I Said Goodbye To My Dream Car And Finally Ended Two Years Of A Living Nightmare

Last weekend, I finally ended the last chapter of a nightmare that has dominated much of the past nearly three years of my life. Two men stopped by my parents’ house, pushed my 2002 Audi TT Quattro down the driveway, then dragged it away with a truck and a tow strap. That Audi was my dream car, yet seeing it roll away made me smile. In fact, the last time I was this happy to see a car go away was when a tow truck hauled away my old diesel Ford Econoline van, and the sales of both vehicles relate to the same nightmare.

I first started collecting cars back in 2016. My car collection started almost entirely by chance after my 2012 Smart Fortwo caught fire. I leveraged my connections at Smart USA to score a brand new 2016 Smart Fortwo Edition #1. The dealership was supposed to take my 2012 Smart as a trade, but gave me the trade-in value and just let me keep the car, anyway. Suddenly, I had two cars despite having only planned on having one. Since then, I have purchased over cheap 30 motorcycles and over cheap 25 cars. Basically, I have dirt cheap rent and spend all of my money on cars. I would sell most of these vehicles later on, only keeping my favorites. As of today, that means 15 cars, 4 motorcycles, 1 bus, and 1 fiberglass camper.

A Short-Lived Dream

One of my favorite purchases was this 2002 Audi TT Quattro. I picked it up in late 2020 and this car was another piece of physical proof that dreams can come true. I’ve loved the first-generation Audi TT ever since I drove one in Gran Turismo 3 some 22 years ago. And yes, this one was in a sort of weird configuration of having the 180 HP engine and Quattro. Countless people have called me stupid saying that such a configuration doesn’t exist, but they’re wrong. I love the TT so much that I bought a ZipZaps version of it.

Remember RadioShack’s ZipZaps? My enjoyment with this car would be short-lived and the vast majority of my near three-year ownership of the car was like an albatross around my neck.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, I got laid off and suddenly found myself with tons of free time. I decided that instead of moping around my tiny apartment, I’d make my automotive desires come true. I picked up that Audi TT, a Buell Lightning, a Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen TDI, another Smart Fortwo, and even a Harley-Davidson Sportster. Of course, 2020 is when I met my wife, Sheryl. Our second real date (or what we call our second real date) was a 5,000-mile road trip across the country in a little four-cylinder Ford Ranger.

Against the odds, 2020 was looking great. I even picked up a beat-up Volkswagen Passat W8 with a manual transmission as a restoration project. And my off-road rig? A 2006 Ford E-350 Power Stroke van.

I loved that van. It was one of the seemingly few 6.0-liter Power Strokes that worked well and its limited-slip differential made it unexpectedly decent when the going got rough. Sheryl and I took it on a Gambler 500 run, but not before giving it a parody NASA theme complete with “Free 10mm Sockets” spray-painted on the side. Little did I know that this van would kick off a series of unfortunate events.

My Nightmare

My problems started when I brought the van home with its new livery. The apartment complex that I live in does have an association, but the rules here are bizarre for what’s more or less an HOA.

There’s no rule about how your car has to look, but the association says that it has to run and drive. You also cannot have a vehicle with more than four doors. What qualifies as a door? Minivans technically have five doors if you count the tailgate. A Chevy Astro or any van with double doors also has five doors. This rule has never been explained. Another rule is that the vehicle parked at the complex cannot have business markings.

Knowing the bylaws, I figured I’d be just fine parking my rally van at home. After all, there are no rules against having an ugly car! My neighbor disagreed and was apparently offended by “Free 10mm Sockets” joke painted on the van, thinking it was some ploy to draw in children. At any rate, this neighbor also calls me “it” so her complaint about the van was likely a cover for what she really doesn’t like about me.

Anyway, she called up her friend at property management, who called up a tow company. That tow company dragged away three of my cars and tried to take a fourth.

