They mention a Ferrari 365, which is a classic Ferrari model. Classic Ferraris can be worth a lot, but the exact value depends on the specific version and how well it’s been kept.
They’re talking about a 1965 Alfa Romeo Giulia Spider 1600 Veloce. It’s a classic open-top Alfa, and the “Veloce” part basically signals a sportier version.
They plan to sell the car on Bring a Trailer, a website that auctions enthusiast cars. It usually takes a lot of photos and videos because buyers expect detailed listings.
The speaker describes the effort required to prepare an online auction listing: taking many photos, shooting videos, and documenting the car thoroughly. For enthusiast platforms, this “presentation” can directly affect buyer confidence and final sale price.
On a manual car, you press the clutch pedal to “disconnect” the engine from the gearbox. That makes it easier to change gears without damaging anything or grinding.
The underbody is the underside of the car, including areas like the floorpan, frame rails, and suspension mounting points. Photos of the underbody matter because they can reveal rust, damage, and signs of prior repairs that aren’t visible from the exterior.
Putting a car on a lift allows a closer inspection of the undercarriage, suspension, brakes, and any potential leaks. It’s a common step during pre-sale research because it can uncover issues that are hard to see on the ground.
A diagnostic fee is the charge for the shop to look at your car and figure out what’s causing the problem. Even if you don’t end up doing repairs there, they still spend time testing it.
A service advisor is the dealership employee who interfaces with customers, writes up the complaint, and coordinates with the technicians. They’re essentially the communication bridge between the customer and the mechanic, translating symptoms into a work order.
A TSB is like the manufacturer’s “how to fix this problem” guide for a specific issue. Dealers use it so repairs are done the way the automaker expects.
A recall is a manufacturer-led action to correct a defect that could affect safety or compliance, often involving a specific repair or software update. Large numbers of recalls can be a sign of systemic quality issues, and they also affect owner experience and resale value.
Honda is the car brand in this story. The host is saying Honda is dealing with more problems than usual and that their electric-vehicle plans haven’t gone well.
A dealership is the official service center for your car brand. It can cost more, but they usually know the car best and may have the right parts and diagnostic tools.
An independent shop is a regular repair garage that isn’t the car brand’s dealership. They can sometimes fix things faster or for less money, but for some problems you may still need the dealership.
Original equipment parts are the same kind of parts your car manufacturer designed for the vehicle. They usually fit correctly and match the specs, even if they cost more than aftermarket parts.
Aftermarket parts are replacements made by other companies, not the car’s original maker. They can be cheaper, but the quality and fit can vary by brand.
General Motors (GM) is the parent company behind brands like Chevrolet. The episode references a “GM alternator” to compare OEM-style pricing versus aftermarket pricing at parts retailers.
Chevrolet is a car brand owned by General Motors. The host is using it as an example of how parts for certain brands can be priced differently depending on where you buy them.
O’Reilly’s is a store where you can buy car parts. In this episode, it’s used to show that parts bought at retail can cost less than parts sourced through dealerships.
Advance Auto Parts is another place people buy car parts. The point here is that retail aftermarket parts can be cheaper than what you’d pay through a dealership.
The service manager is the person in charge of the service department. If you’re happy with the work (or need help), they’re the one who can make sure it gets handled.
The transmission is what helps the car shift gears and send power to the wheels. If it breaks, the repair can cost a lot because it’s a major component.
LIVE
Hey folks, welcome back to another edition of My Car Guru.
You know, I don't cry very much when it comes to the car business or cars and car related
situations.
But I did yesterday.
I mean, I wasn't sobbing, but I had tears and I had a big lump in my throat and it was
all about a friend of mine who's 87 years old, very feeble, worried about him even walking
down the sidewalk and he wants me to help him sell his vintage car.
And so I jumped in my vehicle in Greenville, Tennessee and drove to Greenback, Tennessee,
which if you don't, well, even if you do live in Tennessee, you probably don't know where
Greenback is unless you live somewhere near Lenore City or Merrillville.
