Here’s How I Manage A Dozen Project Cars at Once While Not Going (Too) Broke Or Being Murdered In My Sleep By My Wife

I do not have a problem. Instead, I have about a dozen problems on any given day. Sometimes even a few more. Many of my problems were built in Toledo. One was built in Zuffenhausen, where problems get expensive. One even came from a place called Uusikaupunki, which is utterly unpronounceable but is also home to something called the Bonk Museum that is nearly as Dr. Seuss as it sounds.

My problems are, of course, cars. Shuffling them around is essentially a part-time job, which reminds me that my car problems create even more problems: I live in a relatively dense urban area with limited affordable off-street parking options. I would far prefer to spend my free time with my preschooler and my incredibly patient wife than with my leaky cars. (Most of the time.) My chosen career of automotive journalism (20 years and counting!) affords me plenty of free time, but it doesn’t exactly afford me Countach money.

Since all of my children-cars are above average, at least to me, I have some basic ground rules:

• My cars cannot clutter the street in front of my house. (This is less about courtesy to my neighbors than it is about theft and sun-related damage.)
• I am unable to justify “replacing a fuel pump” and “weekend at the junkyard” as regular family functions. (I did convince my wife to visit a you-pull junkyard in New Zealand on our honeymoon, but that’s another story.)
• My cars cannot become relentless money pits.

[Ed Note: Welcome Andrew Ganz, a new contributor and clearly a diehard car-nut like the rest of us. He’s a big XJ man, so I personally made sure we got him writing here. -DT]. 

This is no easy task. As much as I would like to provide you with a list of sure-fire tips as to how to recreate this situation for yourself, the best I can do is lift the hood a bit on my operations. They are as meticulously intense as they are sporadic. As of this writing, I haven’t physically seen two of these cars in at least six months, even though they’re parked less than five miles from my house. Another drives wonderfully and is among the best of its surviving breed, and yet I don’t think I have started its engine in 2025. Hey, nobody’s perfect.

It Takes an Enabling Spouse

Forget about a spouse who tolerates your cars; find one who enables your hobby. My wife (usually) gets excited about every new car that I bring home. I’ll text her a photo of a random car in the middle of the day, and her response is usually, “Did you buy it? Please stop at Safeway on the way home because we need eggs.”

Simply put, my wonderful wife enables my hobby — so long as it doesn’t usually get in the way of our lives. And if it does, we make the best of it. She got a trip to Paris because I picked up an old Porsche for export, and I think she enjoys getting to park something weird in her work’s parking lot every once in a while.

I’m Forever Assembling a Cast of Characters

My mornings, in typical Autopian reader fashion, often begin with a perusal of what’s for sale near me — or maybe far away. I’ve personally collected cars across the continent and across the Atlantic pond, after all. You likely know all the usual suspects: Facebook Marketplace, Auto Tempest, and Gratka.pl. (What, you’re not currently shopping for a car in Poland?)

Once I’ve inquired about a half-dozen cars and shuffled our preschooler off to school, I turn to the whiteboard I use to track my current projects — and, yes, with the exception of my Ram 1500 tow rig, the entire fleet is a project.

Listing them all out is futile; by the time this publishes (even if that happens later today), I may find something new. However, you probably want to know about some of the current highlights:

I have a green 1973 BMW 2002 that I bought from the original owner’s estate. At some point, someone bolted on Bosch’s K-Jetronic fuel-injection system from an E21-generation 3-Series. As you might imagine, this car awaits an engine transplant…

…which is why I have a very rusty ‘75 2002 that will donate a freshly built engine, five-speed manual gearbox, and Bilstein suspension bits to the aforementioned ‘73. I technically own this car, though I’m trading it to a buddy, who will do the swap so that he can add it to his yard of cars fine collection.

A few years ago, I bought a ’94 Mercedes-Benz G300 Europa. I live 30 minutes from some of the best off-road trails in the country, and yet I’ve never gotten it dirty. I guess that makes me a typical G-Wagen owner, except that mine has 15-inch wheels and exceptionally underutilized BFG All-Terrains.

I decided I wanted a fast wagon about a year ago and then spent months tracking down a 1998 Mercedes-Benz C43 AMG … wagon. They made 770 or so of them, and I didn’t want a silver one, so I had to go to Poland to find a blue one. As one does! Dzięki!

