The Roadmaster is no longer ours…

It’s done, it’s over. We left it behind and it is not in our posession anymore! The Roadmaster… The wonderful car that helped us going from Las Vegas to Miami, the car that endured -13 degrees and +36 degrees, the car that drives better than it looks… That car is no longer ours.

And maybe it sounds strange to all of you, but we are very happy that we sold the car. Let me explain:

As you all probably know, we’ve bought the car from Mike, at Instant Auto Sales in Las Vegas. Because of the fact that putting our name on the certificate of ownership would take about a week, Mike told us it was much easier (and for us, the only possible thing to do) to take the ‘open’ certificate of ownership. This means that the car isn’t formally owned by either of us, but it is implicitly owned because we have the certificate.
We didn’t have a licence plate (which got us pulled over about 5 or 6 times) because we we’re using a temporary licence, which are used to cover the inbetween period of buying and selling a car (which in fact was our plan). This saved us about 60 bucks and a long waiting at the DMV.

Because the Roadmaster is not a very common and popular model, and our estimated selling price would be between $ 500,– and $ 2000,– we needed to find car dealerships who are specialized in selling cheap cars… You might imagine what these kinds of dealerships in the lesser attractive area’s of miami look like..

Besides that, the US has a problem with selling cars. Back at the time i went to the IVA (a school which is specialized for management in the automobile industry) they already told me that you could make a lot of money by selling cars in the US. Now I know why: there are to many of them! Everywhere you look there is a dealer trying to sell you a car. That’s one of the main reasons these dealers are not buying any extra cars. They only want to sell you a car and if needed trade one in.

They other reason why these dealers don’t want to buy a car ‘of the street’ is that they all buy their cars in auctions. Because of the current economical situation here, plus the fact that everybody finances their cars and cannot affort it after a while, those auctions have a lot of cars for little money.

Yesterday evening i looked up the adresses of 11 car-dealers in the neighbourhood of our hotel. I did this by using www.autotrader.com, adding a request for a car between $ 500,– and $ 3000,– and entered the zipcode of the hotel. This way i got the best ‘cheap-ass’-dealers in town.

So this morning we left for these shops. The first five did not want to buy our car and we where lucky to have left their properties alive and without being bitten by dogs or being robbed or whatever. Those where all very ’shabby’ and poor neighbourhoods… Our feelings about selling the car for a reasonable price begin to turn to ‘where can we dump this car, and get out of this country alive’.

After a couple of hours driving around we finally found a store who was willing to buy are car. I was happy. The only thing was, that he only wanted to give $ 500,– for it. After Eelco and I dicussed the price and after two other shops who where not willing to buy our car, we decided to go for this guy. When we returned at his store and showed him the paperwork and our car, he told us that he could not buy our car…

We where suprised and asked him to explain us why. First he discussed our case with his partner, in a language we did not understand… It sounded pretty slavic to us… Eelco could not resist to ask him, and he told him he was Russian… Wow, we got to know some Russian guys to do business with, which do business in cheap cars (by the way, the dealers name was ‘Affordable Cars’) in one of the lesser area’s of Miami. This situation didn’t make us feel really save.

‘Vitali’ explained to us that the problem was the ‘open certificate of ownership’. The law about registering cars in Florida seems to be different than in Nevada. As a company he can not buy a car with an open certificate. The only way he could buy our car, was if we had a Bill of Purchase or something that showed that we had legally bought this car. Of course Mike gave us a this bill, but that one was still at the hotel.

Now we had to go back to the hotel to pick this piece of paper up, to fix the deal. So, we drove back to the hotel and got all the forms and papers we could, might or would need. Than i saw a strange detail which i did not see before. I saw that the our ‘certificate of ownership’ was different from the one Mike sent me by fax 2 months ago. This could mean two things and we didn’t favour either of them. Ór we have the certificate of the wrong car, that way we are not able to sell the car to anybody. But i’m leaving tomorrow.. so Mike wouldn’t be able to get us the right papers in time. Ór we have the right certificate and are able to sell the car, but did not have any insurance on this car for the past two weeks(!!) because we have insured a car with a different VIN (vehicle identification number). Like i said before, none of those options were favourable.

After calling Mike and checking the VIN on our car, we found out that we had the right Certificate but indeed we where not insured for the past two weeks and upcoming hours. What a story! We do need to sell the car (to Vitali or somebody else) but how can we drive a car which is not insured? And why did none of the policeman who pulled us over figured this out before? Well, that’s the nice part, they, just like us, didn’t noticed it (which is kind kind of logical; the other car (which had the insurance) was exactly the same kind of roadmaster, even the same color. Since the make, model and color is written down on the insurance card the didn’t took the time to check the VIN). If they had found out that our insurance wasn’t completely correct, we’ve been without a car (and probably in jail).

With no other options than just driving the car for the last time to Vitali we went to Miami Downtown. With our most honest faces and a higher blood pressure then normal we made the deal with Vitali. Mike offered to help us with the sales-procedure and we asked Vitali to call Mike. After that we got our $ 500,–. Some young guy working there drove us back to our hotel.

So now here we are. After two weeks driving in a un-insured car, bought in Vegas, sold to an Russian business man in Miami. Tomorrow i will be on the plane home.
Strange deal, sorry for the Roadmaster, but i’m happy we don’t own it anymore.

E: Bye Bye, you very trustworthy buddy :’( :’(