And if you're out of this country or out west or up north somewhere, you would call that
Maryville.
Down here, we call it Merrillville.
And so I went to way out in the boondocks.
I mean, it was, I'd never been to Larry's house before and my good friend Tom said,
Lenny, it's out there.
And boy, it was.
So we finally get to where his house is.
His house was built in 1847.
It's on the National Historic Register.
There's a little emblem, a badge, I guess, right beside the front door.
And when you look at the house, you go inside, it has shiplap walls all over.
There's no, I mean, this was even before plaster was the thing, I guess, in rural
Tennessee because this is as rural as it gets.
But just a beautiful home.
You can tell it's old and right beside it kind of in front of it is this like five-car
barn-like garage.
Well in the first stall is a Ferrari worth a ton of money.
It's I would say between half a million and $750,000.
Not sure what the market is on a 365 like that.
But anyway, the garage next to it, there was a 1965 Alfa Romeo, Julia, let's say
make it all names right, Julia, Spider, 1600, Veloce.
And I'm not really sure what Veloce mean.
Hold on a second.
Hey Siri, what does Veloce mean?
Here's an answer from thesaurus.net.
Oh, she's not going to tell me.
Veloce is an Italian word that translate too fast.
Okay, so this is a fast little Alfa Romeo.
I don't know if you know anything about fiat.
It looks like a little two-door convertible car.
Looks like a fiat 124 Spider or an MGB, something like that.
But it's a cute car.
If it were an MG, it'd be worth about $25,000 maybe.
This car is somewhere between $80,000 and $100,000.
And he wants me to sell it for him, which I'm more than happy to do.
I'm going to sell it on bringitrailer.com because it involves a lot of work.
I probably took a hundred pictures, shot several videos.
He sat in a chair there in a lawn chair and watched me taking all these pictures.
And we went on a little drive and that's when I got emotional.
Because here he is riding with me and tops down.
It's a beautiful day.
I'm shifting through the gears.
I ground one or two and he kind of looked sternly at me.
You know, because I didn't have to clutch in good enough.
But I had a nice little drive.
And I was just thinking about, you know, you get to that stage in life.
I mean, you're 87 years old, you're not in good health.
You know, you, in his case, maybe not going to be around a whole lot longer.
And it just made me sad.
And, you know, we, we have all these things.
Many of us do, you know, like I have a lot of vintage cars and stuff.
And I kind of look at collecting cars as a kind of a supplement to my 401k.
And plus I love them and I like the history of them.
But, you know, when you get to a point, it makes no sense to keep him anymore
because probably your kinfolk, your kids, maybe your other family members,
they have no interest in the cars.
And so he's going to sell the cars and donate all of the money
because he has no family, no real family members.
It's just a sad situation.
And isn't that depressing?
I didn't mean to depress you.
But this is what I like to do.
I try to add some joy into his life, some light.
We had some great conversations, talked about his love and my love,
our joint love of cars and his home and some about his life and stuff.
You know, sometimes these older people, they deserve to have somebody to talk to.
I was talking to my brother after I left.
I called him and told him it's kind of an emotional experience.
He said, I totally get it, you know.
And he said some of his greatest regrets is not spending more time with our grandparents
and asking them more about their history and their life,
things that, you know, when you're kids you don't really think about
and you don't really care that much about.
And then you get to a certain age and you're so busy in your life,
raising kids and family and working that you don't think about it then.
And then finally, they get to the point where they die
and you think of all the questions that you failed to ask at that point.
And I asked my brother, say, you're trying to make me more upset.
But he wasn't.
But this was another great car experience for me.
And hopefully I'll be able to sell this car for him successfully on Bring a Trailer.
So I'll take boo-coos of pictures.
I've got to somehow arrange to either send a trailer down there to pick up the car
and bring it up here so I can get pictures of the underbody
and do a little bit more research on the car
or just take it, maybe I'll call a dealership down in Lenore City
and see if they'll let me put it up on the lift, you know,
so that I can look at pictures and don't have to haul it all the way to Greenville,
which is 100 miles away.
