The beautiful thing about being a freelance mechanic in New York City is having the freedom to take outlandish jobs to keep the dream alive and pay the bills. You know, like rescuing a busted limo from a random farm deep on Long Island for a television show.
Last week, the outlandish job came from my close friend Doug, who always seemed to be up to something in the world of motorsports. We met years ago when I was a freshly independent mechanic having just left an apprenticeship at Cavalier Customs, one of those old-school motorcycle shops where everyone spoke in thick Brooklyn accents and the parking lot was always filled with old Harleys and cigarette butts.
Doug had needed help getting the wiring in the taillight on his custom cyberpunk BMW R9T to play well with its temperamental CAN bus system at the time, and I ended up coming by to work on every one of his projects since then. It seems like he has a thing for projects with electrical gremlins, because our most recent quality time was spent on a 70-hour wiring harness overhaul on his 1987 F150 prerunner, whose previous owner was presumably a colorblind crackhead.
This time, he had something special for me from his friends at Top Gear France: a limousine rescue from a farm out on Long Island. He knew about my Facebook Marketplace addiction and my willingness to travel thousands of miles for a good deal and thousands of miles back home in clapped-out shitboxes, so in his eyes, I was the perfect candidate for the job.
Mission Improbable
The mission was simple, if not slightly batshit. Get myself to the limo, get it running, and drive it to the logistics warehouse in Port Newark to be shipped off to the folks at Top Gear France. The limo allegedly ran when parked at the farm years ago, so all it needed was a jump. I’ve heard that story before. This usually meant whichever Facebook Marketplace seller giving that excuse had limped the poor vehicle into what would become its final resting place, refusing to sell for any reasonable offer until it became one with nature. I hoped this wasn’t the case with the limo.
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My phone lit up with a notification, and I swiped to reveal a group chat Doug set up. He has a thing for AI-generated memes, so of course, the group chat photo was set to a super-stretched Lincoln Town Car jumping off a flaming ramp. He introduced me to Franck Galiegue, the Top Gear host who presumably parked the limo in its current resting place. Jokingly, I asked if I could jump the limo if I rescued it, and he replied with a thumbs up. Whatever outlandish plans I had for the limo were now officially endorsed by the man himself.
The farm was located at the furthest point on the North Fork of Long Island. To get there, I would have to take the Hampton Jitney, a bus whose three-hour-long route would place me within walking distance of the farm. The overcast morning sky turned into a midday drizzle as I stepped off the Jitney. I prayed that whatever the limo needed, it would be something in the engine bay and not under the car I had just washed my hair last night). As I pushed onward, I spied the familiar silhouette of the limo amongst the autumn foliage.
The rear airbags had completely deflated, giving it a squat that would make a Carolina redneck proud. Surprisingly, the exterior of the car was clean except for the edges of the trunk lid, where mold had grown. “What a perfect place to hide a body,” I thought to myself as I tested the driver’s door handle. It swung open, and I was greeted with a time capsule of mid-’90s luxury: chrome accents, leather front row seats, velvet headliner, and plastic imitation wood grain on every corner of the interior. The cabin was more of the same, with furnishings that echoed decades of booze, cocaine, and hookers. An expired pink slip in the glove box showed a 30-day travel authorization for November 2022. No problem,I brought my own plate to use instead.
Turning the keys in the ignition gave no response, not even a whimper, but the engine bay revealed the issue: a disconnected battery cable. Upon reconnecting it, a compressor roared to life, and the rear end of the limo began to rise as the airbags began to fill. As I tried the ignition again, the 4.6-liter V8 awakened with a soft purr that was immediately drowned out by the drone of the door sensor alarm. I was going to go crazy if I had to endure a three-hour drive back to the warehouse without fixing this, but a hard slam on the rear passenger door took care of the problem. I normally perform a comprehensive checkup on every car I rescue, but the rain was picking up, and the warehouse was closing in a few hours, so it was time to hit the road. If it runs and drives, that’s good enough for me.
LSD Is Better Than Coke
The backroads leading to the Long Island Expressway were the perfect testing grounds for the limo. The motor whispered at cruising speed. The soft, compliant suspension soaked up road imperfections, though this also meant that the body rolled and bobbed whenever I took a corner. With the dried-out wipers fruitlessly battling the worsening storm, it felt more like I was a captain at the helm of a ship than a chauffeur driving a limo. As I approached the ramp to the LIE, there was one final test to conduct: traction control and ABS. “It’s the safe thing to do,” I said to myself as I floored the gas pedal mid-turn. Immediately, the once-quiet small block screamed as the rear end of the limo broke loose. Slowly but surely, the car was set adrift like a ship in the ocean. The limo may not have been the best car to take a corner in, but it was an excellent car to enter a corner sideways. Restraint is the watchword of the professional chauffeur, which is to say I would be a terrible chauffeur if I had to do this for a living.
