It can be fun to conduct a multi-state search for a used car and embark on a road trip to pick up your prized purchase, but it's not always the most practical approach. Sometimes you just need a car quickly, so we went hyper-local for this week's episode of Window Shopping.
The challenge was to find the best car within 10 miles, sticking to a budget of $20,000. With two of our participants in Michigan, two in California, and one in Kentucky, we each entered our zip codes and set our search parameters close by to see what we could find.
Road & Track senior editor John Pearley Huffman always weasels in mention of his beloved hamlet of Santa Barbara, California even when the challenge isn't location-based, and this week he found a distinctive Subaru in town. Huffman even went the extra mile and drove to see the car in person, and the video footage he shared is something to behold. Contributor Jonathan Ramsey went next, complaining that he could only find "ancient Toyotas" nearby; his pick was indeed an ancient Toyota, but not one you'd expect.
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Senior editor Joey Capparella and deputy testing director K.C. Colwell both bemoaned the lack of desirable used cars for sale in Michigan. Both ended up with decent but not stellar finds and there was much discussion of rust and general Midwestern malaise. And finally, L.A.-based cars director Tony Quiroga presented an interesting BMW M car with a questionable Craigslist ad possibly featuring photos taken on multiple bridges.
Despite being raised on a steady diet of base-model Hondas and Toyotas—or perhaps because of it—Joey Capparella nonetheless cultivated an obsession for the automotive industry throughout his childhood in Nashville, Tennessee. He found a way to write about cars for the school newspaper during his college years at Rice University, which eventually led him to move to Ann Arbor, Michigan, for his first professional auto-writing gig at Automobile Magazine. He has been part of the Car and Driver team since 2016 and now lives in New York City.