Problems, problems.
But again, this is just kind of what I do.
Okay, I'm going to take my first break.
I'll be back here in just a minute.
Okay, I am back.
Quick question, how do you handle a complaint with a business?
Do you, like, go to their Google page, give them one star
and just rip them a new one?
Or do you maybe call the business and yell at somebody
or even go down and create a scene?
I just love people like that, not.
I don't understand it.
I think it's the distance that has been created between us humans
in modern society by the cell phone.
Because the way I look at it, or the way a lot of people look at it,
is if it's a stranger, then you don't have to be nice to them.
I'm sorry, that's not how I look at it.
I think a lot of people do.
And so through the internet, there is this level of insulation that you're safe.
You can say what you want to.
And I don't know, sometimes people think they get what they want by being jerks.
But I'm not a fan.
If somebody comes into my dealership and is disrespectful to my employees,
okay, I understand if things didn't go right with the repair,
they didn't agree with the way, whatever kind of transaction it was,
then it's okay to be concerned about it.
But it doesn't have to go to DEFCON 5.
I think that was the highest DEFCON, you know, like a nuclear war,
or the missiles had been launched.
No reason to launch any missiles.
Just time to sit down and talk like a reasonable human being.
Too many people can't do that.
Well, you can't get anything if you're nice.
Well, you can.
You just have to have the right mindset going in.
So I went to my Facebook page and I saw in Facebook Messenger,
this guy had said, now this really hurt my feelings.
The name of my Ford dealership and Nissan dealership in Greenville, Tennessee
is Gateway Ford and Gateway Nissan.
If you've never listened to this before.
This guy says, Gateway dealership rips off elderly people
and don't stand behind their vehicles they sell.
Their service department employees are the most disrespectful
of any dealership I have dealt with.
So that was sent to me.
You know, it's a good thing he didn't just post that on Facebook.
I mean, at least I should be grateful about that.
But I needed to know what he was talking about.
So I responded.
Please explain.
I've never heard this complaint about my dealership.
We work very hard to take extra good care of our elderly customers.
That's why we have so many.
After 55 years in Greenville, we've proved it.
Maybe I shouldn't have said that.
If you want to talk about any specific issues or complaints,
I'd love to hear them, period.
And so he starts to go in on this complaint that he had.
He's got an aunt, elderly lady.
She's not in good health.
He's having to take care of her.
She has a 2019 vehicle that was bought at my dealership.
And it was under warranty, and now it's not.
It's two years out of warranty.
And so he made an appointment, brought it into the dealership,
wanted to get it checked out.
Just like all other dealerships, just like your doctor,
if you go to the doctor's office, even if you're not sick,
they're going to charge you for being there.
We charge a diagnostic fee.
It's one hour of labor.
And so we did an analysis on this vehicle.
It took more than one hour.
And unfortunately, her transmission is toast on this particular vehicle.
Now, it has less than 50,000 miles.
From a mileage standpoint,
the powertrain is still under warranty.
From a time standpoint, it is not.
And he said the salesperson was rude.
Sorry, the service advisor.
I went and talked to the service advisor who spoke to the gentleman.
He said, Lenny, it was pretty ugly.
He was cussing, and he was yelling so that every customer in the customer lounge could hear it.
And just really creating quite the scene,
and I told him what the situation was,
and he stormed out of here, and he was just mad.
And then he decided to blast me on Facebook.
Now, he said that he went to another dealership many years ago,
and that they had worked with him to try to get some help,
which we would, too.
But you've got to give us the opportunity,
and you don't come into the business and cuss and yell and scream and create a scene.
I don't like being insulted, and nobody else does either.
You know, as far as the service advisors are concerned, when you go into a dealership,
they're not the ones that work on the cars.
They're the ones that take the complaints and translate them
so that the mechanic can understand what's going on
so that they can determine the, you know, we know what the complaint is.
We've got to find the cause of the complaint, and then we have to find a correction.
It may be involved, or it may involve putting new parts on the vehicle,
repairing something that's broken in modern times.
