Keith Martin

After more than a half-decade of use, the 1995 BMW 318i’s time with us is done. The car served as Alex’s daily driver, and she put more than 50,000 miles on it. It’s a four-door with 5-speed. I recently spent over $2,000 replacing a computer board in the car, and I thought we were good…

Over the past 12 days, I’ve traveled thousands of miles, seen hundreds of classic cars and shared the joy with countless gearhead enthusiasts. My trip started with the 8th Biennial Symposium on Connoisseurship and the Collectible Car presented by the Revs Institute. It took place at the Revs Institute for Automotive Research in Naples, FL.…

I was looking at my motoring schedule for the next few months, and I got to thinking about why I go through all the effort to prepare my cars for these events. I was reminded once again that it’s not really the cars that make these excursions so satisfying and enjoyable – it’s the great people…

Should you upgrade the transmission on your vintage car? That’s one of the debates in today’s collector car world. The discussions revolve around “as built” correctness versus upgrades for driveability. Most of the small-displacement, under-2,000-cc vintage cars from the ’50s and ’60s handle, stop and start reasonably well. You simply adjust your driving style to…

A Gearhead’s Trip Through A Vintage-Car Theme Park You can tell the weather is getting better because I’m spending more time in the SCM/ACC garage. It all started last week when seven-year-old Bradley asked if I would take him to school in the Viper. I asked why that car, and he replied that he had…

I was giving a talk at the local MG club meeting last Friday evening. We were discussing road trips, and the SCM “Road to Reno” adventure came up. In 2011, we bought three 1972-73 MGBs (two convertibles and a GT), refurbished them and drove to Reno for the All-MG Register gathering and then back to…

“It’s black, and it’s slammed.” That was my first thought when I set eyes on the ’64 Volvo 1800S. My daughter Alex and I had just arrived at iRoll Motors in San Martin, CA. I purchased the car in July, but it took this long for the shop to address a variety of mechanical issues and…

  Our 2001 Porsche 911 Turbo arrived a week ago, and as soon as I was able to wrestle it away from my 23-year-old daughter Alex, I started scouting out reasons to take a road trip. An email announcing “Deadly by Nature: Venom and Poison” caught my eye. It was a new exhibit at the…

Kids crash cars. They crash new cars and old cars. They will crash anything they drive. But how do we expect young kids to grow up with a love for our cranky old cars if we make them wait until they are 25 years old to drive them? By then, if they’ve already had nine…

Arizona in January is one of my busiest weeks of the year. The What’s My Car Worth? production crew shoots multiple episodes. I emcee the Arizona Concours d’Elegance. We put on Insider’s Seminars at Gooding & Company and Barrett-Jackson. We host a consignment tour at RM. And we run a week-long subscriptions booth at Gooding. It hardly…