Jay Ward interviews VinWiki founder Ed Bolian

Well, hello, everybody.

It's that time again.

I'm Jay Ward.

And I'm Wayne Carini, and we're talking classic cars.

So, Jay, what happened?

You went to Hilton Head?

What was going on down there?

Yeah, you missed a great Hilton Head Island Concorde.

It's one of my favorite events in the fall that I enjoy going to with my family.

And this year was another great one, lots of great cars, but one of my favorite parts

was sitting down with Ed Bolian and just talking a little bit to him about how he built his

YouTube empire with almost 2 million subscribers.

Not to mention, he set a cannonball record back in 2013.

So listen to this.

All right, this is Jay Ward, and I'm here at the Hilton Head Island Concorde Delegance

for 2023 on beautiful Hilton Head Island.

And I'm here with Ed Bolian.

And if you don't know that name, you should.

You probably, if you watch YouTube and you've watched some of probably the most successful

and popular people on YouTube for car channels, Ed, you'd be up there, wouldn't you?

I don't know about that.

We have a lot of fun.

Tell me, just for people like the number of people right now that subscribe to your

YouTube channel.

We're right at 2 million.

2 million people.

Yeah.

That's quite a bit.

It is.

And it's been amazing just to watch it grow.

We started Ben Wiki as an app, and then a year later, started a YouTube channel

in 2017 to promote it.

And so six years later, more than a billion views later, it's amazing to see what the

platforms allow just in terms of being able to get fun, automotive content like this out

there.

Yeah.

Tell me a little bit about what Ben Wiki is first.

I know what a VIN number is, but what was the idea?

Well, the idea was to build kind of a crowd sourced version of Carfax.

So anybody could contribute information to the timeline of any car by its van or

by its license plate.

And that kind of becomes more of like a living and breathing history of it.

So if it's a car that shows up here at the Concor or a cars and coffee or in a terrible

crash or, you know, a news story, anything like that, it kind of goes in there and it's

been amazing to watch our community grow.

We've got about 500,000 registered users and more than 10 million posts and 160 million

cars.

And so it's an awful lot of fun.

So VIN Wiki came first and then obviously the YouTube content.

But before that way back, we were talking yesterday, you're a Lamborghini guy.

I am.

And you worked for Lamborghini at one point in the Atlanta area.

Is that right?

I did.

I was a college at Georgia Tech.

I started an exotic car rental company back when you get stated income loans as a 20 year

old for Lamborghini's.

And so I bought a Gallardo when I was 20 and started the rental company, grew that a bit.

And then actually in 2009, I became the director of sales for Lamborghini Atlanta, to be

quite honest, as the economy was sort of, you know, hurting, especially in the United

States.

They were looking for somebody who had a stronger grasp of the economics of ownership

to sell around the catastrophic depreciation cars were experiencing.

And so I started there.

I think that year they had sold five new Lamborghinis and by the end we were selling,

you know, 70, 80 of them a year.

And so it's it's been great.

And I learned a lot and really grew to love the brand even more.

I'd always loved, you know, the poster cars, the big naturally aspirated V12 Lambos,

but really getting to live with them every day was a lot of fun.

And at 20 years old, you bought a Gallardo.

Like first of all, you weren't old enough to legally drink.

No.

And you were able to buy a Gallardo on credit.

Yes.

In the years that precipitated the collapse of 2008, there were some reckless lending

practices, you might say.

You were the poster child for that.

But I paid my bills and I was able to grow it and get more cars.

And to be quite honest, what that allowed me to do through the rental car days was

build up some real bulletproof car credit.

And so when I was at the dealership, I could get a loan for whatever I wanted.

I had more buying power than most of the customers, just because I had so many

long term service successful car loans.

I've always loved, you know, in the anti Dave Ramsey sense of the word, just how

can you buy a car you can't afford?

Yes.

And for me, that was looking like you won the lottery 10 years ago.

Because if you buy a car that's 10 years old at that time in particular, you

know, they're talking in 2009, 10, you know, whatever, then those cars were

still pretty functional.

