However Cheap You May Be, You’re Probably Not This Cheap: COTD

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Many people have asked me how I can keep 15 or so cars and a half-dozen motorcycles around in my life. The truth is that I’m a terrible cheapskate. I spend almost all of my money on cars, bikes, and sometimes, bras and computers. The TV on my dresser right now is some old Vizio thing from 2015. Its backlight flickers out above 53 percent brightness, so I leave it set to 52 percent. I’ll replace the TV when it finally blows. My apartment? Oh boy, it’s so small and cheap that my “office” is a nightstand next to my bed. For lunch, I am embarrassed to admit that I’ve consumed quite a bit of Chef Boyardee lately. Sure, I’ll blow a lot of money on some wheels, but I’m still running a launch day edition Xbox One.

This morning, Lewin wrote a story about how you could push-start old Mercedes and Mopar cars with automatic transmissions. That was a fascinating read that even I wasn’t aware of! Michael Beranek made me smile today with a story about how cheap his dad was:

My dad, the cheapest MFr who ever lived, did this EVERY DAMN DAY down our driveway hill. There were skid marks all over the stretch where he’d dump the clutch in 1st. Probably lead to his ’74 Dart’s early demise.
I had a Dasher that lacked a starter when I was young. But there was a hill at home, a hill at work, and a hill at my girlfriend’s house. For other situations I would just leave it running and lock it with an extra key. I have found that using 2nd gear and releasing the clutch slowly is more effective than dumping it hard in 1st.
Ahh, the good ‘ol days.

I don’t know why, but popping a clutch to save on starter life just makes me giggle. Please don’t let me get that cheap! For a second set of COTD today, I have to nominate a thread from Jason bullying his Toyota Sienna’s HVAC design. It started with Icouldntfindaclevername:

Wow at least it come with sonar so you can ping other vans under water

And it immediately turned into The Hunt for Red October. From Data:

Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.

For an honorable mention, we have Adrian Clarke commenting on the Zagato AGTZ Twin Tail. Adrian does not hold back his opinions on the design of a car. If he hates it, you’ll know. On some days it seems like he’s the Gordon Ramsay or Jon Taffer of car design. He will probably exchange some words with me after I compare him to those other fellas. So, this got me:

Adrian: “this is bullshit”
Matt: “Adrian, can you elaborate for our members?”
Adrian: “No”

I thank all of you for giving me smiles today. Have a great evening!

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42 thoughts on “However Cheap You May Be, You’re Probably Not This Cheap: COTD”

  1. Micheal Beranek’s post reminded me of a similar story. Back in the summer of 1990, I had a 1984 Mazda B2000. Awesome little truck! I had a job delivering pizzas while still living at home (I was barely 18 at the time). The starter went out between paychecks, so for two weeks I had to pop start it to go anywhere or leave it running and lock the doors with a second key or park on hills. My dad let me use his spot on the driveway until I could replace it. I also realized at this time that pop starting it in 2nd was a much softer way to get the engine running vs. 1st gear. Good times.

  2. Yay, I’m famous!
    Seriously though, in the ’70’s the old man would drive 20 miles to find gas that was 2 cents a gallon cheaper. He also bought wood alcohol and mixed his own gasohol.
    But he grew up a kid in Pilsen during the depression, and then was a teenaged scrap-collecting savant during WW2. Old habits die hard.
    Also, great job Merc on choosing the photo. His was also a Duster-style “Sport”, and had the same stripe. But his was powder blue and lacked the luxurious vinyl top.

  3. Speaking of being cheap and “The Hunt For Red October”…
    They couldn’t afford an accent coach for Sean Connery?

    I mean, if Juno Temple can rock a believable Minnesota accent for the TV show “Fargo” why is a Scottish dude commanding a Russian submarine in a major blockbuster movie?

      1. They had a French guy playing a Scotsman, and a Scotsman playing a Spaniard. It all makes total sense. All they needed was a Hungarian samurai to make it perfect.

    3. He spoke Russian at the start of the movie, before, it schwitched to “any accent that isn’t American is Russian. And to be blunt, that movie is a remote drop for me – I love it unreservedly.

      Better are the Mazda ads Sean Connery did in Japan. For striking products starting with “S”. It’s like they were trolling him.

      https://youtu.be/GHJJ6v46EbI?si=j2nDWmsENPMN8wUd

      https://youtu.be/BnHcwBFioks?si=Iaute1MGE0I-Mrea

      Thank heavens he didn’t speak in this Suntory ad.

      https://youtu.be/goUBezKpNmU?si=EWMmNS1z3-FxOs2H

      “Shuntory. Shitfaced. Shtriking.”

  6. I was in the middle of typing the same Hunt for Red October quote, when Data beat me to the punch. I shouldn’t have stopped to look up the spelling of Vasili 🙂

    Definitely going to be watching that again tonight.