I have owned far more Jeep Cherokee XJs than David Tracy (although he still knows way more than I do). The current fleet includes an 80,000-mile ’87 Cherokee Chief with a rear-mounted spare and a first-year combination of a five-speed (Peugeot, le ugh) manual and the 4.0-liter inline-six, as well as a 59,000-mile ‘01 Cherokee Limited that my family bought new and I later tracked down and way overpaid for. (Another story for another time.)

My most recent acquisition, at least until the next one, is a Monte Carlo Yellow Saab 900 Turbo convertible. No, it’s not a cool 900 Classic… it’s the GM-ified NG900. But I just adore it, and my kiddo’s classmates have nicknamed it “Taxi.” (How do four-year-old kids know what a taxi is in 2025?)

Speaking of my preschooler, he’ll inherit both my family’s Cherokee and the green Porsche 993 I imported from Italy. I negotiated on it while my wife was giving birth. (Well, not literally, but on that same day.) Why buy a Porsche in Italy? Once upon a time, the exchange rate was favorable… and this one has factory cloth seats, so it’s properly weird. Find another, I dare you! And then send me the link so I can get it.

You get the point. Lotta cars, none of which I want to leave exposed to the elements for long. My tastes tend toward the eclectic; I’m probably the only person you’ll ever meet who owned a Corvette C3 and a Bertone Freeclimber in the same year.

I’m fortunate that our house has a three-car garage with a fenced-in storage space just big enough for an XJ, even though it’s on a postage-stamp-sized city lot. (Hey, my enabling wife liked the kitchen…. win-win!)

My mother-in-law — yes, really, my mother-in-law — discovered a condo-style warehouse capable of holding six cars (or eight if they’re BMW 2002s, not that I would know…) that turned out to be an absolute bargain. I bought it deep in the COVID-19 pandemic when I had to sign the paperwork using a pen in a plastic bag that was handed to me by someone who had disinfected while wearing gloves hours before. You remember those days. Such properties are much more expensive now.

Toss in the fact that at least one of my cars is perpetually in for some kind of work somewhere else (shout out to Tyler at Simply Clean Detail Studio) and, you might understand how caring for my cars is a full-time side hustle.

Someone Needs to Invent a Task-Management Software For Cars

I am a reasonably organized person, but not obsessively so. My desk is rarely all that clean, and, if not for “Hey Siri, remind me tomorrow at 9 a.m.,” I’d forget to do everything.

When it comes to my cars, I have learned that I can’t always remember where they are, what they need, or what parts are ready to be installed. Rock Auto boxes are always full of surprises, and I don’t just mean the magnets.

I update a rudimentary whiteboard in my home office as a big-picture way of managing my cars. It’s sort of like the whiteboards you’ve probably seen in the manager’s office of a car dealership, although instead of tracking who screwed the most customers this month, I’m always the one getting screwed. And one time I used a Sharpie, which necessitated so much vinegar that my office still smells like a pickling jar.

The old-school whiteboard is useful from a high level, but it is utterly useless when I’m not sitting at my desk. For the nitty gritty, I do a reasonably good job of tracking my cars using the free version of the Asana task-management software. Each car gets its own task, where I can track things like insurance and registration, drop links to how-to videos, and keep lists of parts I either need to order or locate in a junkyard. I’m probably the only person who pays $2 to get into U-Pull-And-Pay and then opens up the Asana app as a shopping list.

Using Asana to track my cars is, of course, much smarter than the whiteboard. It’s not perfect, however. If anyone creates a car-centric plugin for Asana, I’ll be your beta tester. Here’s what I’d like to see:

• Integration with Apple AirTags so that I can see where the vehicle is at any given moment.
• A junkyard shopping list that suggests ancillary parts.
• Integration with my YouTube playlists.
• The ability to automatically send follow-up emails or texts to the shop(s) doing paint/body or other major work on my vehicles that is out of my scope.
• Integration with my phone’s camera so that I can snap pictures of whatever obscure part I need to fix or replace. If the plugin could identify the part, that’d be even better — but maybe I’m asking too much.

What I don’t do well, aside from inevitably neglecting 11 of those 12 cars, is track my potential purchases. Perhaps I’ll start a new Asana task now where I can drop want-to-buy links — and if I find something great near Uusikaupunki, I’ll have to squeeze in a visit to the Bonk Museum.