And so I loved to buy old Ferraris and old Lamborghinis and by the worst

ones I could find, make them a little bit nicer, drive the wheels off of them

and then, you know, sell them for a little more.

Sell little props to get to drive the car for free.

That's always the idea.

You've had some good cars and you've had some very bad cars.

Absolutely.

Tell me about one of the worst car purchases you ever made with a car you

wish you couldn't give it away when you were done or you wish you

would have never bought it in the first place?

Well, I know something's coming to mind.

There's, yeah, the car, the worst car that I've ever owned and the worst

car I've ever made it somewhere in was actually a TVR Cerbera that we bought

last year for a show that I do with Tyler Hoover of Hoos Garage and

Freddie and Tavares Hernandez called Card Trek and it is honestly a

sponsor driven production with Auto Tempest that they wanted to do something

higher end and they asked us what we wanted to do and the answer was

obviously play top year.

And so we built kind of a knock off top year concept on YouTube.

And so we do these different car buying challenges.

So the idea was that we had to buy a car overseas and then import it

and then take it to Emilia.

And so last year I drove it to Emilia just barely.

But it was, it was a Cerbera, yeah, from 1997.

So they have to be 25 years old.

And it was a car that was built by Jamie Shaw of Max Power or Charisma,

which was like the Pimp My Ride of the UK.

And so it had these like crazy wide everything and badly fitting fiberglass.

Like if a stock TVR isn't bad enough.

Exactly.

Somebody modified to decrease the level of reliability ended up with this thing.

And they were very successful.

Fantastic.

Yeah, I ended up driving all the way back from Emilia to Atlanta at night

with no headlights or tail lights.

So we had a camera car front and rear to keep people from hitting me.

A British car with bad electrical.

Are you sure?

You never would have thought.

Are you sure?

It's really out of character.

And so I was doing an event with another sponsor up in Montana.

And I had, I had it sold.

And I knew I'd probably found the only person that would ever want it.

And I, my flight got delayed.

And I was like, I'm not going to get back to deliver this car.

And it was one of those car guy crises of like there's, there's no one else.

Yeah, I have to close this deal by whatever means necessary.

I have to get there.

And I had to do two other connecting flights just to get back to Atlanta.

I was home for 30 minutes before I was like, right.

I was like, here's your amazing new car.

You're going to love this.

You're going to love it.

I mean, I can't really imagine what.

And you have to sell that car at golden hour.

It has to be like not under bright sunlight where they're going to see how terrible

it is and not at dark when the lights don't work right there at the golden hour.

That's it.

And the movie will call that golden hour.

Exactly.

Yep.

That lightning queen through the desert kind of time.

That's it.

Perfect.

And then tell me about like the worst Italian car that you probably

bought.

I bought a Lamborghini Gallardo spider out of the police impound for the state

police of Virginia.

They had repossessed it when it was found to have been then swapped and they

sold it.

They had somehow gotten a title for the car, but it had a previous

salvage title.

It had been rattle can painted black and then rattle can painted orange.

And the probably worst smelling car I've ever owned.

And I bought a I mean, but it was honestly a running and driving 2013

Lamborghini Gallardo LP 550 spider, which should have been 140,000

bucks.

What if 35 grand?

OK.

And Honda Civic money, as I like to say.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Exactly.

You know, for the price of a Camry, you could own the worst Lamborghini

on the planet.

No, it doesn't.

This is manual.

There's a game.

It was not.

No, it was a it was a paddle shift car.

But they but you know, I got it for that.

And honestly, I didn't know what to do with it.

And so what I did, I made a video of like, what would you do

if you bought a $35,000 Lamborghini and I had all the viewers submit

videos talking about what they would do.

And then I picked my five favorite ideas and then let the audience vote.

And I let them buy me out of it for 35 grand.

And this woman from Arkansas, she's a nurse for like special needs kids.

And she's like, I would turn it into the Lambulance and I would take it

to all these shows and let these kids ride in and stuff like that.

And that's what won.

I was so glad.

And so it's now wrapped in this ambulance livery.

