The Road Trip That Made My Dream Car Mine

When does a car become yours? Is it when you first feel the keys in your hand? When you get the title in the mail? Or does that moment depend on the car itself?

My 1979 Alfa Romeo Alfetta Sport Sedan wasn’t my first car, but it was my first special car, a mutt with many donor parts from many Alfas. Spiders were well represented, with taillights from a ‘71 and an engine and electronic fuel injection system out of an ‘87. The seats were from a Milano. A passenger door from a blue Sport Sedan contrasted with the car’s original red. The entire thing was oversprayed in a drab grey. Somewhere along the line, the interior door cards were ripped out and replaced with sheets of aluminum diamond plate—unsafe, unsightly, and uncomfortable in summer, when the inside of the car would heat up like an oven and the metal would scald my arm. I called the car Ol’ Sport, and I loved it.

The Alfa didn’t really feel like it was mine until, after I’d owned it a while, it sunk in that pretty much no one took any notice of it. If they did, they thought it was an old E28 BMW. I was proud of my Alfa. I thought it was unique. Most everyone else thought it was junk. The first time my father saw it, he turned to me and, ever the smart-ass, asked, "... and that thing runs?"

Only I could see how special it was. That’s what made it mine.

But the Alfa was never meant to be a forever car. It wasn’t safe for our two young kids, despite my efforts to make it so by installing three-point belts in the back seat. When we moved from Los Angeles to Denver, the car had to cope with the added burden of frigid winters with plenty of snow followed by brutal summers of the searing solar radiation that comes with the city’s mile-high altitude.

When the catalytic converter was stolen from our family’s 2009 Prius in the height of the summer, the Alfa became the family car. Suddenly, my seatbelt installation job didn’t seem so great. My wife didn’t like driving it, especially with its worn transaxle mount producing a conspicuous thump any time the driver stepped on the gas or let off the clutch in a manner other than very, very slow.

In other words, this was the inflection point. It was time to sell my Alfa, sell it while it was still running. But there was another reason why I suddenly became more motivated than ever to sell my Alfa: My dream car had come up for sale.

And I never see my dream car for sale. Not here, in the United States.

Before I met David I didn’t know much about Peugeots. I knew they existed. I knew the company had pulled out of the American market in the early Nineties. I had even driven a rental Peugeot on a vacation to Finland, of all places. Beyond that, the slate was blank.

What I learned was that, by 1990, only the starry-eyed brand loyalists and automotive savants were frequenting Peugeot showrooms in the U.S. Even though by every measure their main offering was an absolute triumph of a sports sedan.

The Peugeot 405, especially in Mi16 trim, could run with the best of the Bavarians and Swedes in the segment. It had the bona fides: A high-tech dual overhead cam four that feasted on revs; subtle ground-effects bodywork; and a trunk spoiler that said you meant business. The full leather interior, heated power seats, plush carpets, and quality sound system showed you had class.

The full package.

Somebody kept it classy enough to buy one particular 405 brand new in Portland, Oregon in 1990 and then drive it for 30 years before selling it, in 2019, to a close friend in Montana. Faced with a home remodel, and having by his own admission too many cars in the garage, the second owner decided he was ready to sell it, and quick.

One of my favorite details in this final American era for Peugeot is the font on the badging. The negative spaces in the letters are just a little off center. Not so much as to look comical, but just enough to catch your attention, to make you smile. Kinda off-kilter, like David.

But we’re all a little skewed, aren’t we? When David wrote me to confess, with evident sincerity, that this obscure French sedan was his dream car, I didn’t flinch. Automotive obsession comes in many flavors, and even though I don’t have a particular affinity for these cars and didn’t necessarily “get it” in particular, I understood the phenomenon. I respected it. We had never met, but looking out at my crowded driveway full of old misfit Land Rovers, VWs, and Hondas, it was clear that we were cut from the same cloth.

That text above in italics that’s referring to me was written by a guy named Steve Edwards. He’s helping me tell this story because he is part of the story.

Steve lives in Montana. Like me, he’s a car guy. We’re also on Twitter, the both of us part of a fun, enthusiastic corner of the social media platform known affectionately as Weird Car Twitter.

We’d interacted with each other on Twitter before, but that was the extent of it. We’d never met or spoken to each other. But all of that would change when he tweeted something highlighting interesting Craigslist ads in Montana. One of them was a Peugeot 405.