    1. Came out when I was in high school. The line my friends and I repeated often like the teenage dumbasses we were: “Hey, I think somebody just shot a torpedo at us!”

  7. Adrian Clarke is this site’s gem. A shiny, cold, black gem that could lead to this world’s destruction and raise the dead back to life, but a gem none-the-less.

    Regarding cheapness, I used to drive a Suzuki Sidekick with a manual transmission. Black. It was my step mother’s vehicle. As a broke college student, I hyper-miled it to extract as much out of the fuel as possible. When driven normally without any concern to efficiency, doing abut 65 mph on the highway, it got about 18-20 mpg. It was an out-of-tune POS and it’s drag coefficient of 0.48 made it a gas guzzler, in-spite of its Miata NC-like weight of 2,600 lbs and power-starved 4-cylinder engine. BUT if I drove it in the city, and shifted up at 1,500 rpm, and accelerated at 2/3 throttle, doing 35 mph in 5th gear, remaining cognizant of traffic lights and coasting where I could and having my foot on the throttle as seldom as possible, I could get 30-35 mpg on a good day with this driving tactic. It was a survival necessity, as my part time job wasn’t even enough to cover my textbooks.

    This same vehicle could also do up to 100 mph. I remember when my father was using it for his nursing job, and got home late. I was already 5 minutes late for a final exam Junior year for an EM Fields course by the time I left the house. That is the morning I found out its top speed. Its speedometer only went to 85 mph, BUT in 5th gear, every 1,000 rpm equated to 20 mph. It topped out exactly at 5,000 rpm. I could literally see the needle on the fuel gauge decline in real time at that speed. I’d guestimate it got like 6 mpg at that speed. And at speed, this vehicle was VERY unstable. It felt like it was going to take off into the air and every crack and groove in the road made the steering wheel shimmy with a disturbing degree of violence. I got to the exam 30 minutes late, and managed to get a B, leaving the exam unfinished when the time was up. Had I not broken the law, I probably would have been too late to take the exam at all and failed the course.

    Normally, when it’s not my vehicle, my default mode of driving is to obey all traffic laws. When it is my vehicle, all bets are off… That was an exceptional circumstance that required a judgement call. I chose correctly(and got lucky). I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket in my life, even if I’ve spent literally hundreds of hours at triple-digit speeds. But in this vehicle, I drove it to the best of my ability to extract as many miles out of each gallon of guzzoline as possible, because otherwise, I’d have been in a world of hurt.

    Electrical problems sent that POS to the crusher, and I don’t at all miss it.

    2. My driving instructor taught me a ‘game’, which was to try and get all the way across town without ever coming to a complete stop. This entailed learning the timing of all the traffic lights on different routes, and knowing when to let off and chug towards a red light, knowing that it would turn green just as you got there. His thinking was that it would encourage alertness and thinking ahead in his students, and it also helps with fuel economy, dispensing with the wasteful 0-5mph acceleration.

      1. Because of the difference between coefficient of static friction and coefficient of kinetic friction between tires and the road, it takes roughly 6 times the fuel to accelerate from a stop as it does to coast through the stop.

        I still came to a complete stop at red traffic lights and stop signs, just to avoid any possibility of a ticket that I wouldn’t have been able to afford, but I got very good at timing traffic lights and staying in motion through them.

    1. My wife knows how to make money scream. The engagement wedding band i bought her for $500 fell apart within a year and a half so she bought several replacement rings for $20 or less that look better.

        1. He’s lucky to have her. Most of the ladies I’ve dated wanted/demanded someone that would go into debt to lavishly expend their money on them for the most frivolous and stupid crap. One even complained that I drove a clunker car instead of a new truck and said I should go $50k+ into debt at the time to buy one because “everyone else is doing it.” That relationship lasted all of abut 2 weeks. I wasn’t born rich and there’s many things I want to do in this life that lack of money prevented me from doing until recently, so that’s a demand which is not at all compatible with my lifestyle or goals, so of course it didn’t work out.

          When I lived out on my own multiple states away, I lived in the ghetto with roommates to pay my student loans off. There were some bouts with homelessness as well.

          Currently making six figures once overtime is factored in and living in a family member’s basement for $120/mo plus utilities, using electric vehicles that don’t require registration or insurance because they’re legally bicycles(functionally, they’re one-seater microcars, and one of them can accelerate faster than most new cars), and saving/investing everything I can. That’s what I call WINNING.

    2. I drove an 89 Honda Civic SI for 250K miles. My driveway out of the garage was steep, so i would open the door and leg it out the garage and eased the clutch out in 2nd gear to start it. The parking lot at work was sloped so I would back into the space. When it was time to leave, 2nd gear would fire it right up. I put a new contact ring in the starter solenoid at about 150K miles and it served until the car’s demise at the front bumper of an 18 wheeler.

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