In 2013 I bought a brand new VW Passat TDI as an upgrade to my 2003 VW Jetta TDI for hauling the family around. The 2003 Jetta had ~200k miles on it but is a good solid car (still driving it today 5 years later), however it was just too small for the whole family. The Passat was the perfect car on paper, still a VW TDI which I’m familiar with, gets 50+ MPG, has a ton of room, within budget, etc.
So, I go to my local dealership and take a couple test drives over a period of time, make a deal on one and take it home. The Jetta goes in the garage and I start driving the Passat as a daily driver – and I start to notice things…many things that I really don’t like about the car. I tried for 2 months/2300 miles and just couldn’t find any love for this car and spending $25k on a car that I really didn’t like just didn’t seem right, so I sold it. If I’m going to spend that kind of money on something, I’m going to like it (dang it!). I also learned to ask for an overnight test drive or something to get more time in a car before buying it.
Before the Passat was sold I began looking for other cars with the same criteria of being able to haul the family around and still get great MPG’s. I’m not a big fan of SUV’s and while trucks are nice I can’t justify the sub 20 MPG’s that these vehicles get so that narrowed things down a bit.
I’d always kind of liked the 90’s Impala SS and a former employer of mine actually took a ~1994 Roadmaster wagon, stripped off the wood, painted it black, tinted the windows, put Impala SS wheels and a grille on, lowered it and it was a cool looking cruiser. So, I started doing my homework and looking for 90’s “B Body” wagons. In the fall of 2013 I found a nice 1996 Roadmaster, I stored it for the winter and started driving it daily in the spring of 2014. First drive after the winter, cruising down the road and 3 deer come out of the ditch – nowhere to go, no time to react.
I scrounged up a caprice headlight, turn signal, radiator support and a white Hood and patched it back together. I put a few thousand miles on it over the next couple months to be sure I didn’t repeat the Passat experience above. There were a few things that I didn’t like about it, but it was just a few things and I had an order of magnitude less money in the Buick than the Passat so that makes it much easier to tolerate :). Plenty of room, decent power, MPG’s in the low 20’s on the highway and mid teens around town. Probably equal to any similarly sized SUV’s or trucks available. How many of those vehicles can swallow a full 4×8 sheet of plywood, close all the doors and get 20+ MPG?
Of course we can’t leave well enough alone, I had a lead on a wrecked 2012 Chevy 4500 chassis cab that had a Duramax in it and the gears started turning…a Roadmaster wagon is like a living room on wheels, complete with 12 way heated leather couch and recliner, and the Duramax is a well regarded powerplant that should get some pretty good MPG’s in a relatively (to a truck) lightweight car. There’s a lot of Duramax swaps out there, how hard could it be?
So, on the 4th of July weekend of 2013 the Roadmaster drove into the shop under it’s own power and started the transformation.
Fix Until Broke 