I froze the instant I saw it. I’d only run searches for Peugeots about a thousand times before. Usually there would be no results. On the rare occasion there was something, it would be a non-running diesel 505 wagon, mouldering and rusting away in a weedy patch behind someone’s garage.

But this thing? This thing looked practically pristine.

I responded to Steve to tell him how much I liked it. And then I DMed Steve to tell him how I more than liked it; I loved it. A Peugeot 405 was a dream car. I asked for more info and he sent me the ad.

It wasn’t just a 405. It was a 405 Mi16. The fast one, the one with the spoiler that made it look even better, even more aggressive. To top it off, this thing had magnificent leather seats that, like its paint, looked practically new.

I immediately came up with a list of reasons why this would never work. It was too expensive. It was over a thousand miles away. I already had a bizarro-mobile in the Alfa Romeo. There was probably something major wrong with it that wasn’t disclosed in the ad. Oh, and it was probably already sold.

Steve offered to go drive a hundred miles to look at it for me. I did my best to say no. I really did. But despite my best efforts to tell him not to worry about it, he must have sensed something. Still, he assuaged any sense of guilt I had about sending him on such an errand, and assured me he’d love to see such a car in person.

"I live for this kind of stuff," he said.

A hundred-mile journey in western Montana is a treat, not a chore, especially when there’s an interesting car to drive at the end and a mission to accomplish. When I bumped down the final mile or so to the seller’s home in some deep woods near a green lake, a 1989 Peugeot 405 Mi16 came into view. I was so drawn to its presence that I fully missed the fact that the seller, B., was standing right there in the driveway. He said later that he’d waved. I didn’t see it.

After an awkward hello, some shuffling of masks, and the usual dance-around, B. and I got to the heart of the matter. I had brought my flashlight and armed myself with objectivity. I was keyed up to be as critical as I possibly could.

But I knew the instant I opened the driver door that this was David’s car. With a soft click from the handle and a swoosh, the aroma of quality leather and late-20th-century plastic hit me hard. The smell of nostalgia. The immaculate daring red trim contrasted cleanly with the conservative white exterior. The seat cushions, pleated like a row of soft baguettes ready for the oven, invited me in. Bienvenue, mon ami.

A folder overflowing with service records, a trunk full of NOS spare parts, and the full background story from the owner spoke well of the car’s pampered life. I crawled under and over the Peugeot, shined my light in dark corners, and listened intently to the idle. I rocked the suspension back and forth.

Eventually, B. asked if we should drive it. I nodded and settled behind the wheel. I pulled quietly out of his neighborhood, letting the 1.9-liter growler come up to temperature, toying with the clutch uptake. We traded car stories about his RX-7s and my Land Rovers, a stranger with a shared life in cars, a fellow pilgrim.

When we reached the junction with the county highway, B. turned to me and pointed west.

"Go that way. It’s a great twisty road. You’ll see what this thing can do. Now, seriously, I want you to drive this car like I would. Don’t be afraid to push it."

So push it I did, running clear through the revs in each gear, double clutching and braking hard deep into the curves. It was tight and responsive, beautiful to drive. The grin on my face probably told B. all he needed to know. In my notes, the only real issues were a bouncy speedo, lousy tires, and a noisy drive axle. It felt like the car could run Peking to Paris that day. I fell a little bit in love.

But this wasn’t my next car. It was someone else’s.

The money at stake here had been earned by a complete stranger I’d met on Twitter. His dream car. What if it turned out to be a nightmare? David’s decision would rest heavily on my report from a thousand miles away. Knowing that he was waiting by the phone like a high schooler desperate for a call from his prom date didn’t make things any easier.

I said my farewells to B. and drove to find some cell service. I took a deep breath, called David, and gave the car my seal of approval.

It’s funny, wanting two entirely opposite things at once. When Steve called me, part of me just wanted him to laugh and say that the frame was rusted out, that the head gasket was toast, that it needed a new transmission—anything that would let me put this thing out of my mind.

But I also wanted to hear that it was fantastic. I wanted Steve to tell me it was beautiful and running strong. I wanted this guy who I’d never met before to tell me that if I wanted it, I should get it.

And that’s pretty much exactly what he said. In terms of negative stuff, he reported little more than the original ad indicated: The front drive shafts needed either work or replacement, though Steve also noted they weren’t making much noise and still rotated smoothly. Beyond that, it needed new tires.

