There’s a difference between needing transportation to function in daily life and wanting a dream car. When it comes to the latter, whether a $6,500 Craigslist deal or an $85,000 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, here’s a tip you don’t need to pay any crowdfunded cash for: people don’t want to help you buy it. Stop doing crowdfunding for cars. It’s over.
Of course, if someone is financially down for reasons he, she or they don’t have control over and needs transportation to get to work, that’s a different situation. That’s not what we’re talking about here.
This is about the “Hey, friends! I’ve always wanted a WRX STI! Please help me achieve my dream!” people of the world.
No. Just no.
We get them to our tips email line at Jalopnik all the time. The subject line will be “Help me buy a car” and someone, who does not admit to being in a down-and-out situation, will give us a GoFundMe link to buy a dream car.
Since the Gmail search bar is not great, here are examples similar to what we get that haven’t actually been emailed to us: donations to put a turbo in a 2000 Mitsubishi Eclipse, finish a 500 horsepower build on a Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX, compete at Pikes Peak, and, simply, “hi, pls help me in getting a car.” The goal on that one is $27,000.
Could you use $27,000? Yeah, we all could.
A perfect, incredibly polished example of this came from the totally believable and credible Dodge Demon Experience on an Indiegogo crowdfunding page. The miserably failed page is closed now, so if you had a burning passion to donate, um, don’t.
Rather than the basic explanation of how a person doesn’t have the unnecessary cash needed to buy a car or finish a build, the Dodge Demon Experience worked out a complicated donation system full of big promises to those who help the person who started it buy the car.
Since only 3,300 will be built, the Experience page said, “most people will never get to experience this record shattering beast.” Because of that, the Experience promised to bring the purchased Dodge Demon to the “closest Drag Strip near you and record your experience in this magnificent peace [sic] of engineering.”
While it isn’t hard to guess that this person just wanted donations to buy the car for personal use, the crowdfunding page got more ridiculous as it went along. See how far you can make it before giving up:
The campaign went up before the official $84,995 starting price for the Demon came out on Tuesday, and it had a “$1,072,500 flexible goal” for donations. Why, yes, that goal sounds incredibly flexible.
Before closing, the Dodge Demon Experience raised $1 from one backer.
If that result isn’t enough to keep people from using kickstarters for their dream cars, there truly is no hope. Instead, raise money for an actual cause next time.
And if you want your dream car, get one the American way: be rich already. Or just work hard to save up for it.
Hat tip to Paulo!