Winter Beater Challenge: Window Shop with Car and Driver

Winter still has a couple months to run. Slushy roads, frozen things, and more salt than the Red Sea rips and rots cars. Unless, that is, you live in a place like Santa Barbara, California, where the occasional rainy day is followed by warmth, sunshine, and smiles, everyone smiles.

If you’re unlucky enough to live somewhere that stains your shoes with salt, there exists the concept of the “winter beater.” That’s the Car d’Crap that is driven in lieu of more precious machinery. These are the sacrificial dogs of the dog days. Or are winter days cat days? Whatever. Think cars and trucks that suffer, so that other more cherished vehicles need not see the indignities of rust.

The challenge facing the Window Shoppers in this episode was to find a decent winter beater for $7500 or less. When we did this last year, we set a $5000 budget, but used-car prices have been rising faster than the snow drifts in the 313.

This ep’s character or characters includes the return of senior editor and reliability aficionado Joey Capparella of Michigan, bearded tech editor K.C. Colwell of Michigan, suave contributor Jonathan Ramsey, who is currently somewhere in the mid-South; cat herder Tony Quiroga, who used to live in Michigan but now cowers in Los Angeles; and finally, Road & Track’s elegant wordsmith John Pearley Huffman, who solved winter long ago by growing up in Santa Barbara and still living there.

The goal set by our new video guru, Carlos Lago, was to keep this session down to a half-hour. That goal was not met.

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