The Terrible Toothbrush
Hi Friends!
The early 2000s have been in the news a lot lately as far as collector cars go. It was definitely an interesting era filled with bright paint jobs, bad body kits and oversized spinning rims. It was also the era in which I had my first ever real-deal automotive job. Of course, I grew up in a family of car and motorcycle enthusiasts (my family owned a motorcycle dealership) but landing a sales job at Nissan and Infiniti of Scottsdale on the infamous Scottsdale Motor Mile, after like 4 years of nearly full-time touring band punk rock madness felt like a natural landing place and a real accomplishment for me. It was also the first time I’d ever actually made any real money so to speak of as well.
By this point, I had been casually driving the same gold on gold 1989 Acura Legend two-door with 153,000 miles on it for way longer than I should have and although not completely dedicated to the idea, I had started to somewhat look into what it would take to finally buy myself something a little newer (and with actual working brakes!).
And that’s when I saw it…..
Parked across the street, just outside the service drive at Scottsdale Land Rover was a BRG over Saddle (CLOTH believe it or not) Series 1 1997 Land Rover Discovery and I was in love. I watched this car like a hawk for about 2 weeks. Every time it moved, I knew exactly where it was within minutes. My first thought when I walked onto the lot at Infiniti every morning, wasn’t our obnoxious Hitler youth-esque morning sales meeting, but whether or not somebody had stolen the thing out from under me. Eventually, the fear of never seeing it again started to overwhelm me so on my day off, I decided to go knock on Land Rover’s door and see what my options were.
Now, I’ll be the first to say, I have never been an SUV or a 4×4 guy (I’m still not), but there was just something about the boxy dimensions of this car that I couldn’t take my eyes off of. l’d also never actually been inside of a Land Rover before and I’d certainly never driven one, but that didn’t matter. My expectations were set in stone. This car had the perfect colors, perfect spec, perfect everything and I really wanted it…. or so I thought.
I walked in the door and greeted the staff (we all knew each other from the bars in the area), exchanged pleasantries and they asked me what I was doing there. I sheepishly pointed at the Disco and told them I wanted to take it for a drive.
For those that remember the era and the one shortly after, this was when Land Rover was building really elaborate obstacle courses on their dealership properties. These included rock walls, fake streams, trails, logs, all kinds of ridiculous things that most of these trucks would never actually encounter out in the real world of getting groceries and going to luxury shopping malls for girls brunches, but I digress, it was the early 2000s, Britney Spears was on the radio and everything was gloriously surface level everywhere.
The Used Car Manager assigned me sales guy, tossed him the keys and we went for a test drive West, down the Motor Mile. Left on 64th Street, down through Papago Park, Left on McKellips, up Scottsdale Road, left on McDowell and back to the dealer. This was the same route that every dealership on the Motor Mile took on every test drive and I knew it well.
I’ll say, the car was not what I expected. It was not fast and it felt very clunky but it certainly had a vibe and it was cool. It felt like a safari through South Scottsdale and that anything could turn into an adventure. We pulled back into the dealer lot and of course I had to take it up and over the rock wall that bordered McDowell Road on the other side of the glass in front of the sales tower. We went up, it was sketchy (but capable), we went over with zero issue, we pulled off the curb surrounding the makeshift wilderness with a thud and out of nowhere, the rear window of the vehicle fell straight downwards into the door skin and shattered everywhere.
I immediately stopped the car, threw it in a park, looked at the salesman and both of us were completely drop jawed. The guys on point in the up rotation obviously saw this whole thing play out and went and grabbed the sales managers and by this point the entire dealership was basically standing in the front parking lot scratching their heads and trying to figure out what the hell just happened.
The General Sales Manager instructed us to take the car into the back to the service department, so I started the car back up, pulled it around and pulled it into a service bay wherein a waiting technician (a guy I also knew from the bars) had already heard what happened. He straight up admitted he’d never seen anything like this before and didn’t really know what to make of it, so he climbed in through the rear passenger seat and started to pull off the interior panels on the tailgate to investigate further. What he found I don’t think anybody was really expecting, but in hindsight it was certainly in line with UK car shenaniganry and definitely par for the course.
As he pried the plastic off and slowly started to pull the window out, a very used, very crusty and very bent green toothbrush fell onto the carpet in the rear of the car. According to technician, It appeared that the rear part of the interior of the car had never been removed before and what it looked like, was that somebody in the factory at some point along the assembly line decided to stick a toothbrush into the rear part of the car where a rubber seal and a brace would normally have been stationed. Needless to say, at this point I definitely didn’t understand the certain nuances and undeniable charm of the British automobile manufacturing process like I do now and I was no longer interested owning this truck.
This memory has stuck with me for years and I have told this story over and over again since. Normally, it’s been a situation where I’ll see one driving down the street and I’ll recall it to whoever is in the passenger seat or somebody will bring up something regarding one of these trucks and it all comes rushing back. Generally, it boils down to “those cars are such pieces of crap, I don’t know why anybody would ever buy one”.
Even with a good two decades of this mentality regarding these trucks in my back pocket, a couple of years ago something changed in me. I would see one of these at a car show someplace or I’d get an email that had one featured somewhere for sale or something and although this experience would rush back just the same, it hit completely differently. It didn’t become a memory of poor craftsmanship, a potentially dangerous malfunction or anything else. It was a definitive moment that took me someplace that I hadn’t been in a long time and there was a real value in that for me. Since then, I’ve updated my search lists and email notification settings on things like Bring-a-Trailer and I have alerts set up with Google for Craigslist and I’ll admit, I’ve got my eyes open.
Will I ever own one of these trucks? The answer to that is probably not. These things still somewhat remain a horror show of reliability problems and as cool as they look, it’s tough to justify – even as inexpensive as most of them are. Especially when, if you also recall in 2000 and 2001 absolutely everybody wanted a square headlight Nissan Xterra, I sold a ton of those things and had a bunch of great memories in those trucks too (no toothbrushes involved), so that’s probably a more likely landing place for my 4×4 component of the absolutely undefeated Keith Martin 4-car collection requirements that I have pretty much defined my collector car objectives around, but that doesn’t change the fact that despite this car being undeniably awful, I still lust after one.
I’ve had a bunch of pretty good, pretty reliable cars in my history, but those are not cars that I think about regularly. I’m also pretty sure it’s not the reason that I am so thoroughly enamored with Alfa Romeo and why my entire garage consists of nothing but cars from that brand. I also love British cars and I’ve got a thing for Fords too (I ended up buying an Electric Green Mustang here). The fact is, the best cars are not the cars that do everything correctly. Cars like that transcend into the realm appliances and they lack what’s required to connect with us at a more primal level. Imperfection gives things personality and makes them real and that’s why we love the cars that leave us stranded or catch on fire or just do generally ignorant things (like have giant fire chickens painted on the hood or be able to do football field wide donuts while beating out drum fills from Dr. Feelgood on the steering wheel for example).
Machines are cold, but things that make us feel, create stories and build memories are things that stay with us much longer than those that just get 50 miles per gallon, have zero recalls or effortlessly clear emissions after 150,000 miles. It’s all the dumb stuff that cars do that make us feel alive and in turn that’s what gives them life too.
That’s it for this week……
Darin Roberge