Lifted Honda Element

Who sells a built S550 Mustang for a lifted Honda Element? Zach Napier does. Ehhhh I guess to be fair, there’s a little gray area though. And the troubled current car market definitely played into it. See – Zach bought a new Mustang back in 2017 when the economy was great for buyers. In 2017, you could buy a base GT for just under $30,000. And if that wasn’t enough, Ford was offering 0% interest for 72 freakin months! It was literally unbeatable bang for the buck!

So Zach had his S550 Mustang…

Plus his old Datsun Z and a supercharged JCW Mini Cooper… and all was right in the world. But then he did what a lot of us do… and started throwing mods at the new car until he was like, “This things kind of a handful, I should probably get a better daily.” So Zach went truck shopping. Trucks are practical.

But by this point, there was a problem.

The car market had gone bonkers, and unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that truck prices are straight-up like 1-level under rape. Therefore, a new truck was off the table if Zach wanted to also keep his Mustang.

So his mind went the other direction. Instead of a new truck with heavy payments, Zach created a clever pitch to sell to his wife, that a lifted Honda Element was actually very practical for a daily. Plus – they could start doing some fun little weekend camping trips in it, like they had been talking about. In a lot of ways, it would check the same boxes as a full size truck for that sorta stuff.

During the pitch-process, Zach basically… really sold himself on the idea as he was trying to sell to her. She said, “Fine.” And he became ADD-obsessed with finding the right one. I mean – who hasn’t looked at a Honda Element at least once in their life & thought, “That’s weird… I wanna mess with it.” Zach ultimately landed on this one – a 2008 AWD EX that only had 60-something thousand miles on it.

Zach acquired his Honda Element, and all was right in Zach’s world once again.

But then a few months later, the Ford dealership where he bought the Mustang called Zach out of the blue, and offered him a ridiculous amount to buy-back his Mustang. A good bit more than he originally bought it for… if that’s any indication to how absurd this car market is. Zach was like, “Dangit man why you gotta do that to me?!” But then he took the deal… figuring he could set aside the money for whenever the market stabilizes. Of course some of that profit would go into modding the Element… that’s just a given. And that’s the story of how Zach traded a Mustang for a toaster… in a roundabout way.

But it’s all good.

Zach & his wife have been taking those camping trips in the Element. And now they’re planning a trip out West for a few weeks… just meandering around & throwing the tent up wherever they land each night. And that’s the great circle of car culture, isn’t it. As car enthusiasts, we get a sense that certain cars are just worth experiencing. Getting outside of our norm gives us better perspective & allows us to grow. It builds our car vocabulary so to speak. And damned sure the memories that we make, are for life. They never age. All these car prices will drop soon enough. But until they do, keep the party-circle going & get crafty. Decades from now… you’ll be talking about it as if it was yesterday.