And she takes it around all the time and drives a little off of it.

The Lambulance.

It's so, so cool.

So, you know, it's a good way to take some some real bruised

lemons and turn them into not lemonade, but always water that

tastes like better water.

That's drinkable, better water.

Exactly.

Did you have something to add to the story?

Yeah, I just I remember that one.

You remember the Lambulance?

The Lambulance.

You took it to like when I broke the record.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we took it.

He he set the Hot Wheels World Record for the most loops

in a Hot Wheels track.

Yeah, he has a Guinness plaque and everything to prove it.

How did you do that?

It's amazing.

Nice work.

The gold platform.

That's my son, Graham, and nine years old.

We did it on your eighth birthday.

That's so cool.

Yeah.

So so going back to why we're here,

you've got a collection of cars here.

You're one of our featured collectors at the show this

weekend and you're laughing about that because you don't

consider yourself a collector per se.

You know, I'm an accumulator.

I like that.

Yeah, I wind up with a lot of them and I do have some

cars that I intend to keep for a very, very long time.

And but I told him when they called, I was like, you

know, my cars aren't like nice.

Like I drive these things all the time.

I brought the highest mileage US example of a manual LP640

coupe, the highest mileage US example of a manual 640 roaster

and a my CL 55 from the cannibal record has got 140,000

miles on it.

It's been road hard, put up wet and yeah.

So I was very honored very obviously to be here and it's

amazing to think about that and to hopefully, you know,

some of us of our age can kind of be the torch bearers

of this because these are ideas and institutions and

events that need to need more young people.

Young blood.

Yeah.

And I think when you see a Lamborghini from the 90s or 2000s,

that attracts a younger crowd.

You know, most of the white hair guys that are your

Packard, Duesenberg, Pierce Arrow guys, they're not so keen

on the 2003 Lamborghinis and that's okay.

There's everybody.

And that's the great thing is that, you know,

we've always been very good at having a corral for each

type of brand and each type of thing.

And I think that the more that we can see the crossover

because, you know, anytime you can wind up with a

multi-generational experience, you're just empowering so

many relationships to start.

And I think that when you see, you know,

fathers and sons and grandchildren all walking around

and having a blast, I think it's just amazing.

And it's exactly the kind of thing that we need to

foster in being here.

Very cool.

So one thing you mentioned was Cannonball Run.

First of all, tell folks really quick what it is for

those who don't know and then tell us a little bit

about how you got involved and how you did.

Absolutely.

So the Cannonball Run was not just a goofy movie

from 1981.

It was an actual event that Brock Yates and Steve Smith

from Car and Driver organized.

They ran it competitively four times in 1971, 72, 75, and 79.

And then they kind of hung it up as they were getting ready

with how neat them to make the movie.

There was a continuation event called the US Express

that happened until 1983.

And then after that, it was really just left up to

idiots like me to go out and see how fast they could

drive across the country.

Unsanctioned, if you will.

Exactly.

Just kind of time trial style.

And so I really in high school just read about this,

learned about the folklore, and just thought,

that's the perfect way for me to express what I mean

when I say that I love cars.

Because we're a car guys, we're in a world of car guys,

and everybody just means something different.

They may love fixing cars, detailing cars, driving cars,

teaching about cars, drawing cars, whatever the case may be.

And I think that for me, it was really identifying

the right car for the right challenge,

solving that challenge or that problem in a series of steps,

then figuring out the team to do it

and the tools that you need,

and then how you share that with the world.

And so Cannonball just became that sort of beacon

that I chased for about a decade.

And it was a whole lot of fun to pursue.

And then in 2013, we actually were

able to set the world record for doing it.

And so we drove from New York to Los Angeles,

the Red Ball parking garage that car and driver used

to house the press fleet all the way

to the Portofino Hotel in Redondo Beach

that they used to use.

Mary Alice owned it, was a huge fan of Brock

and racing and everything like that.

And so finished there in 28 hours and 50 minutes.

28 hours and 50 minutes to go from New York to Santa Monica.

That's right.