Every reason given didn’t make sense. The association said that the van had graffiti on it, my Passat W8 supposedly didn’t have a parking pass, and my Passat TDI wasn’t even given a reason. In doing these tows, the association also broke its own rules, which state that a vehicle’s owner is to be contacted and warned before a tow. I only discovered that my cars were disappearing when I went outside to take pictures of the W8.

Retrieving the vehicles was another hassle. All of the cars were towed either in park or in gear. The W8’s clutch was seemingly fused engaged. I tried a bunch of troubleshooting, including an on-the-spot fluid flush, but the clutch just wouldn’t let go. And the other Passat wouldn’t engage drive. Only the van moved under its own power.

My wife (then my fiancee), the attorney that she is, saw all of this to be too suspicious and recommended that I take legal action. After all, the reasons given by the condo association didn’t make sense and the tow company seemed super sketchy.

To illustrate how crazy this was, up above are my three cars in the “tow yard.” Yes, that’s a residential backyard. There were no fences, gates, or signs. There was even nothing stopping me from just hopping into any car and driving off. Heck, there weren’t even any cameras.

Through the case, we learned that the tow company didn’t have a yard (that part was obvious), a license for the truck, or a business license, and the guy who performed the tow wasn’t even an employee. Its insurance documents weren’t legitimate, either. In other words, some guy essentially winched my cars across a parking lot and took them to his mom’s backyard.

The cases raged on for over a year and I learned more interesting things. We identified at least 50 vehicles breaking the bylaws, but curiously, they’ve never been towed. To this day, there’s a van with plates four years expired, four flat tires, and a family of creatures living under it. It’s never so much gotten a warning.

How My Audi Became Illegal

Eventually, I settled my cases, collected my payout, and bought more dream cars. The litigation wasn’t fun. Lawsuits are never as quick and simple as they seem on television.

While the suits were ongoing, I received death threats from friends of the tow company and my cars got vandalized multiple times. A quartet of meth heads also stole all of my tools, a brand new set of mud tires, and that Power Stroke van. And they did it all in -20 degree temps in the middle of winter. When the van got stolen, the meth enthusiasts spray-painted the wheels a different color and then parked it just 200 feet away from where they stole it. They then turned it into a rolling meth lab and tried upgrading it like a discount version of Overhaulin’.

When the van was recovered, the police couldn’t believe that anyone would be so stupid to steal such a crappy vehicle. That night, I found myself in an interrogation room for over an hour while officers told variations of the story that I told them, with critical facts wrong. Sheryl tells me that they were trying to catch me in a lie about the theft. I didn’t lie, some jerks really did steal my shitbox! After that night, I ran a FOIA request on my city and learned that the meth heads told the police that I gave them the van. Police thought that the van theft was so dumb that I had to be a part of the meth ring somehow.

Anyway, while all of that was happening, these fiends tried stealing my Audi TT.

They pried out one of the windows, stole all of the vehicle’s documents, stole my Gambler 500 ring, and tried to make off with the car. Thankfully, my laziness paid off because the car had a bad starter that I hadn’t gotten around to replacing. Doubly thankfully, the goofs didn’t know that bump-starting is a thing that you can do with a manual transmission.

On their way out, the thieves also made off with one windshield wiper and the car’s battery.

Stealing the car’s documents put me in a tough spot. I don’t remember why, but for some really dumb reason, I had the car’s title in the glovebox. Yes, leaving the title to your vehicle in the vehicle is some smooth-brain stuff. I know, I learned the lesson the hard way. Anyway, they made off with the title, but not the car. The local police said that they would report the vehicle as stolen so that the thieves couldn’t transfer the title. At the time, this seemed like the best plan.

Not long later, one of the thieves set his girlfriend’s car on fire. Police found him living in the rafters of a nearby garage that he broke into. His buddies were also caught and all of them are still in prison today. My tools and tires were found in that garage and I bet my title was there, too, but none of it was ever returned to me.

