy astro van. someone could find this to be a surprisingly good starting point for some sort of compact but truck-based van. check.

more in next post

11/9/2009 12:52:00 AM

^^conversation? with who, yourself? all i'm seeing in here is a bunch of mindless rambling with your name beside it. unless you want to consider the other user's posts of exasperation and mockery to be legitimate conversational responses by some stretch of your vivid imagination.

[Edited on November 9, 2009 at 1:03 AM. Reason : tww is not your personal blog. at the least, you could contain all your pipedreams to one thread...]

11/9/2009 1:00:47 AM

5. I do think there's a chance for a "holy crap I love that van! It's a kit?" moment for a kit based on a chevy astro for a group of people who wouldn't be caught dead in an astro in stock config. Check. The act of modifying could create a vehicle of wholly separate and wider appeal from the original vehicle despite obvious commonalities between donor and kit.

6. simple process of modification. check. It's a body on frame vehicle, right? Shuck the original body, make a fiberglass replacement, reinforce it however you like, it's going to be stronger and lighter than stock, and even on a stock motor it'd be a crazy sporty van, having much lower CoG, less weight, better braking, better gas mileage, less frontal area.... that couldn't be simpler! If you were really concerned with impact resistance, even the simplest of cages or tube-framing the sides would deliver ample additional strength for modest weight and cost.

7. I have no idea what you'd call the non-kit equivalent! A mercedes R-class? You'd definitely have the cheapest, sportiest, badass rwd van around. check.

8. hmm, modest amount of time and investment? unfortunately, so much of the astro would be thrown away in the other steps' answers that there's little question that the build cost would be far and away the more expensive part of the project. For a lot of ppl interested in building an astro-based kit, they'll be able to find one for free or a pittance. A lot of people with a free astro aren't going to be the sort of person who are willing to drop 10k in fabrication. This might be the holdback.

9. reflects on the owner positively... I think a monster van that carries sporting pretentions could be an aspirational vehicle, and so ppl could imagine themselves being personally proud of it in a way that buying an R63 couldn't. check.

10. there's plenty of ppl who will know what goes where on an astro.

11. while this test is to figure out which donor will be a hub for many different projects, it doesn't affect whether a single kit or sort of kit could be worked from such a donor. I think an astro could be a great place to start for a monster-van, but c'mon, you aren't going to be making the best tow vehicle, rock-crawler, sports-car, nor luxury vehicle from this thing. It isn't a chameleon. Also, how many suitable astros are even out there to be used anymore? It can't be at the center of a kit car renaissance if you can't run into one in traffic just by thinking about one such that you end up noticing it where you didn't care before.

So... an Astro could be the go-to donor for some sort of van-genre, but I dunno how big that genre could really get, given the limited availability of good quality donors. I'd love to see someone try it, but I don't think that guy should expect to be able to quit his job and sell kits for astros. That's definitely a limited-appeal kit, even though there'd be a lot of demand for hotrodded suzuki PX clones, at least enough to outstrip supply.

11/9/2009 1:11:12 AM

@BBR:

how is it a pipedream to discuss developments in the composition of the national fleet? Nobody's building anything here, so you don't seem to understand that there's no project for you to shit on.

[Edited on November 9, 2009 at 1:13 AM. Reason : "@BBR"]

11/9/2009 1:13:10 AM

The Astro was sold for 20 years. That's an outstanding success in the world of automobiles.

Just don't get in a wreck in one:


The choppped van in the above photo might actually be safer. At least if you're thrown out the van itself won't crush you.

11/9/2009 1:15:00 AM

It was sold for 20 years because it was a marginal thing for GM to engineer off of parts that pay for themselves in other vehicles. Minivans were the rage, Chevy needed one, and the parts were there. In the absence of Chevy trucks, there would be zero incentive to produce the astro. The two-box car-based minivan monstered it. I wasn't knocking the astro, but the fact that you found one where someone tried to make some sort of roadster/lowrider out of it proves my conclusion: ain't nobody gonna care if you trash it. So have at it. Just don't expect there to be a market for people lining up to get themselves a copy.


..... edit: holy crap, I just skimmed ebay...they were still making that POS in 2005?! Giddyup astro enthusiasts, I had no idea it was that recently retired. That van has been invisible to me for years, then. Total donor candidate. Great suggestion opt. I take back what I said about total availability of plausible units for donor duty. There ought to be plenty.

[Edited on November 9, 2009 at 1:29 AM. Reason : and you thought you were just being a wiseass. That was a good one!]

11/9/2009 1:23:55 AM

In my opinion, GM selling the astro as late as 2005 is the same as VW selling the Type 1 Beetle as late as 2003:
criminal negligence.

But yeah, there's lots of them out there.