Many times it's about reprogramming,
downloading a fix from the internet, from Ford or Toyota or Nissan,
whatever brand of vehicle that you have.
And unfortunately, sometimes it takes more than once to get it right.
We try to do the procedure that Ford, in our case, and Nissan,
recommends us to do before we spend a bunch of money on parts.
That's not our decision as a dealer, folks.
I just want you to understand sometimes the repair procedure is dictated
on something called a TSB or technical service bulletin.
And so we have to follow that precisely,
or if we spend $3,000 of the manufacturer's money replacing a part
and we didn't follow the procedure properly, Ford or Nissan or any other brand manufacturer,
we'll charge it back to the dealership.
The customer doesn't know any difference because you've driven off,
you've gone home, problems solved, but we didn't do our documentation properly.
We didn't follow their prescribed procedure, therefore we get charged back.
And that procedure may involve downloading a software update, sending you home.
And then the problem reoccurs, sometimes that fixes it,
but the problem reoccurs, you come back.
You end up having to leave the vehicle, we replace a part, you leave.
Again, we're doing what the manufacturer says.
We didn't build the thing, as I've said many times.
You can't say that to a customer, but I'm saying it to you on my car, Guru,
because this is the way a lot of people in the service department think.
We didn't build it, you know.
We didn't engineer it, but we got to fix it.
I saw where Honda recalling 440,000 Honda Odyssey's.
Honda's on a bad roll right now.
A lot of quality issues, their EV program failed miserably.
They invested way too much money in it, and they're struggling.
I just never thought I'd hear that from Honda of all places.
They're just having a lot of recalls and just different issues.
But overall, you give them a chance to solve the problem for you.
You make people want to help you by being nice.
I guess some people just don't have it in them.
Maybe their parents were that way.
They would go into a store or do business, and they saw their parents yell and scream and create a scene,
and they just think that's the only way to get something done.
Or they have no patience with strangers.
As I don't know if I continued what I was saying about cell phones,
but I just think there's a distance between us that has been created because of the cell phone.
If you're not a Facebook friend, or they don't know you personally,
they've got no use for you.
You're just an obstacle in their path.
And I think a lot of people have, well, you know, they have really complicated lives.
You have complicated lives.
You need your car.
You want to get it fixed.
You want to get fixed the first time.
You don't want to have to bring it in again.
It disrupts your life, and I get it.
But don't always blame the dealership.
Now, if they're totally indifferent to your problem and putting you off,
and you just feel that inattentiveness,
I don't mind at all somebody coming in and sitting down and saying,
hey, Lenny, can I talk to you a minute?
Because it has happened.
I get phone calls sometimes, you know, in the evening from friends.
They say, will you help me get my car through?
I understand you have backlog of work,
but I'm getting ready to go out of town.
It's been there for three days.
I need my car.
I said, let me see what I can do.
But they're nice, you know.
They understand there are issues in any business.
So my recommendation to you, if you're a car owner,
is get to know the people where you have your car serviced
and understand that if it's a serious problem,
taking it to a quick loop place or to an independent shop,
sometimes that's not going to be the answer.
You're going to have to go to the dealership.
And that's a dealership service is, yes,
it's slightly more expensive because they use original equipment parts.
They don't use aftermarket parts.
And when you look at like a Chevrolet or a General Motors alternator
versus something you would get from O'Reilly's or advanced auto parts,
there's a big difference in cost.
And that's why the independents can sometimes do things cheaper.
When it comes to labor rate, the cost per hour of labor,
sometimes that's cheaper in an independent shop.
But one of the reasons for that is they don't have the training.
They don't have to send their text to school like car dealers do.
And they don't have the equipment that we do to fix the problems.
There's millions of dollars invested in just training and equipment
in a typical car dealership.
That's why the labor rates are higher.
But hopefully that means that they fix the problem right.
And sometimes you have to follow the instructions from the manufacturer
in the form of the technical service bulletin.
So when you go into the shop, make a friend.
Make a friend out of the service advisor.
