When does habit become vice? | Column

Like any other vice, car collecting starts innocently enough. You long for a particular car, or perhaps you just stumble across something and decide it’s yours. Interest turns to infatuation, and soon you’re fully invested in this vehicle, which somehow embodies everything you always wanted to say about yourself in this world. It manages to do what the ironic posters in your bedroom never achieved: Define the best parts of you.

It stops there for most of our readers. You always wanted that TR3 or Shelby Mustang, and after you got your kids through college and your house paid off, you finally made that dream a reality. You love your car, you take care of it, and you enjoy everything from rallies to shows with your dream come true, but you are still tangibly “okay.” Those hoarding shows on TLC have nothing to do with you.

For some of us, however, the path is different. Sure, there’s that first car, but it’s a gateway drug. Next thing you know, a buddy or someone you work with tells you where there’s another Triumph or Healey or whatever. “Why not?” you ask yourself, and one becomes two. Then you stumble across another cool “find” and decide it would be good to have, since you don’t have a two-seater or a four-seater or an open car or a closed car, and the justifications start to multiply.

It escalates from there, either by accident or by plan. Some of you actually want to own nineteen different MGAs, all in different colors, while some of you decide you have space for exactly six cars and they should all be different. Others of us, however, got there with no clear idea where we were going.

For many years I was a serially monogamous automotive lover. I bought a car, fixed it up, then sold it before I moved on to the next. I think the used-car-salesman mentality I grew up with made me love the idea of selling a car for a profit, and more to the point, for many years I had no room to store multiple cars and certainly no money to buy another unless I sold one.

At some point, however, things started to change. I’m not even really sure how it happened. Either I got lazy, or another good deal came along so quickly that I didn’t have time to sell my current car, or maybe I just ran out of time and got tired of the hassle of selling the finished cars. Whatever the reason, I started to notice a gradual…accumulation.

I guess that if I really think about it, I realize there were other factors at work. I finally decided that killing myself for a story series, then dumping the cars for no real profit, was getting old. So once I hit my 40s and realized I wasn’t going to live forever, it seemed like a good idea to keep some of my projects to play with. Sure, I justified it by saying we needed a fleet of cars to use for the magazine, since as longtime readers know, we like to have a variety of cars and use them for various stories, from event coverage to comparison tests and how-to articles. But there was more to it than that.

I think a big factor was that I started hanging around with more collectors, guys like Bill Warner and Jay Leno, and amassing a lot of cars seemed like a reasonable thing to do. Heck, in comparison, my hoarding tendencies seemed absolutely paltry. I can’t really blame it all on them, though: In my business, I am always tempted. Someone’s always sending me a picture of something cool, or knows a guy who needs to unload a classic car. Apparently, more often than not over the last 10 years, I have said yes instead of no.

It’s come to this: A lot of people, starting with my wife, have asked me just how many cars I have, and my stock answer is that a gentleman never tells. The truth is that I’m usually not really sure of the actual number.

I did have to figure it out the other day. Florida automobile registrations must be renewed on your birthday each year, and I had to make my annual pilgrimage to the tag office and get all my tags renewed.

When it was all said and done, I had to write a personal check for over $850 for 19 registered vehicles. And yeah, I can argue that one was a boat, a couple were trailers, one was my kid’s car and one was my dad’s car—but what I didn’t tell the lady at the tag office, as my file literally froze her computer system, is I have at least ten more vehicles that are parts cars, race cars or otherwise unrestored vehicles that don’t have tags yet.

Okay, so this is starting to be a problem. What began as a hobby has turned into a collection and is rapidly expanding into the symptomatic. Even though I pay a guy to help out an afternoon or two a week, I still spend all my free time keeping stuff running and have very little time to enjoy the cars that I have built. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve even contemplated yet another garage expansion project.

I’m getting to the point where I feel like the living embodiment of the expression “penny wise, pound foolish.” These are mostly cheap cars that I bought for hundreds, not thousands of dollars, but it still takes a lot of time, money and patience to keep this many cars running—especially if you’re as demanding as I am. As I enter middle age—okay, late middle age—I also very much want to enjoy some of the cars I have built, and maybe even do something other than get greasy with my spare time. I don’t know how many classic car events I’ve missed because I was too busy welding up a body or pulling an engine. Something has to give. 

I’ve tried some self-help techniques. My first idea was that, while I wouldn’t try to stop myself from collecting more cars, I wouldn’t get any more license plates. This helped some, but honestly it just made moving some of the cars a complete pain in the butt.

I can’t just do this cold turkey. I have commitments to honor, stories to finish. After that, I need to spend some time getting organized and deciding which six cars I really care about and want to keep. Okay, which 10 cars. Or hey, how about a nice, even dozen?

So stay tuned, because there’s a reckoning coming, and we always offer project cars to our readers first. In the meantime, though, don’t even bother asking, because the TR3 race car and the Sunbeam Tiger are not for sale. And my Shelby? Fuhgeddaboudit. That’s the one, the forever—for now.

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