11/9/2009 10:52:31 AM

Quote :

"I bet I could fit a chevy 350 in there or a cadillac northstar and have a running machine with wayyyyy less real engineering to figure out if I wanted to make a Ferrari 348/testarossa/f40/f355/.... replica."

Plenty of people have already done this. Just google Northstar Fiero.
</thread>?

[Edited on November 9, 2009 at 11:26 AM. Reason : l]

11/9/2009 11:24:50 AM

I meant the AWD astro as a donor vehicle for an AWD kit car, like the kind that comes on a big ass pallet and you build youself. Not the fucking gay kind where you take an existing vehicle and bondo some body kit onto it.

because

#1 its AWD
#2 LSx bolts right up to AWD
#3 you can use an S10 frame if need be


also see: AWD 6.0L Chevy/GMC/Cadillac SUVs

[Edited on November 9, 2009 at 2:48 PM. Reason : S10 frames are easy to find]

11/9/2009 2:48:02 PM

AWD Subaru Kit Car: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murtaya

But subarus sell for way too much due to yuppies and wannabe rally car drivers.

11/9/2009 3:15:20 PM

grandpa has a mint condition 89 astro sitting in his garage with less than 30k miles on it

11/9/2009 4:17:37 PM

^^^is it really not obvious that I meant the same type of frame-up lightweight kit-car-from-production-parts-donor type of kit car? Im not suggesting an astro be slathered with plastic to resemble a px, i'm describing making a lightweight kit car van. There's no rule that says the kit car formula has to be forced toward a tiny sports car. Doing that while starting from truck components would be idiotic, but to take an awd v8 van drivetrain and make a dramatically lighter, lower, better looking van would make sense. if you wanted to go any smaller, then an astro would be the worst chevy-components starting point. You could do far better, even per-dollar, to start with a camaro or s10.

The murtaya is sweet. That's the sort of kit car I care about. Start with an excellent package and dimensions, and strap it to a smaller, stiffer chassis and sexier body. It works pretty well when you take a sedan and make a coupe of the same configuration, but there's just no way you'd be able to pull off the same trick with an astro without significantly more work for dubious results. I think that if you start with an astro, you could probably go as small as something the size of a Mazda 5.

Also, yeah, I know about engine swaps in fieros.... I thought I made that perfectly clear by quoting a hypothetical kit car enthusiast as someone having an idea back when that could have been an original idea. I wasn't trying to claim that to be my idea. But making a vw bug into a dune bugg on the other hand....

I guess I should've explained some of the more specific kit ideas for each of the donors I suggested. I don't think that just any car can be a great donor for a kit car of any configuration, because I think that you end up throwing away a lot of the mass-produced value if you make an entirely different machine from a donor. For example, in the case of the Chrysler and Cadillac sedans, I thought those would be great donors for kits of varioux luxury concept cars, like the Chrysler chronos and Cadillac sixteen. I'll dfibitely elaborate on each of these later in the week.

[Edited on November 12, 2009 at 2:43 AM. Reason : iPhone+ late night = tons of typos]

11/12/2009 2:36:09 AM

^^good for him.

[Edited on November 12, 2009 at 2:53 AM. Reason : .]

11/12/2009 2:51:18 AM

it will stay about the same since shit isn't as interchangable across years as it used to be

11/13/2009 11:28:46 AM

TMFL;DFR

11/13/2009 8:40:00 PM

what?

11/16/2009 10:35:54 AM

^^I'm gonna guess: "Too MotherFucking Long; Dude, For Real"

11/19/2009 2:21:36 AM

seriously.

you need to write your diatribes, save it to a file, come back the next day and reread it, edit it, save it to a file, come back the next day and reread it, THEN post it.

your stream-of-consciousness writing is unbearable to read. its almost impossible to follow, full of irrelevant shit, terrible grammar and run-on sentences.

which is ashame because there are usually some really good ideas there, but I honestly can't read your shit anymore. It takes 10 minutes to read it and another 20 to go back and make sense of what I just read.

11/19/2009 4:00:42 AM

^ I love you too. noted. I'll give it a try.

[Edited on November 19, 2009 at 4:05 AM. Reason : .]

11/19/2009 4:04:26 AM

^^^too motherfucking long, didn't fucking read

11/19/2009 4:42:00 AM

indeed

11/20/2009 12:18:17 PM

Quote :

"too motherfucking long, didn't fucking read"

winner

11/22/2009 10:55:10 PM

[failramble]

11/23/2009 1:37:55 PM

noen is very correct. it looks like one of my adderall fueled papers that i don't have time to edit and write in one shot straight through

[Edited on November 23, 2009 at 1:48 PM. Reason : also, i think wrecked c5's will be a great donor car. they're getting stupid cheap. see FFR GTM]

11/23/2009 1:48:05 PM

woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrddddddddddddddddds

11/24/2009 7:30:39 PM