If you get really good service and you're pleased with it, tell them.
Thank them.
And say, is your service manager here?
I want to tell him what a great job you've done.
I'll tell you what, that service advisor will greatly appreciate that.
And he'll find that service manager as quickly as he can.
Because if you just say, I need to speak to your service manager.
He said, what's the matter?
Are you unhappy?
You know, he's fearful.
But if you tell him, I want to tell him what a great job you've done.
I want to tell him face to face.
Or write him a note.
You know, nice little handwritten note.
Remember those?
It's not a text message.
It's handwritten note.
That means more.
And they will appreciate it.
And you will have made a friend.
And the next time you come in there, they won't forget you.
They'll know you by name.
And they'll do everything they can to make sure you're happy.
You know, if you go into a car dealership and they give you a price,
a new car dealership, they give you a price on replacing some expensive component.
Don't forget what I told you to say.
Is that the best you can do?
I really don't have the money to pay that much.
Can you help me out?
I guarantee it.
They'll go back.
They'll talk to somebody.
Back behind the curtain.
They'll come back and say, yeah, we can give you 10% off.
Or 15% off.
You know, depending on what the situation is.
Another thing, if it's a major repair and you're just out of warranty,
you say, listen, would you call the manufacturer possibly and see
if they will provide some help to me?
And then call the customer service line with the manufacturer
and tell them what the problem is.
Don't be all mad and hateful with them either.
Be nice.
Because they respond to that as well.
And tell them what the issue is and get a case number.
So when you have a case number, you go back to the dealership
and you provide that number to them.
They know this is a serious situation.
They want to get it solved because the clock is ticking on them.
So customer assistance.
Get a case number.
Be nice to the service advisor.
Compliment them when they do a really good job.
When they do a bad job or something doesn't go right,
don't rip them a new one.
Be nice.
Just make sure they understand and tell them that you will be back.
You want them to keep servicing your car.
They want loyal customers.
They want you to come back.
It means a lot to them.
Okay, I'll be back in just one minute.
So I'm still trying to get help for this guy.
I haven't heard back from Ford yet.
I don't know if they're going to do anything,
but I'm going to do something.
I'll discount the bill to absolutely no profit
and do what we can to make it happen.
But this is an expensive repair.
It's like $6,000.
I mean, you have to replace the transmission basically
with either a factory new one
or a re-manufactured transmission from Ford.
But, you know, he got off on the wrong foot.
A lot of people do that.
And I'm, you know, I'm human just like anybody else is.
It doesn't feel good to get chewed out
for something you didn't do
or to be called, you know, less than human
because they're not getting what they want.
So just be nice.
I think it pays dividends in the long run.
Well, thanks for listening to this edition of My Car Guru.
If you have questions about repairs,
about the value of your vehicle,
about any type of automotive issue,
whether it's about an antique vehicle
that you're trying to sell for a family member
or whatever, I can help.
Just text my personal cell phone number, 423-552-2020
or send me an email to Lenny Lawson,
2020, at gmail.com
and send me your email address
and I'll send you a copy of the My Car Guru guidebook
which will help answer a lot of questions
when it comes to buying and selling and trading
and servicing vehicles.
It's a manual that you will want to keep in your car
or at least study in detail for a while
and then maybe do a refresher
by listening to all of the backlog.
I've got a 533 podcast online right now
and they all have titles
and most of the time the title actually
tells you what I'm going to talk about.
So you can go into that
if you don't know what a podcast is, then just call me.
423-552-2020
and I'll see you on the next edition of My Car Guru.
About this episode
Lenny Lawson shares an emotional story about helping an 87-year-old friend sell his vintage cars, including a Ferrari and a 1965 Alfa Romeo Spider 1600 Veloce, using Bring a Trailer and a ton of photos. The episode then pivots to a debate on customer service: why being polite and constructive beats yelling or one-star rants. He recounts a real complaint at his Gateway dealerships, explains warranty vs. time coverage, diagnostic fees, and technical service bulletins, and argues that respectful communication helps get repairs solved faster.
