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Car Keys with Robin Leech and Jay de Marcken – September 15, 2025
Car Keys with Robin Leech and Jay de Marcken – September 15, 2025
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About this episode
Robin Leach and Jay de Marcken discuss recent road improvements in their area and share insights from their driving experiences. Jay highlights a unique right-hand drive pickup truck from the 90s, often used in Japan, noting its compact size and utility for farming. The duo also debates the practicality of exotic cars on public roads and delves into the complexities of extended warranties, sharing personal anecdotes about vehicle repairs and the pitfalls of warranty clauses. They wrap up with a reminder to be cautious of pedestrians and cyclists as summer ends.
Topics:
road improvements
right-hand drive trucks
exotic cars
extended warranties
vehicle repairs
pedestrian safety
car shows
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Mazda Rx7
"It was a little... It was like riding with you and your RX-7 except a little more extreme and a little scarier yet."
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"...the value of the vehicle, and this is a 2014 Jeep Cherokee, and I can tell you it is probably not on any Kel..."
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He is Robin Leach. He is Jada Markin. This is Car Keys.
Good morning for this week's show of Car Keys, which is being done as summer is slowly coming to an end.
Lots of things have been going on around our area in terms of road paving and improvement. God knows if it's needed.
Both the town of Salisbury has been working on some of the side roads yet to be finished.
The state has been working on a number of our roads between Sharon and Salisbury or Lakeville.
I'm not sure they're totally finished, but they've marked most of the new lines on our main strip.
It has allowed cars to now travel unimpeded because the work has stopped.
In that sense, I have noticed a distinct increase in the average speed, which we have been traveling along.
This particular stretch of a resurfaced road since it's been finished, and it's gone up a bit.
It just requires us to remember to pay attention to a posted speed limit, which many of us are exceeding.
To be safe on the newly paved roads, which are smoother than ever.
On another front, Jay has got some interesting vehicles, which I'm going to turn this show over to him now.
He can start out and we'll go from there for the rest of the show. Listen on.
Yes. I had the opportunity to drive a pretty interesting little vehicle over the weekend.
It is a, I don't know what the model name is, it's a little pickup truck.
Flat nose pickup truck, right hand drive, built in the 90s.
They were sold in Japan. They had to meet certain criteria to...
Not much. When you look at one, there's not much criteria that they had to meet.
Other than four-wheel brakes and steering wheel and gear shift and a body.
That's about all they have, but they had a category they were...
I don't know if it was a tax bracket or whatever, but if vehicles met certain criteria and were limited in size and engine size,
they had some advantages. Anyway, these vehicles are short bed, flat nose...
Two-seater cabs, right?
What's that?
Two-seater cabs. Bucket two-seater cabs.
Two-seater if you're not too tall. If it's some of your size, Robin, you probably have to...
Just perfect for you, Jay.
Perfect. Perfect. It was actually quite comfortable.
But no airbags in the interior to prevent you from getting your face burned.
It's very compact. It's like a... It's the size of a lawnmower.
Well, they fit the narrow streets too, very well in the Asian cities.
I'm sure that's where they are.
These are work vehicles and people who buy them here are usually farmers.
We've seen them at ski resorts. They climb up the mountain like nobody's business.
We've seen them at the racetrack and they're just great.
They're a great substitute to getting a Polaris, for instance, which costs now $20,000.
You're right. I am always amazed at how much these ATV vehicles are costing against what you said you were able to...
Your friend was able to buy one.
It was the same pricing that I saw when I was looking at them in the one dealership that I first bumped into them,
which was in New Milford, two or three years ago.
They were all priced. They all had prices in their windshields of $5,000, $6,000, maybe $6,500.
But they are old vehicles.
They have lots of miles or kilometers on them depending on what they were using for odometer in those countries,
in the countries that they were used.
They were all over. They were all six-figure mileage on the vehicles I looked at and up.
Other than the fact that a lot of the bodies that the ones I saw were deteriorated in various spots,
notably rust areas around fenders and door jams and that kind of thing.
They were very useful-looking vehicles. I almost bought one, but I did not.
