We’re Rescuing A 375,000 Mile New York City Taxi That We Bought For $800 On Copart. Pray For Us

Few cars live a life as hard as a New York City taxi cab. They’re in operation constantly, they stop and go, they deal with all sorts of weather and infrastructure conditions, they have to handle thousands of passengers who like to spill things both natural and unnatural — taxi cabs are the mules of the car world, and buying a used one with 375,000 miles on it would be a terrible idea. But we just did, and it was against the advice of our nice and understanding new partners at Copart, who showed us scores of much, much nicer — honestly, downright gorgeous — alternatives. But we chose the cab; here’s why.

I should clarify right away that the whole point of this was for us to demonstrate that there are amazing project cars on Copart (We even asked you, dear readers, to help us find some running projects and you came up with a bunch of great options). We wanted to show that Copart is a single-source gearhead destination where enthusiasts know they can get cars in all kinds of conditions, including great runners like this sweet Nash 600 Airflyte or this Magnum PI-worthy Ferrari 308 that we definitely should have purchased instead.

Did we do any of that? Nope. David found this cab and once we saw it none of us at The Autopian could let it go. The curiosity was too strong. Plus, it’s a car I’ve never seen for sale before. A custom NYC NV200 taxi is an extremely rare vehicle and it’ll be super cool when we get done building/fixing it.

To the eternal credit of Copart, when we told them we purchased an NV200 Taxi instead of, say, this sweet Buick Gran Sport, they just laughed and said they’d love to see what we come up with.

It Was $800! How Could We Not Do It?

We ended up bidding on a lot of different and interesting vehicles before ending up with the NV200. This includes the aforementioned Nash, the Mercedes El Camino thing, and the World War II Jeep.

There are always great deals to be had at Copart, which is why there were usually at least a few people also bidding against us for the various cars and trucks we were looking at. Every car we ended up bidding on sold for a price I considered to be a really good deal, but this is the Internet and we wanted an insane deal.

It’s here that I should also probably warn you that searching Copart and bidding on cars is so fun that, like Pringles, once you pop you can’t stop. I’m told there’s a variety of illegal drugs that are similar. The issue we quickly ran into was not a lack of cars, but way too many potential options.

Amongst a bunch of potentially interesting cars that David found one night was the Nissan NV200 Taxi. He posted the link to Slack around midnight in California and I looked at the link a little after 4:00 AM. Perhaps it was the bright yellow paint or maybe the late-night feelings, but we all understood quite quickly that this cab must be the next Autopian vehicle.

How To Buy A Car On Copart

Understanding Eligibility

One of the challenges of buying unique vehicles like the NV200 is that every state has its own laws about who can bid and buy different cars at auction. Copart has a relatively low-cost Membership, which brings a bunch of perks, and one big one is that it makes determining what you can/cannot buy extremely easy.

For instance, here’s what the page for that Ferrari 308 looks like for us when logged into the site:

As you can see, there’s a bright green spotlight that says I’m eligible to bid.

Going Through A Broker Was Easy

For boring business reasons, I needed to buy a Nissan NV200 with front-end damage from New York as the representative of a California LLC. This could have been an enormous PITA because some states require a dealer license to buy a car, but Copart offers a lot of intermediary brokers (I used AutoBidMaster, but there are many others) who could make the transaction for us for a fee without needing a special license.

Understanding The Condition Of The Car

I was able to use the site’s built-in condition report option to get all the info on the van, which had a surprisingly high-value estimate of $11,810. I also learned that there was a front-end and side-impact, though the airbags didn’t go off. There was also an issue with the odometer, which didn’t matter for our purposes but was still good to understand.

The Bidding Is Intense But Fun

When the day came for the taxi to sell I got into the live auction on the site, which comes with super intense music and a robotic computer voice that lets you know if you’re the high bidder or not. This definitely adds to the drama and fun of it all.

As you can see, I might have bid on this sweet Bentley that was also there. I couldn’t help it! There’s a version of this post where, instead of a 375,000-mile Nissan NV200 Taxi we bought a rad Bentley (I also sort of want this one). Again, there are almost too many potential futures!

Pulling The Trigger On The Cab

I was a bit nervous given that we knew just enough about this NV200 to get in trouble, but I bid anyway. My max bid was $575 and that, to me, seemed like a crazy steal. Perhaps because of the odometer issue, there wasn’t a lot of competition for the cab and we won it.

Or so we thought. A nice feature of Copart is that, if you don’t hit a reserve, the seller has the option to accept your bid or not accept it. In this case, the seller declined.

A couple of days later I got an alert that the NV200 Taxi was going back up for auction and, using the “Make An Offer” option, we floated them an offer of $800. This was accepted and just like that we, The Autopian, own an NV200 Taxi.

Because we used a third-party broker and because we had to pay for tilting/documents and storage for the van until we could get it picked up, the total cost of the vehicle was $1,790. If we were able to skip the broker we’d have saved about $300.

Copart also offers the ability to book a shipper through them or book one yourself. We booked one directly and Copart made it easy to get the info to the company picking up the van.

We’re Going To Try To Rescue The Cab And Put It To Work

Right away you should know: The state of disrepair this cab is in will shock you. 375,000 of the hardest miles ever put on a car punished this Nissan to within an inch of its life, and fixing it is going to be a herculean challenge. Honestly, we don’t know if we can ever pull it off.

Jason has a vision for the cab that involves keeping a lot of its cab-ness (he wants to use it as an Uber, he wants to do a cross-country taxi ride with the meter running, he wants to take it back to New York), while also modifying it in a few fun ways that feel very Autopian. This meant that the cab needed to stay on the East Coast for now.

To have a fully operation cab we need to have a running cab and, from the condition report, we just know that it has a complete motor and transmission that should work. The cab’s been sitting for a few weeks, which means that some tinkering will likely need to be done to get it running. Rather than ship the cab all the way to David’s doorstep, it was much closer and more interesting to ship it to our own Stephen Walter Gossin in North Carolina.

The ball is in his court next and the goal there is to see if we can get it running well enough to get it to a Nissan dealer, who will inspect it and tell us everything that happens to a cab after 375,000 miles of abuse by New Yorkers.

What could possibly go wrong? Initial reports from Steph Walter Gossin say: Lots. Pray for us.

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