How many miles does a total?

It was right at 2,811 the route that we took.

So your average speed was?

98 miles an hour overall, 100.3 moving.

103 moving was your average speed.

So you are cooking.

There's times when you're hitting 120, 130, 140.

Exactly, that's kind of,

we cruise between 130, 145 most of the time.

So after we did three fuel stops,

so the car that we've got here

has three radar detectors and two laser jammers

and a police scanner and a CD radio,

multiple GPS systems and ambulance traffic light changer,

you know, all the kind of things

that you could possibly put in the car to avoid detection.

And it was kind of designed to be kind of a sleek,

color ambiguous Mercedes, it's a CL-55 AMG.

Right, we call it the gray ghost.

That's it, it just blends in.

But the fact that you did this run,

there's so many things to go wrong, right?

I mean, you can have a tire blow at 120.

You can have a police helicopter somehow see you

and call that in and you're just hosed.

And then you're going to jail for a long time

because you're tripling speed limits in most places.

That's it, that's it.

So we had a lot of fun and we fortunately got away with it.

And magically it was kind of a high gas price week,

something late in 2013 in October.

And so we were able to go,

we just saw five fixed speed traps

and we saw four of them long before.

And fortunately the fifth was staring into a

recently updated website, I'm sure, on his computer.

And so we didn't have to worry about that one.

We passed about a dozen cops moving in either direction

and it was really amazing.

You know, it's sometimes, you know,

we chase these goals as car enthusiasts

and sometimes they live up to life, sometimes they don't.

But this was one that we pulled into the Portofino

and at the time, nobody there even knew a thing

about cannonball.

Did they know you were coming?

No, no, I didn't think we'd make it.

So I didn't book the hotel till Arizona.

And so we pulled in just before midnight

on October 20th, 2013.

And it was just one of those things that

it just, it was everything you wanted it to be.

I'm going to ask a very bizarre question.

When you have to go to the bathroom when you're running,

did you just do the old Gatorade bottle?

Is that the trick?

Is you're rolling?

Well, let's say we had facilities on board.

But one of the things that we had learned

was that a lot of the guys that had run in the 70s, 80s,

even as we had seen the record advance in 06 and 07

with guys like Alex Roy and Richard Rawlings,

they were doing really, really long driver steps.

And, you know, in endurance racing,

you do 90 minute steps or something like that.

So we thought that two to three hours on a road car

was really perfect.

And so every couple of hours, which

was about, you know, half or a third of a fuel tank,

we would pull over and just do a roadside driver change.

Because you drive faster enough in your first 10 minutes,

in your last 10 minutes to easily make up

for that minute of lost time, decelerating and strategy.

So we could use the side of the road facilities

in such a circumstance.

You figured out.

And your record was finally broken when?

It was.

It was broken in late 2019.

And then during COVID, it got broken a dozen times

in six weeks because the cops weren't

allowed to pull people over in a lot of states.

And everybody was told to stay home.

And those that chose not to found it a whole lot easier

to drive a long way fast.

Yeah, they hit the jet stream on that one

and just flew right through.

But your record stood for quite a bit of time.

That's not bad.

It did.

You know, you don't set anything like that,

hoping it stands forever.

It's really about the community.

And that's been so much fun is being

able to sort of reignite this modern cannon

boulders community.

I call it the fraternity of lunatics.

Yes.

Because, you know, we all find our own ridiculous way

to do it.

And there's been new electric car records, new motorcycle

records, coast to coast to coast records,

southern route records running from Jacksonville

finishing in San Diego, which is about 500 miles shorter.

And so that's all a ton of fun.

And fortunately, we've been able to kind of capture

and immortalize a lot of those stories

on the Vinwiki YouTube channel.

Back in 2016 at the Greenwich Concours,

there was a cannon boulders reunion.

And it was great because Pam Yates was there.

And at this point, Brock was quite advanced

in Alzheimer's and stuff like that.

And unfortunately, I'd been able to go up and visit him

via home not long before it.

And so these guys were all sharing stories.

And it was very clear that their grandkids were well tired

of hearing about it.