You're going to tell us more about the size of the pickup bed and everything else. Go ahead.
The bed is maybe four and a half feet wide and five feet long or something to that.
It can hold garbage bags and trash stuff and little things like that, right?
Very useful for that kind of stuff.
It's a property to go around a farm or larger property, but yes, you can go to town if you need to.
I would not recommend taking any long trips with that because safety is really, really marginal.
I mean, there is nothing to protect you.
Like you mentioned, no airbags. Even if you had airbags, it wouldn't make any difference anyway.
You do have to be careful if you take them on the roads.
They're very narrow.
Small engines, three-cylinder engines, 600 and a few CCs.
They probably put out something like 25 horsepower.
Lots of fuel feed being drive.
Lots of fuel feed being 50 miles an hour.
I don't know. Maybe downhill.
I haven't tried to go up Smith Hill.
I'll have to ask my friend how fast he can go up Smith Hill.
That'd be interesting.
And you register them as classic vehicles, antiques.
So pretty straightforward, easy to do in Connecticut.
I don't know about the other states.
No missions required.
Correct.
Okay, good.
That was that. And it was fun.
Okay, you've also driven a couple of much more exotic, really exciting cars.
No, I got to ride in a couple exotic cars, but I did not drive them.
Okay, excuse me.
Very different.
One race car from the 1970s.
Compact.
A lot of fun on the little roads around here.
And another hypercar of the early 2000s.
And just a thought that race cars have no place on public streets.
And hypercars are extremely fast cars.
Sports cars are just totally useless on the streets because you just cannot get their full potential.
Use their full potential.
Use their full potential, exactly.
Plus, you said that the body situation on some of them were so confining or low or whatever
that it's very hard to be able to go down some of the streets we have in our listing area,
downhill, or even go turn to go uphill without the possibility of scraping the front end
or rear end of somebody.
One or two of these vehicles you drove or rode in?
Yeah.
And yes, but you have the same problem.
If you tow a trailer, you have the same problem.
There are certain streets that have angles.
You get to the bottom of...
Wellfield Road.
Wellfield Road.
End of 112.
Yes.
You run into that problem.
But anyway, that was fun.
It was thrilling.
Were they street licensed?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Both of them had classic plates.
Again, classic plates.
You know, classic plates, I think.
Okay, now...
Yeah.
Okay.
That was my phone.
Okay, go ahead.
Shall we move on from these?
They were exciting to ride in and very impractical to own, right?
Yeah.
It was a little...
It was like riding with you and your RX-7 except a little more extreme and a little scarier
yet.
Okay.
But they have airbags in those cars, right?
No, absolutely not.
Oh, they don't?
In the sports cars?
No, no airbags.
Again, it wouldn't do you any good if you had them anyway.
Okay.
Well, moving on into some other areas in the automobile industry, as I look at one
of my weekly periodicals, periodically these...
This magazine I'm looking at comes out with a section called Cars and Concepts, trying
to let everybody who reads these particular magazines, mostly people in the car industry,
what is forthcoming several years down the line as they try to make newer vehicles
more interesting to get you to buy things instead of to buy them instead of to hold
on to your existing vehicles, which I think a lot of us are planning on doing, because
we like the vehicles that we have already better than maybe what's coming down the line.
And the public doesn't get to see these cars coming down the line unless they are getting
automotive magazines in their subscriptions and or they occasionally make news stories
out of these coming events.
But cars seem to be getting sleeker in design than they have ever been.
Not necessarily more beautiful, I would say, in some of the pictures I'm looking at here,
and I'm not going to name anything because hopefully we won't see them anytime soon.
But the car industry never seems to run out of abilities to make things look new
enough to make you want to buy it.
But at the same time as vehicle prices have been going up in the industry, amazing things
have been going on to seemingly keep the cost of purchasing a car lower.
One of them is extending contracts of financing.
They used to run three years, four years, or five years.
And now you can finance it.
I think you can finance a new car for up to seven or eight years.
And that's only designed to keep the monthly payments down.
It does not change the price you're going to end up paying over time.
