I hated the drive to Ohio.  The drive itself was fun, but the purpose behind the drive was extremely disappointing.  We started the drive at 6:00 AM.  We knew it was going to be a 6 hour drive, we were anticipating it. There was minimal traffic, the way we went was extremely fluid and we were easily capable of making it there in an older and plush Cadillac.

There were no issues going through Wisconsin, and then Illinois, other than the morning fog and the pitch black of the morning did not help visibility.  Even with custom LED headlights, the light would only shine so far and then it was stopped by the abundance of fog.  When we got past Kenosha, the fog was gone.  There was daylight again, and we plowed through the journey at 80 miles per hour.  The only issue I had on this journey was having to stop for gas in the middle of Indiana.  In typical old GM fashion, the gas gauge gets stuck at a random reading sometimes.  So when we were sputtering out on the highway, the gauge was reading 33% fuel left.  Typically I would use the trip odometer to combat this, like if it reads 300 miles, that is when your car is extremely low on gas and you need to go buy fuel.  I was at 326 miles, and there were barely fumes left in the tank.  Cruising at 80 miles per hour quickly turned into swerving all the way into the right lane, just to get off at the exit that was not even 500 feet away.  We limped it into the gas station, barely, and we had to push it to the gas pump.  Unlike the previous journey to look at a different car in Minnesota, on this trip we only had one issue.

Cruising through the rest of Indiana was a piece of cake.  Now, comes Ohio.  My friend that was with me had lived there for the first 12 years of his life, and he knew that the whole state was a garbage dump.  In front of us, there was a Ford F-150 with the tailgate wide open and the bed cap wide open.  It had a ladder in there, seemingly tied down with no straps at all.  We couldn’t pass him, there were a lot of people sitting in the left lane without a care in the world that we didn’t want to get nailed by this guy’s ladder.  The good thing is though, the ladder never fell out, and we got off the interstate close to the dealership whose car we wanted to look at.

My friend was required to sign a waiver and give the dealer his license for a test drive.  Why would they do that??  It was a simple used car lot, and we were looking at a car with a value of ~$5000.  My friend was extremely skeptical about what might happen next.

We waited, no joke, almost exactly 45 minutes for the sales representative to tell us that the car was ready for a test drive.  Any dealer should have their cars 100% ready to go for a test drive for when a customer is looking at them.  I work at the Toyota dealership in Brookfield, and we have a sticker on the front of every vehicle in line for an inspection that explicitly states “Not For Sale.”  We thought that this dealer might be filling all of the leaking tires up, or they might be putting a cheap body fix over a patch of rust that can’t be properly fixed.  This wasn’t a simple “jump start” because the vehicle was dead from sitting for a long time.  There was obviously something that was wrong with this car, that was getting fixed in the 45 minute period that we were waiting to look at it.  We saw the car parked outside the dealership when we first got here.  When we were waiting for the test drive, the techs were working on the car inside their garage.

The sales representative finally came back and said the car was ready for a test drive.  We thought we were going to get scammed, like insurance fraud, so we did our own inspection.  There was a missing switch on the dashboard which changes the transmission shifting modes.  There were noticeable body defects and an obvious chip in one of the rims.  The tires were total garbage and barely had any tread left, let alone the dry rotting that was easily visible by the eye.  You could see a location where they repainted it, and they made no efforts to sand anything around it, our eyes told us that they just slathered some paint on the car and called it “repaired.”  This was the second to worst Lexus LS430 that we have ever seen.  The worst one had obviously been involved in a T-bone collision, but the paint repair and door replacement job quality was significantly better on that one rather than the LS430 that we were currently looking at.

We told the sales representative that we were no longer interested in test driving his car and we ripped the waiver to shreds, so that he would not be able to hold us liable for any of the cosmetic damages and the parts missing that were already on the vehicle before we even touched it.  We got back into my Cadillac, and we booked it out of Ohio.

“I told you this state was bad, right?” my friend asked me.

“Yeah you did, and just this past half-hour alone proved that I don’t want to be anywhere near Ohio ever again.  Let’s get out of here,” I reassured him.

A couple days later, we found the perfect car in Indiana.  There was absolutely no rust on this car, it was in Florida for its whole life until the last owner moved to where we met him by a lake.  This car was easily worth the $2900 premium over the car from Ohio.