In terms of the good stuff, it seemed Steve didn’t quite know where to begin. He gushed about the handling, about how much juice it had all the way up to its 7200-RPM redline. But he was just as impressed with how nice it was on the inside. "The carpet," he told me, "is so plush that when you sit in it, it’s like a time machine. It’s like you’re in 1989, sitting in a brand new 405 inside a Peugeot showroom."

The price should have been the main obstacle. Either that, or the fact that I had to sell an utterly bizarre (and, let’s face it, undesirable) car in order to get the bulk of the money. But to my surprise, the Peugeot seller came down a little over 20 percent on price. And shortly after posting my Alfa for sale, a charming young couple came to test drive it, resulting in an unlikely case of love at first sight.

As we drove around in Ol’ Sport, their grins reminded me of my own the first time I’d driven the car. This was to be their first special old car. Everything that made it undesirable to purists, like taillights and seats from entirely different models, only made it more endearing to them.

We got back to my place and they made an offer of only $500 less than what the Peugeot seller was asking. So we shook hands, and I called the Peugeot seller and Steve to talk logistics, and we made a plan.

So B. brought the Peugeot a hundred miles south and dropped it off in front of my home. I offered to give him a lift back to his job across town, and asked if we should take the Peugeot for one last ride.

"No," B. said, placing the keys in my palm. "I’m not even going to look at it. Let’s take your truck."

And true to his word, he didn’t turn around, didn’t crane his neck for a final glance or goodbye. We chatted briefly about what an amazing car the Peugeot was, but we mostly rode in a fidgeting silence as B. spent some time in rumination.

Cars are fungible. The experiences we have with them, and the bonds we make with them and because of them, are not. I suspect the emotions B. grappled with that afternoon were those familiar ones. I had to resist the impulse to give him a comforting clasp of the shoulder, to promise him it was okay, that his car was going to a good home.

Instead I gave him a warm final handshake and told him I’d stay in touch.

The Peugeot lived with me for a couple of days. I drove it frequently, sheepishly telling myself it was a shakedown before the long journey south to Colorado. In truth, I was loving every minute behind the wheel. I was starting to get it. My respect was growing. I eagerly showed it off to some of my more puzzled friends. My wife Julie, who is very anti-sedan, peeked out the window at it and asked me, dubiously, if that’s what all the fuss was about.

I replaced the expired tires with a good set and got the thumbs-up from my friend and mentor Jeff, a mechanic with a speciality in old European iron. It needed a few things attended to, but we would make it.

Of course I needed to spend more than the $500 difference between the Alfa and the Peugeot. There were the tires, the one-way plane ticket to Bozeman for myself, plus another one-way ticket.

I had come this far with Steve. It only seemed right that we should make the 1000-mile journey from the Peugeot’s old home to its new home together.

We’d do the drive, and he’d be a guest at my house for a night, and then he’d fly home. The circle would be complete.

After a year starved of both travel and new human contact, this wacky plan was just what I needed. In 2018, Julie and I bought a decrepit Land Rover Defender sight-unseen from strangers on the Internet. We’d flown one-way to Ethiopia, a country we’d never been to, picked it up and drove it all over Africa before putting it in a container and sending it home to Montana. Even through the dubious filters of social media, I inherently recognized that David was drawn to this little French sedan, and damn it, I was going to help.

The day I left to pick up David was perfect for a road trip across the wide American west, the kind of early autumn morning that portends good things down the highway. It was just as much the kind of day that makes you question why you’d ever want to leave Montana in the first place. With the season’s first frost scraped from the windshield, cerulean Big Sky overhead, and snow-dusted peaks in the foreground, I turned the lion’s nose south from Missoula. Like a meteor we hurtled 200 miles down I-90 toward the airport in Bozeman, just the Peugeot and me on a date with destiny.

Like a lot of flights into Montana, David’s was early and as I pulled into arrivals I couldn’t miss him. Literally jumping up and down, he ran the length of a concrete island and leapt into the passenger seat.

When I saw that white sedan pulling up at the airport, I was floored by how much better it looked in person than in photos. And it looked great in photos. But I also found myself almost immediately repeating to myself That’s your car. That’s your car. But no matter how many times I told myself this, it just didn’t feel true.

I ran to the passenger door, flung it open, and jumped in. The gorgeous oxblood leather seats were the most comfortable I’d ever sat in. The sound of the small but high-revving engine was thrilling. And even after 32 years, it somehow still smelled like a new car.

"You want to drive?" Steve asked me.