It's actually going to increase it because there's more interest in those eight years
or seven years or six years of financing than there are in the three, four, and
five years.
And tucked in there behind the interest is the principal cost of the vehicle.
And of course, you have to plan on wanting to want to finance a vehicle that long.
But how many people want to finance a vehicle for five, six, or seven years when the manufacturers
are trying to get you interested in something as early as two or three years after you've
just purchased your latest vehicle?
Jay, you want to comment?
Well, I'll say the same thing I usually say.
Vehicles are much better built than they were.
And they last a long time.
So the engines can go what?
800,000 to 200,000 miles.
You're willing to live with the vehicle.
There should not be any problem in over six or seven years.
However, of course, it does limit your ability to trade it in.
And if you do trade it, you want to make sure you're not under water,
which brings me to the point that sometimes you're better off
purchasing a freshly used car at a very discounted price.
And I can think of a few vehicles that are really great deals on the used market.
And on the other hand, there are certain brands that hold their values very well.
So if you go buy a Toyota or Honda, statistically, you have a good chance that if you trade it in,
even if you're financing it, if you trade it in after three or four years,
you might not be under water and you might be able to refinance a new car
and not lose any money.
So there are options out there.
There are options out there.
Let me switch to extended warranty programs.
I just learned a very disturbing factor about extended warranty programs,
which are designed to tell you that you are protected against major breakdown costs
if you own an extended warranty program that goes beyond the manufacturer's stated warranty,
most of which are between three years and 36,000 miles to three years and 50,000 miles.
The programs tout that they will pay for costs,
maybe with a minor cost to you of $100.
So depending on what type of program you buy from zero to maybe even $500 deductible.
But I just had a transmission situation on one of my vehicles,
which I wanted to have looked at by the dealer who sells these vehicles
to see if this problem and it happened to be a transmission clunking sound in one of my jeeps
in case it was going to be a situation where the transmission might be requiring replacement.
This is a 2014 Jeep which has this clunking issue with the transmission.
And I have an extended warranty which is still in force for this vehicle.
And the dealer called me up and said, yes, we've diagnosed that you have something going on in your transmission,
but let me tell you something, your extended warranty program has something in it that says
if the cost of the repair is more than the value of the vehicle, they will not make the repair.
Now, listen to this.
If the cost of the repair might be more than the value of the vehicle,
and this is a 2014 Jeep Cherokee, and I can tell you it is probably not on any Kelly Blue Book or any book worth more than maybe $10,000
because it's got 135,000 miles on it, the transmission cost for replacement was $10,000
and the dealer said they might not pay to have this transmission replaced.
They will give you the value of the vehicle in place of the total cost of the repair.
What good is that? They buy the vehicle from you, you have a vehicle with a bad transmission
supposedly being covered by an extended warranty except for the small print that I'd ever read.
So back up for a second.
Okay.
There's a difference between warranty and an insurance because that's like what the insurance company...
The warranty of a vehicle doesn't seem to have a depreciated value situation clause in it.
If something fails in the three years or 50,000 mile warranty of a vehicle and the transmission were to fail,
they're not going to come back and say your vehicle is worth less than the cost of the transmission
because it's within the three years or 50,000 mile at the time and a mileage factor guaranteed by the manufacturer's vehicle warranty.
So that extended warranty is basically an insurance policy?
That's what it seems to be, but it seems to have limitations of what they're going to cover
even though you may have paid and think everything is covered fully
if that breaks down in that time of your extended warranty period which is usually maybe as long as three years beyond the three-year warranty that comes with your vehicle.
Depending on what you buy, you can buy all sorts of programs and there are lots of them out there.
So which one did you have? What did you buy for that particular vehicle?
Lifetime warranty by Jeep. Lifetime goes 999,999,999,999,999,999 miles.
I think it states in the warranty and somewhere down in there it says,
If your vehicle is worth it at the time you have something go wrong with it,
we will not put that required replacement part in because it costs more than the value of your vehicle.
And there's no vehicle that's going to be worth anything by the year 9999 as a warranty is good for.
So you cannot get these warranties anymore.