Just to twist the knife in a little further, the meth heads had destroyed the van’s ignition so badly that it no longer started. When my court cases concluded I scrapped it for $400. The Illinois Secretary of State (our DMV) was no help in making the Audi legal again. Every DMV bureaucrat that Sheryl and I talked to said that the car is still stolen and I cannot get another title for it. Sheryl spent a year trying to lawyer the car into legality again.

Eventually, she found a path to make the TT legal again, but it would have taken tons of time and around $2,000. I’d get a registration, but I’d have a TT with a damaged A-pillar, a branded title, and I’d have to deal with the deterioration caused by the car sitting for two years. Oh, and it was time for a new timing belt. I decided it wasn’t worth it and had her list the car for sale.

What’s Wrong With People?

Somehow, the misery with this car still wasn’t over. As I said before, I’ve bought and sold over 50 vehicles; most of those purchases and sales happened on Facebook. If you’ve never sold a vehicle on Facebook or Craigslist before, consider yourself lucky. Sometimes, things have gotten downright toxic. In early 2019, I listed a project Suzuki GSX1100G for $500. One prospective buyer asked to come over to take a look. I gave him my address, but he decided to offer me $200 before even leaving. I declined and told him that my price was firm. In response, he threatened to kill me. Thankfully, I wasn’t murdered! The motorcycle was sold to someone else for my asking price.

That kind of stuff I’m used to. I’ve gotten enough death threats that I try to do all sales at a place I don’t live. People, even readers of Jalopnik, have sent me enough threats that I don’t even use my real city on Facebook. So, I thought I’ve seen it all, but things have gotten really weird lately.

This is what happened last month when my wife tried to buy a cheap set of 5×112 wheels for one of my Jettas. There’s a whole conversation there, but the seller said things that I will not show here. Just know that it was disheartening:

Some Facebook stalking revealed that this wasn’t a troll, this guy actually believed what he was spitting out. This wasn’t our first rodeo with messages like these online, but it was new to find it when trying to buy something. I chalked it up to a fluke. You know, we just so happened to find the weirdo who doesn’t want money for very little effort.

Then I got a weird insult about my identity when I tried buying a Smart Fortwo Cabriolet. And the messages we got about the TT? They were so bad that Sheryl deleted most of them and blocked the people. One of the blocked people went as far as to use a fake account to spam my Facebook and Instagram. Apparently, he then spent quite a bit of time messaging similar messages to my friends.

Honestly, it dragged me down from my normally bubbly state. Over the past year, I’ve felt like people in my local area have been getting a bit more hostile towards trans people, but I’ve been thinking maybe I’m just imagining things. Well, maybe not. I just wanted to sell my own stolen car! Buy the car or don’t, there’s no need to write thousand-word screeds about what’s in my pants.

A Happy Ending

At one point, I was getting ready to call up my favorite scrapper. I would have gotten something like $250 and the car would have seen the business end of a crusher, but at least I would have been rid of the car. But, I wanted to see the car live on, somehow, so we put up with it a little longer.

Thankfully, a buyer showed up with a great idea. He has a Volkswagen Squareback at home with a rotted-out floor. Instead of replacing the floor, he wants to cut the floor out, cut everything off from above the floor of my TT, and mate the Squareback body with the TT’s pan, thus making a 180 HP Quattro Squareback. [Editor’s Note: Hot damn! – JT] This is sort of what I was thinking. The TT may never be road legal again, so I was hoping it would become a racecar or a project. The buyer showed up, gave me a wad of cash, and dragged away his loot. He was even able to get it started and drive it home. Hopefully, the car will serve him well.

I’d long thought that I’d be sad to see the Audi drive away, but I was really happy. Finally, after over two years, I’m finally done with this stupid saga. I feel like I can finally move on from this dark time in my life and not have a daily reminder of the past. Even better, the car’s going to live on as a crazy build. The Audi TT remains one of my dream cars, so I will be getting another. If I’m lucky, my next one will be a convertible with the baseball glove seats, and it won’t be stored anywhere near my neighbors.

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