Searching for that new wreck smell
The author's guides, who would prefer to remain nameless, inspect a Lincoln Town Car. (All photos: Clifford Atiyeh)
Few people in the world, aside from car dealers, car-obsessed celebrities, and the automaker engineers and UAW linemen responsible for interiors, are as immune to the new car smell as automotive journalists. They're the spoiled bunch at every model launch and auto show who claim divine right to plop themselves in the latest rides, all in the humble public service of guiding you, the reader, to the right car.
But not even the stuffiest of noses can overcome the stenches inside the cars at Helping Hands of America Foundation in Wrentham, a used car dealer lined with dozens of donated, sorry-looking vehicles. A Ford Tempo is ripe with dust and cigarettes, a 1990s Camry basks in a funky, mysterious musk, while one of the campers, complete with a yellow-stained mattress, is more of an eau d'algae.
Moth balls are more to my liking, and so I settle into a $500 Lincoln Town Car that looks as if it's about to lose its rear axle. Besides the smell, the Town Car felt like a true Lincoln of the 1990s: comfy, floaty shocks, and the turning radius of a tractor-trailer. A plane ticket is a much safer bet.
I've come to Helping Hands to drive beaten, battered-up cars, a kind of sadistic pleasure my friend discovered on weekends as a Bryant undergraduate. As the son of a successful and now-retired Lincoln-Mercury dealer, he finds car lots are practically his second home. He almost flew to Orlando just to rent a Grand Marquis and visit the last of the country's sole Lincoln-Mercury franchises.
His college roommate, who grew up in nearby Walpole, describes Helping Hands as his high school pastime. Oh, Gillette Stadium is 4 miles up the road? Please. Junky cars are better than any Patriots game.
Where else can you drive a near-perfect Mercury Cougar Bostonian Edition, a Mazda 626 burning oil on two flat tires, or a Camry with a duct-taped sunroof? Some of the cars are missing clutches, some have clogged fuel pumps, and others have too many problems to cover a windshield in neon dry erase marker, so you avoid the strange temptation to hop in those.
Because none of the cars are plated, test drives are confined to the bumpy, pitted gravel lot, which makes for a demolition derby kind of experience, except you're not allowed to crash. Reclining far back in the Cougar, I spot flatbed tow trucks unloading the latest jalopies, and a huge Caterpillar with a forklift attachment standing ready to rearrange the masses of rusted, dented metal. That's because half of the cars can't start.
In recent years, critics and officials including Secretary of State William Galvin have questioned if the dealer's advertising sounds too similar to that of a nonprofit charity. A 2003 Globe article said that Helping Hands, "by adopting a name, a logo, and a website that seems to belong to a charity," has blurred "the boundaries between for-profit and nonprofit organizations." Company president Robert R. Sacchetti and vice president Michael Jarret, however, are upfront about running a business that donates a portion of their profits.
"How many corporations give 20 percent to charity?" Jarret said in the article.
Whatever their motives - and of the people dumping cars that don't seem at all road-worthy - the place is brimming with customers. They're here out of desperation and not for the fun, and it's a bit disconcerting that anyone would take a car meant for the junkyard on the street.
But they're mostly skipping the wrecks we found, looking for the few cars in fair condition that need minor shop attention. But even if the transmission fails on them the moment they drive off, squeezing the most from every dollar is essential these days.
Even if you're along just for the drive.
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about boston overdrive
Boston.com reports the latest trends, auto shows and wrings out the newest cars in our city's hellish maze - and across the great roads of New England.In the garage: 2008 MBTA Zone 1A monthly pass, 1995 21-speed Iron Horse. Bill Griffith is an automotive correspondent for The Boston Globe and has reviewed cars for 10 years. He was also the Globe's assistant sports editor for 25 years and the paper's sports media columnist.
In the garage (over the years): 1956 T-Bird, 1959 Nash Metropolitan, 1980 El Camino, 1997 supercharged Camry TRD.