So what are you going to do with your vehicle?
I don't know. The transmission is working fine.
When it warms up, it's just a functional issue which I discovered.
It happens when the transmission is cold.
I thought maybe I'd better have it checked out when they took it in for oil change.
The dealer comes back and tells me that they found it.
They had no way of fixing it but the transmission replaced it would be $10,000.
Maybe some labor involved.
And the warranty that I thought I had won't cover it.
So would you trade it in? Just trade it in?
No, I'm going to drive it. Transmission is otherwise fine.
So what are the symptoms that you have?
Clunking from a shift from gear 4 to gear 5 when the transmission temperature is below 100 degrees.
And I happen to have a manual on my Jeep which tells you the transmission temperature
from whatever it is when you start the car up in the morning to whatever its normal running temperature is,
which is around 170 degrees if I look at it.
But between, let's say, 50 degrees and a 50 degree morning and warm up over 100,
every time I am accelerating, and not hard necessarily,
but when it shifted from 4 to 5 it clunked into it, clunked.
Not shifted smoothly like it's been doing up to when this started
between maybe it was three months earlier than this particular show.
Have you taken it to another dealer?
No, I just took it to my Jeep dealer.
But he read me the wording in the warranty which told me that they would not pay
if my vehicle, he didn't look up my vehicle's value in Kelly Blue Book or whatever book.
We didn't get that far.
But I don't think my 2014 Jeep is probably worth in anybody's used car book at 10,000
even though value values of vehicles have gone up over time.
Most likely not.
Most likely not.
So interestingly, you know, I have a Subaru that's now a two-wheel drive,
so it has not a sometimes problem with the transmission.
It's like a real problem.
And it has more miles, but it shouldn't be an issue.
It's got 160 plus thousand miles.
What's your warranty on it?
And warranty is long gone.
But I have two points here.
One is that the reliability of the Subaru transmission is questionable
because my daughter, who also has a Subaru with a same automatic transmission,
you know, the...
Okay.
When and if you have a vehicle with a warranty on it,
as Jay asked the difference between a new car vehicle warranty
and an extended warranty, which is more like an insurance policy against breaking down,
you need to, if you buy an extended warranty or insurance policy in your car,
you need to really look.
And these programs are advertised on many TV shows.
And then I have...
I am now besieged with having a new used vehicle, pre-owned, new used car
that I am now being besieged by some of these warranty programs.
Telephone calls on a number that they have found that they can...
A ground line that they can reach me at my home.
And I'm getting mailings saying,
your Audi Q5 is used and you need to protect it in the long term
and call us and we'll give you how much you can save if you call before.
You know now the prices are going up.
All this saleship stuff.
But do not buy any of these.
My admission to listeners listening to this is don't buy any of these
until you have actually seen the entire warranty in print sent to you
and looked for things like I was told would cost more...
If it cost more than the vehicle is worth,
they would not put it in under their warranty program no matter what you thought you purchased.
So my other point was when you do encounter a problem
that you think may be under warranty and you bring it to a dealer
and the dealer gives you a hard time, go to another dealer.
My daughter had that with a Subaru.
She went to one dealer and one dealer said,
okay we know there's a recall in that car
even though the car was out of warranty,
they replaced her transmission at no cost.
And it was like a five or six thousand dollar job
if she had to pay for it.
And on the other hand,
the other dealer where she had initially wanted to go
was just giving her a hard time
and was not going to do the job and was not trying to help her
and cover the car under warranty.
A point Moelle made,
that is something that is outside of these extended warranty programs
discussion that I'm telling our listeners about
in that these warranty programs require the dealer
that you're taking your vehicle to for repair
to call and get the repair estimate approved
before they do any work on the car
so that they can sit there and tell you
that maybe your repair is okay and maybe it isn't.
And any dealer would have to call this warranty program
if you said take it to another dealer.
This is a warranty program that is in print.
You pay for it extra beyond what you've ever paid for the car
and it may or may not be worth the paper that it was written on.