Unfortunately, the same conditions that made for perfect drifting also wrecked my chances of making it to the warehouse on time. For whatever reason, in New York, people forget how to drive when it’s anything other than a sunny day. The controlled drift I initiated was also happening uncontrollably to drivers all across Long Island, and the green route estimate on Google Maps turned amber and finally red. The delivery of the asset would have to wait until tomorrow, when the warehouse reopened. On the bright side, this meant I would have the limo for another day.
On the way home, I decided to pick up my friend Myles and head to a well-known parking lot in our neighborhood. He had personally documented every stunt and breakdown I had on our trip through Route 66 last year, so if anything happened at this parking lot, he would be the one to capture it. The parking lot was made of smooth concrete, and whenever it rained, water would pool, forming a shallow pond that spanned across the entire lot. This place was so popular with the local car community that the tire marks they left were visible from satellite images in space.
For my math people, the law of angular momentum meant that drifting a long wheelbase vehicle translated to the passenger’s direction and magnitude being multiplied tenfold at the rear of the vehicle. My poor passenger was violently thrown against the walls of the cabin as I skidded across the parking lot. I forgot to tell him the seatbelts didn’t work, and he spent the rest of the time watching from outside the car. From a healthy distance, he pointed out that the limo had been upgraded with a limited-slip differential (LSD, now you get it?), as both drive tires produced beautiful white trails of smoke.
The next morning brought freezing temperatures and flurries of snow, though the highways thankfully remained accident-free. I couldn’t believe my luck as I pulled into the warehouse. The limo had made it over 150 miles without a single issue. My phone lit up with a notification. It’s Franck. He saw my Instagram stories, and he’s horrified. I have a feeling I probably won’t be asked to rescue any more Top Gear vehicles in the future. Oh well.
Top graphic image: Andrea Huang
Want to read more from you!
Great story and writing style, and raises the bar – even here at Autopian.
Plus, I echo Cars? I’ve owned a few in saying, Please provide a link to the Top Gear France episode where the limo is included. Seems like a good reason for another article…
Wow, a “crackhead”? It is 2025 and I didn’t think that I’d see such terms thrown around; such words reflect an uninformed mindstate and I, for one, will not have it.
First of all, meth has displaced crack by a wide margin, so the reference itself is heavily dated. Additionally, to use a more inclusive term for methamphetamine, they’re generally referred to as stimulants. We can’t just assume that adderall=meth now can we? From students with wealthy parents to the unhoused, there is a whole spectrum of drugs that they will treat themselves to.
This would give us the updated and more inclusive term a stimulant enthusiast.
So there, now we’re no longer using dated references and we’re updated to current standards that covers a wide spectrum of individuals. If you’re going to insult someone by saying that they’ve formed an addiction to a narcotic or other psychoactive substance, at least do it with a little panache.
This spoiler element is not very good.
Welcome to the Autopian Andrea! A great tale and that’s exactly what I would have done if I picked up a Limo. There’s one a few towns over that has been for sale forever…but where would I park a 30’ Lincoln Navigator based limo.
Yes. Welcome. Very entertaining read.
Where were YOU able to park the limo overnight? And when the episode they are using this car for airs, will you be able to post a link to it? This I want to see. (I didn’t even know there was a Top Gear France. It seems to have been a lucrative franchise for the BBC.)
You specifically mention
“The limo allegedly ran when parked at the farm years ago, so all it needed was a jump.”
What were the tyres like ?
That is so cool! And you now have a new follower on Instagram… 🙂
I bet I can find many better limousines at a cheaper price that would suit the buyer. Unless top gear France is as dumb as top gear uk
Imagine getting to a yard pile and connecting the battery and it just starts up and drives
*cries deeply*
Wonderful!
I think a friend of mine has canbus nightmares.
As far as jumping a limo, I refer you to the ending of Deadend Drive-In, when a truck is leaped 162 feet through a neon sign.
Very much a one take shot!
Now that’s a fun little tale, well told!
needs a Godzilla swap 😉
this was fun to read and see!
“It’s Franck. He saw my Instagram stories, and he’s horrified. I have a feeling I probably won’t be asked to rescue any more Top Gear vehicles in the future.”
I imagine whatever you did to that car wasn’t even a warm-up for what awaited it on Top Gear.
It probably won’t even have a roof much longer. LOL
More Andrea stories please. Maybe about her KTM that always explodes.
