Now comes the next challenge, selling the car. What price for all this work? No Europa is worth Ferrari bucks. But then again, this is a very nice Europa. Not many Europas have had a body off restoration. If you price it too high, you get a lot of laughs and crazy comments. If you price it too low, you lose out on some money. So I started high, placing an ad in the Lotus ReMarque for $29K and an ad in the Lotus Notus for $27K. There was an absolutely perfect Europa that sold on ebay a couple months ago for $32k. Then again, there are lots of them going for less than $10k.
No bites on the new Lotus newsletters so after a couple weeks there so I put an ad in the Sunday Chicago Tribune next. Got one call the first week and another the second. They both seemed interested but no bucks in my hand yet so to ebay I went. The first day I got 1,000 hits and 100 people watching along with 6 inquiries. One of them was interesting because the ebayer is French and you lose something with those translation web sites. Several emails back and forth on that one. I also spent about 45 minutes on the phone with a collector in Atlanta, answering all his questions. I had a starting price of $9,000 and a reserve of $21,000. You have a reasonable starting price so people will at least think about it. You set the reserve at what you really want for it. I rarely use a buy it now price, just in case I get something that several people with sufficient funds really want. Of course nobody bidding knows what the reserve is until a bidder hits it. Let the bidding begin!
All sorts of questions and comments ensued. I was really optimistic as at the end of the auction I had over 4500 hits and 185 watchers. But alas, they were watchers and not players as the bidding fizzled out at $15,000. I think all the other Europa owners in the world were trying to justify their own cars by sending me emails of how much they liked my car and how much they thought it would sell for. I relisted it in ebay a couple weeks later with a $17,000 reserve.
Not as many watchers this time but there were some new bidders. In the end however the high bid again fell short of my reserve. Now it's time to wait and see who was thinking about it but did not have the spare cash to quite pull the trigger on ebay. 3 days after the auction I got the email I was looking for. The high bidder from the auction was a savvy collector in Canada. Through emails he asked what I really wanted for the car and we struck a deal at $16,000. Not as much as I had hoped for but I really only have at most about $10,000 in the car including the $4,000 purchase price. I kept track of the hours and it all totaled up to about 1100 hours start to finish over a 3 year, 5 month period. So doing the math that works out to 26.82 hours a month of work, But if you subtract the 6 months I took off to work on Paul's Elan that works out to be 35 months or 31.42 hours per month of fun. As to how much I made on the project, $6k goes into 1100 hours and comes out $5.45 per hour. Not bad for a hobby. How many people go golfing week after week after week and shell out $20-80 a day for greens fees? Wouldn't they like to get all that money back and make $5 an hour on top of it? I like what I do.
I had a real nice conversation with the new owner when he called one evening to firm up the plans of transferring the money and shipping the car. He is a Canadian car collector who owns among other cars an Esprit (nice), and a Viper (I won't hold that against him). He had just sold his S2 Europa because it was in need to a major $$ injection for an engine rebuild and a paint job when mine came on the market. Good timing for both of us. The money appeared in my bank account the next day and I awaited a call from his shipper to tell me when to expect a truck. A couple days later I got a call at work from the trucker. He was on the road corning up through Indiana, had to make a couple of stops and wanted to pick up the Europa that night. We had just gone through the aftermath of hurricane lke and my town of Des Plaines and the surrounding area had many closed roads due to flooding. It was going to be a challenge to get the big rig to where I was at. We talked for a bit and I told him to call me at home when he was leaving his last stop in Northfield, about 15 miles away.
The trucker called and I gave him directions to get through on one of the few open roads crossing the overflowing Des Plaines river. I agreed to meet him in the K-mart parking lot a few blocks away. A lot easier for loading. About 8:30 pm, I started up the Europa and headed on over. The rig was there already with the big ramps already down awaiting the tiny little Europa. This was a big open trailer truck towing another trailer. Looked to be 75' long? I don't know, as big as I've ever seen. The trucker was friendly and really liked to talk. After a bit I drove the Europa up the ramps. Barely cleared but barely is enough. He chained her down in the front and rear and then used the hydraulics to move the whole thing up and into the rig. He had a huge Ford truck precariously perched above the tiny little Europa and as he fiddled with his levers he brought down the Ford to within a few inches of the Europa nose. I guess it's his baby now. I signed the release, gave him the title and away he went. Off to Canada after one more stop on the South side of Chicago.
Next - Europa Euphoria, Part 34