"No, not yet," I said. "Let’s get away from the airport first." The plain truth is, I was just trying to take it all in.

A few miles on, we stopped at a gas station to top off before we hit the Interstate. I put my credit card in the pump and then put the pump into the car. This is your Peugeot and you are filling your Peugeot with gas using your own money, I told myself. It still didn’t work, though. This was truly a foreign car to me.

"I’ll drive," I said to Steve.

The clutch engaged at an entirely different point than the Alfa’s. In fact, in these first moments, I almost thought I hadn’t put it into first. Truly, it was not yet my car. I’d paid for it. I was driving it. I owned it. But the car was not yet mine.

And then around Laurel, Montana, the car started doing something strange. While we were cruising at a comfortable 80 mph, the car started lurching a bit. The revs would dip, then come back, then dip, then come back, then be fine again. I could feel it more, being the one at the controls, so I pulled over and had him drive it to confirm what I was feeling. It did the same thing, and also started giving us a flickering CHECK ENGINE light.

I’ve owned a lot of terrible cars, the worst among them an automatic, carbureted 1984 Accord and a CVT-cursed 2006 Ford Freestyle. Having a car lurch and go all Christmas-tree on me is, unfortunately, somewhat familiar. So perhaps it was in this moment that the car started to feel a bit like mine. Not entirely, but a little.

We pulled off at a NAPA in Laurel and agreed we should check the air filter. The awkwardly located and stubborn clamps fought me for a bit, and I tore the skin on the top of my hand. A small blood sacrifice. Yes, it was feeling even more like mine now. We tried replacing the filter with a spare from the trunk but found it to be a poor fit, so we simply cleaned out the first one. Steve’s hypothesis was that the car had simply not been driven so much and there may be a bit of crud in the system. I concurred. We went into NAPA and bought some injector cleaner and amused the guy behind the counter when we told him what we were driving. He also shared our theory.

"Man, I haven’t seen a Peugeot since I don’t know when," he remarked, looking at us like we were a little crazy. We went back out to the gravel parking lot where the French sedan was waiting for us. Or perhaps taunting us.

A thought came to me as if rendered in bold neon letters: I don’t trust this thing.

It sounds like a frightening thought to have 600 miles from home. But it wasn’t. It was a true, correct thought, and it brought to mind something appropriately and famously French: The Little Prince. In that story the Prince meets a fox and wishes to become friends with him. The fox says that the Prince must first tame him. To which the Prince says, "What does tamed mean?"

The fox answers, "It’s something that’s been too often neglected. It means 'to create ties'..."

Creating ties comes with time, not a title. It comes with experiences. In The Little Prince, the fox tells the Prince he can tame him by showing up at a certain place at a certain time every day. And then the fox will begin to trust him.

They say you should never love a thing that can’t love you back. But sometimes you can’t help it. And sometimes you have to let yourself anyway, especially when it comes to the car of your dreams. And while a car can’t love you back, it can certainly need you.

The Peugeot was good, but it needed injector cleaner in that moment. That’s what I fed it, and we got back in the car and drove it to Sheridan, Wyoming, where we checked in at a Super 8 motel for the night. Steve and I shared dinner and stories about places we lived and cars we’ve driven. He was no longer a stranger or someone on Twitter. He was a friend who helped me get something special, and who was coming along on an adventure, there to help if trouble arose.

But trouble didn’t arise. The Peugeot ran smoothly the rest of the journey. I’ve since replaced one drive shaft and swapped the CV boots on the other, with the help of another friend, Dave Severenuk of the delightful automotive podcast Apex Adjacent, who also helped me replace a worn bushing and mount on one control arm.

Sharing experiences with friends through road trips and repairs—these are the things that create ties. And now I can honestly say that not only do I own the car of my dreams, but the car of my dreams is truly mine, as well.

David Obuchowski writes fiction and long-form essays, his work appearing in The Baltimore Review, Jalopnik, West Trade Review, Longreads, Border Crossing, Fangoria, and many others. He and artist Sarah Pedry will have their first children’s book published in 2023 by Minedition (Astra Publishing House). David is the creator, host, writer, and producer of the in-depth automotive documentary podcast, TEMPEST. Find him on Twitter @DavidOfromNJ.Steve Edwards once bought a Land Rover sight-unseen from strangers on the Internet in a country he'd never been to, and drove it through half of Africa. He blogs at Overlander.com and his writing has appeared in Overland Journal and Adventure Journal. Find him on Twitter @mt_drift.