I’ve always operated under the assumption that it’s better to be stopped for no license plate then to be stopped with a plate that doesn’t belong on said vehicle because that escalates to a felony depending on the mood of the officer.
This was made very clear in Michigan during the time when you couldn’t do title transfers or get new plates because of covid stuff. A lot of people seemed to think that “plate from wrong car is better than no plate at all”, and posts starting popping up here and there informing people that was not correct, and actually a felony like you said.
I’ve seen people yelled at in court for inadvertently switching two of their own plates.
Seems bizarre still.
In college I had a couple of friends who were recreational chemistry majors. Bruce got financial support and was from the neighboring town, with a more working class population than the NY hippies at our private school. And by “working class”, I mean, at the city limits, they proudly announced they were the home town of a MOH recipient from WWII, but didn’t mention the Nobel laureate. Bruce overcompensated by being the most genuine hippy 1990 could produce. He had gotten back from a year in mainland China, which he largely spent enlightening the local population on the virtues of the plants growing in the garden behind the village doctor’s house.
Jimmy’s parents in Taiwan had the money to send him to this place, and Jimmy could drive his Supra sober, but it was a terrifying experience. I’m told that he was a much more conscientious driver after “calming his nerves”.
Well, it so came to pass that the Dead came to town, and Bruce and Jimmy drove out there for the vibrant parking lot market scene. They buy some various things, and start driving back, not before sampling some of the lower-Ph items.
Their road back to school runs through Bruce’s home town, and by then, they’re halfway to Terrapin Station. They’ve bled off a lot of groundspeed, and are basically taxiing the Supra through town. Jimmy picks up a bandit on his six, and pulls into a parking lot to evade. So he gets lit up.
A conversation and a call later, and the cop explains the problem. Well, he didn’t, but I will. There are two ways to assign license plates in the world: to cars and to people. In most places, like the US, the car has a license plate. In Switzerland, Taiwan, and a few others, the person does, and it’s not unheard of for someone to screw the old plate on the new car.
So, Jimmy figures out what went wrong, and just starts speaking Mandarin. The poor cop, looking at Jimmy and his passenger – some kid with a beard, army jacket, peace signs, and baked like my grandma’s fried chicken – decides not to deal with it and lets them go.
Moral of the story: if you can’t swap a license, try to take license.
I once had a Houston sheriff approach my new to me car with his hand on his gun, convinced I had fake plates. I’d gotten my new plates from the dealer less than a week before and still had the paperwork in the car and a current, clearly legal, registration sticker. After much confusion and a profuse apology on his part, he had corrected the DMV error that led to the stop and sent me on my way. Somehow the plate number was off in the system, but because I had all the paperwork I didn’t end up in jail for no reason.
You’re extremely lucky, and extremely likely to not be a POC….
(Not a POC; grew up nearish to Houston.)
That is more of a problem now than it was in the past. Before, the police needed to be suspicious enough that they were willing to take the time required to manually run a check on the plate – so they often didn’t unless you were already pulled over.
With today’s automatic plate readers, when they are behind you in traffic they can just look down and see all the information tied to your plate, including what kind of car it should be on.
Agreed. I drove from Boulder, CO to Houston, TX with no plates once in 2014. Didn’t realize Colorado was a keep the plates state. Figured I had the title and bill of sale with me, so I could talk my way out of any issue. Surprisingly didn’t get stopped.
My theory is they know you’re either legal or will create so much paperwork over nothing, they want to avoid stopping you at any cost.
Probably reasonable if you’re up to serious crimes, you’d steal a plate.
Of course, I had that experience before home invasions had no consequences.
I always had a plate in the car, but rarely needed it.
I’m assuming, as a mechanic a transit/under repair plate was used, which is similar to what transportation and logistics services use. It’s not a vehicle specific plate, but tied to the commercial entity transporting the vehicle.
The rules on plates vary state to state.
New York, you own the plate and can move it to another vehicle. You should register it to the new vehicle before use, but can probably convince a cop you just bought it and are on the way to the DMV.
No idea what the rules are on those South Dakota(? pic isn’t clear) plates.
California, the plate stays with the car.
But did you get to jump it? I understand not posting that to Instagram, but you can tell us. We’re all friends here!
*Manuel’s “Limousine” intensifies.*
Tell Franck weve seen his videos too! You deserve the applause!!
I love this. You can Huang out here, youll fit right in.
You’ve got a South Dakota plate on it? How does that work?
Righteous! When in doubt, hoon the shit out of it.
I’m so carbrained that I didn’t even get the LSD joke as being a reference to the drug.
It was kind of a funny double entendre!
I love this story!