If you're going to keep a car through the total extended period
of a warranty and that results in the car becoming five,
six, or seven years old
and a hundred, a hundred and over a hundred thousand miles,
blah, blah, blah, okay.
That's what the point of this particular discussion
is about for our listeners.
My point is if you have transmission issues with your car,
it's time to get rid of it,
which is what I'm going to do with the Subaru.
All right, moving on.
Moving on.
You have some more things to say.
We could go to safety.
I don't know that we have any new safety stuff.
We've been talking about safety or driving.
The bicyclists are out.
The walkers are out.
The shadows are out in the evening,
making people invisible
if they're not wearing bright clothing
and are not walking on the right side of the road.
I see too many people walking on the side of the road
going in the same direction as traffic
and they now have dogs on leashes
and the dogs are on leashes.
If they're six feet long, they get to walk
parallel to their owner
and they could be on the road,
maybe even across the so-called safety line,
the white line that's on the side,
sometimes known as a bicycle alley
or some other alley.
And it just says to our listeners,
if you're driving
because you can't be too attentive
and with all the things that can go wrong
and you do not want to hit anybody
or anything on the road.
Right, and we know around here
a lot of teenagers going up and down
from Lakeville to Hodgkin School
who are walking alongside the road
some of them are walking
two or three abreast
and staying two or three abreast
when traffic is going both ways.
And yes, I have a lot of respect for pedestrians.
I think they have the right to be on public roads.
But if you're a pedestrian,
you need to walk in a single file
if there's any sort of traffic coming your way.
Especially if you're walking in the same direction
that traffic's going.
If you're walking in the same direction
or the opposite direction,
that's true, Jay.
You just have to be in a single file.
The other thing I will say, too,
is pedestrians are cyclists.
If you see people,
if you see a cyclist of pedestrian
on the other side of the road,
what I do is I move all the way to the right
even over the white line
or on the white line
so that the cars coming at me
trying to pass the cyclist
or go around the pedestrian
can actually go over the yellow line
and into my lane, if you will,
to give these pedestrians and cyclists more room.
And I think that's just common courtesy
and just not being oblivious
to what's going around you.
That's just my two cents.
That's worth five cents, at least.
Five cents?
Whatever. It's worth your life.
If you pay attention to this suggestion.
Just a reminder.
Walkers and bikers look alike.
Give them room.
Give them room.
Jay, I'm going to turn the rest of the show over to you.
It's a good time to look for car shows.
It's a good time of year.
I think summers are a little hot to have cars
baking in the sun,
but whether it's Lyme or Rock,
there was a car show in Millerton
I think over the weekend across from CVS.
But there were like 20, 30 cars there,
if I can tell.
So there are plenty of car shows around
for people looking for car shows.
I was driving my Porsche around
and kind of got joined by a bunch of guys
in Porsches as well
on the roads
right around Milbrook
over the weekend.
And they were obviously on an organized tour
because there were four or five of them
and that was just driving on my own.
And just a reminder that those roads
are actually beautiful roads
to drive.
And you don't have to be driving fast
to actually enjoy them and enjoy the scenery.
And I've been having the opportunity
to do Sunday morning drives
to and from Milbrook
and it's very enjoyable.
For those of us who like to take our little
special cars out.
Now a lot of little special cars out there
that I haven't seen in a long time.
I said earlier on this show
that
I don't know, I don't think they just purchased
these vehicles.
The little Fiat Cinquecento
otherwise known as 500
two doors.
I've been seeing a number of those on the roads
and this is all since COVID
and they were disfigured.
These cars have not been, I have not noted
and I'm always watching for cars that I haven't seen
out and about
like they are now.
And they are cute little cars.
I must say and I'm glad to see them.
The original 500?
Yeah, the original one, the 500
that you were in here.
All right gentlemen, I'm always watching
the clock and guess what?
It is time to drive
on down the road.
Okay, so listeners, until next week
we are Car Keys with J. DeMarken
Robin Leach and we will see
you on another show
in a week or so.
Car Keys with Robin Leach and J. DeMarken
is produced at the facilities of
CD91.9 FM
RobinhoodRadio.com
Sharon Connecticut.
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