And so when somebody actually asked them and handed them

a mic, they would not stop talking.

And so I was like, you know, somebody

has to find a way to capture all these great stories.

And so it's been an honor to have Brock Yates Jr.

and John Harrison and some of these guys

come along to just really tell the stories of what

it was like to be out there and be on the road

for that long in such different conditions

than we find today.

Yes, exactly.

In the analog era, if you will,

that's it, that's it.

Why would he go wrong with a car too, actually?

For sure, yeah.

And that was kind of Brock's thesis was, you know,

he wrote in his book in 2001 that there was really

a wall at 30 hours, that no one could go faster.

Beyond that, he said no one would be crazy enough

to try it now because there's twice as many people

on the road, there's twice as many cops.

And the penalties for speeding were so much bit different.

I mean, when Gurney got pulled over in the Daytona in 71,

he got a little, you know, $50 speeding ticket,

nobody cared, and they just went along their merry way

at no time exceeding 175 miles an hour.

Yeah, we're in a different era now, but it is amazing

because of what the cars can do,

what we can do with electronics and with radar systems

that we can get around a lot of things.

So pretty amazing. Absolutely, yep.

Well, Ed, I got to thank you just for sitting down

and rapping me a little bit about Vin Wickey,

about the best and worst Lamborghinis you've ever

owned about being on the road for the cannonball run.

Yeah, it's been a pleasure.

And what are you up to now?

What's your next big car thing you're doing

that you want to rap about?

Is there anything, Cole, you want to share?

You know, it's been a wild week.

We just did another cannonball.

There are some guys that I get together with

and we do it in old cars.

So we just raced in 1976, Rolls Royce Silver Shadow

across the country.

I say race, we did it in 36 hours and 10 minutes,

average in 78 miles an hour,

and it only drank five liters of oil

and six liters of brake fluid.

And so it's, you know,

I think that's well within spec if I'm not mistaken.

That is correct.

And so we made it into the Portofino.

The next day I had actually shipped in

a Yakuza modified Lamborghini Diablo SV from Japan.

I trucked it from the port at Long Beach

to the Portofino Ballet, picked it up the next day,

drove it to SEMA.

Some of my friends at Glosseter

are transforming that car right now

and so it's going to become a more like reasonable

looking thing.

We pull all the underglow lights off

and the picnic table wing and the wheels and all this.

And so it's going to become a more

presentable automobile soon.

And so now I'm here

and this is the last big event for the year.

So it's at home ready to clean up some things,

sell off some cars and enjoy the holidays with the family.

Good. Well, Ed, thanks for taking time with us

and catching up.

And it's always a pleasure to see you

and we'll see you in a million, I'm guessing, in March.

I'm sure the pleasure is all mine.

Come by and tell some car stories.

All right, we'll do.

Whoa, Jay, that was really interesting.

And I didn't know anything about it.

And boy, this is great

to find out all that information,

especially, you know, his record that he broke.

And then, of course, all the cars he really loves.

Yeah, he's a major collector of gated Lamborghinis.

You know, as you heard, he's just a major enthusiast,

loves these cars.

He's a little bit younger than you and I

and he really gravitates to these cars

of the late 90s, early 2000s and knows his stuff.

And his YouTube viewership really shows

that that audience is following him.

Jay, it sounded like you had a heck of a time

at Hilton Head. What's next for you?

Well, here we are coming into the winter holidays.

I'm getting ready to shut it all down for the year.

January is right around the corner

and I'll be going down to the NASCAR clash

at the Coliseum, the LA Coliseum,

where they're gonna do a mini bowl

to race the NASCARs in.

The reason I'm going is we're gonna bring

our life-sized Lightning McQueen

to maybe do a couple laps.

That sounds great.

Wish I could be there, but we'll see you next time.

Absolutely, see you on the road.

All right.

Jay Ward interviews VinWiki founder Ed Bolian

About this episode

Request an Explanation

Want to learn more?

Help improve this episode

More from Talking Classic Cars with Wayne Carini and Jay Ward