How I bought a 1976 BMW 2002 for less than half the seller’s asking price Pt III

Part III: BMW 2002 For Sale $1450 OBO – Test Drive and Brief Negotiations

At this point any smart car guy will tell you I’ve got two strikes against me in this transaction… 1) rusty car 2) sell it for a profit. Those two things just don’t work together… but what if I can get it for 700 bucks how bad can I lose?  I begin to pick the poor old car apart in my head. The mirrors are nice, chrome, those are worth something. A dash with no cracks, definitely worth something, the glass is good, I could sell that etc. etc. Forget the time and bloody knuckles it might take to pick it apart, take pictures and list everything on eBay. Maybe I’d just try to sell the whole car. Let me see if I can buy it first.

Probably okay if I can get it really cheap.

Chris pulled in as I was closing the trunk of the car. He got out of late 80s Volkswagen Jetta with a two tone custom paint job. He was a portly guy in his late twenties.

“Hi, you’re the guy who called about that yesterday?” he asked me pointing at the BMW.

“Yeah” I answered.

“Why don’t you take it for a drive and see what you think, it runs a little rough, but it drives fine” he insisted, “get your speed up so you can get up the hill there and onto the road” he added. There was a slight grade from the lot to the road, snow on the ground, rear wheel drive.

So I got in and started it up again and engaged first gear, the clutch felt fine. I pulled up the rise, spun the tires a little and got out onto the 55 mph two lane county road. What a great way to die, flipping end over end in an old BMW as the rear wheels crash through the rusty trunk shock towers on a snow covered road. There wasn’t really much snow on the main road.

The car actually drove fine. I was careful with it, the engine pulled well, it shifted up through the gears nicely. I went about a half mile down the road and went to turn around in a gas station. There was some grinding on the stick as I downshifted from third to second gear… synchro is shot… strike three for this little car… it will need a transmission rebuild probably sooner than later to really make it right.

I enjoyed driving it, the view out of the car was incredible, no blind spots anywhere, it was like driving a greenhouse. It steered like a go kart and even though I wasn’t going very fast in the turns in did pretty well, save for some creaking from the rear shocks… cracking rusty metal in the trunk probably.

When I got back to the lot I parked the car and went inside. Chris was sitting behind the desk with his entourage around him talking about cars.

“What did you think?” he asked.

“It’s all right I guess,” I tried to sound very uninterested, “but it’s got some real needs” I said.

“Yeah, there’s something wrong with that carb I think, that’s what’s makin’ it run rough” he shrugged.

“The shock towers are totally rusted through in the trunk, I mean it would cost thousands of dollars to have new metal welded in there” I said.

“It wouldn’t be that much, I got a quote from a welder in town that said he could do it for about eight hundred bucks” he insisted.

Bullshit I thought, no way. Maybe some guy he knows would get in there and weld something for eight hundred bucks, but that won’t fix the problem. To do it right you need to cut out the bad panels, buy good ones from a dismantler in Arizona or California who has panels that have never been rusty and have them welded in, painted, etc. etc. You can go buy a great driver 2002 for what all of that would cost and save yourself the headaches, not to mention the crunchy transmission. I figured the engine idle could probably be put right with a simple carb adjustment.

I just kept quiet for a minute, the guys standing around talked about a guy they knew who could probably fix the shock towers. Chris stood up and walked out from behind the desk and looked out the small window in the door out to the car on the lot. The guys who had been standing around meandered back to the garage area, we were alone.

“Look man,” I began “it’s November, there’s snow on the ground, that car’s probably going to sit there until the spring. What’s the least you’ll take for it if I drive it out of here right now?”

His brow ruffled, he turned to see where the other guys were, he thought for maybe five seconds and looked me right in the eyes.

“Seven Hundred bucks.”