A VIN number is a special code that every car has. It helps people know exactly which car it is and learn about its past, like who owned it and if it had any accidents.
Carfax is like a report card for cars. It tells you if a car has been in accidents or had problems before, so you can decide if it's a good car to buy.
Crowd sourced vehicle history is when lots of people share what they know about a car's past. This helps make a big, detailed story about the car that anyone can see.
A naturally aspirated V12 is a big engine with 12 cylinders that makes power without using extra devices to push air in. It gives smooth and strong power.
Car credit is how lenders see if you are good at paying back money you borrow for cars. If you have good car credit, it's easier to get loans for cars.
Buying used exotic cars means getting fancy, fast cars like Ferrari or Lamborghini that are older and cheaper than new ones, so you can enjoy them without paying too much.
Golden hour is the time just after the sun rises or before it sets when the light is soft and warm. It's a great time to take pictures or show off cars because they look better in this light.
This is a fancy Italian sports car from 2013 that has a powerful engine and can be driven with the roof down. It’s a special type of Lamborghini called the Gallardo Spyder.
The Honda Civic is a small, easy-to-drive car that many people like because it doesn't cost a lot and doesn't need expensive repairs. When someone says 'Honda Civic money,' they mean something that is affordable and good value.
The Toyota Camry is a popular car that many families buy because it is comfortable and lasts a long time without many problems. People sometimes compare it to expensive sports cars to show how much you can get for the money.
The Renault Wind is a small car with a roof that can open, so you can enjoy driving in the sunshine. It’s meant to be fun and easy to drive, and some people like it because different family members can enjoy it together.
The Cannonball Run was a secret race across the US where drivers tried to get from one side of the country to the other as fast as possible. It was real and happened in the 1970s, and later became a funny movie.
The Ferrari Portofino is a fancy, fast car that can be driven with the roof down. It's made by a famous company called Ferrari and is often used to show off or for special events.
Endurance racing means racing cars for a very long time, like several hours, so drivers take turns to keep going without stopping. It tests how strong the car and drivers are.
A speeding ticket is a kind of punishment you get if you drive too fast. The police give you a paper that says you have to pay money because you broke the speed rules.
The Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow is a very fancy and comfortable old car that rich people used to drive. It’s known for being smooth and quiet, and taking one on a long race is a special and unusual thing to do.
The NASCAR Clash is a special race that happens before the main NASCAR season starts. It’s shorter and just for fun, with some of the best drivers racing.
LIVE
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.
About this episode
Ed Bolian shares his journey from starting VinWiki, a crowd-sourced car history app, to building a YouTube channel with nearly 2 million subscribers. He discusses his early days buying and renting exotic cars, working at Lamborghini Atlanta, and his passion for finding and driving unique vehicles. Ed recounts some of his worst car purchases, including a notoriously unreliable TVR Cerbera and a salvaged Lamborghini Gallardo he transformed into the 'Lambulance.' The conversation also touches on his Cannonball Run record and the importance of engaging younger generations in classic car culture.
Jay Ward sits down with Ed Bolian at the Hilton Head Concours d'Elegance. They discuss his popular YouTube channel, VINWiki and more. Discover Ed's fascination with unique car purchases, breaking the Cannonball record, and his love for Lamborghinis.
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