Broken Bentley’s Carmax Appraisal Is Your Daily Cringe (Video)
Issue-riddled Bentley Continental loses money faster than a trip to the casino.
We all wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to cheap project cars, especially seeing just how much cheaper they are in a state of disrepair. Prices can slash an easy 80% off what the original MSRP was, if you’re shopping smart enough. Tyler Hoover of Hoovie’s Garage thought that’s exactly what he was doing when he bought a Bentley Continental GT from auction. The only problem was, he wasn’t able to inspect it until after the purchase.
Hoover explains how screwed the situation is: “Despite its clean CARFAX corroborating the low mileage on the odometer, it actually spent ten years in Russia, where a little digging had shown the odometer had been rolled back twice, and it had been seized by the government at some point.” In all, Hoover ended up paying $27,700 for a car with 150,000 miles and a load of running issues. So how bad is he screwed? Well, he decided to take a trip with the car to get a CARMAX appraisal.
CARMAX has a policy to, at the very least, put a dollar amount on what ever heap you manage to bring into the store. I say manage, because Hoover almost didn’t even make it. Before the GT even left the garage, it refused to start and smoked like crazy once it fired up. Then, on the road, it had a terrible vibration and noise from the driveline and other electrical faults…like windows that don’t roll up.
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So, we know the Continental is a bit of a basket case, but it has to have some sort of value, right? Hardly. The CARMAX appraisal came to all of $4000. Hoover is devastated, saying, “with the wheels that I put on and the shipping from Chicago to Kansas, I would lose $25,000 selling this car to CARMAX.” Ouch.
While Hoover is not quite sure what he wants to do with the car in the future, he’s just hoping that it won’t see a crusher. LS swap, maybe? Sorry, we had to.
