-Live and Let Drive is a road-trip show.
Why?
Two things changed life as we know it--
the freedom to vote.
The freedom to buy a car.
Driving is the most freeing thing we can do.
It's why buying our first car is the most important act,
maybe, in our lives, short of having kids.
I could go every week and talk about radar detectors,
speeding, escaping police.
But that's just a small aspect of what I love about driving.
For this show to be interesting for me, for this
show to be interesting for anyone who doesn't already
know about why I'm here doing this show, we have to do
things that are unexpected.
Two more words.
El Salvador.
I'll be the first one to say that JF is the most un-fun
road trip partner anyone could have.
I was told by a very wise man that if you click your driving
shoe heels together three times and repeat, "that would
never happen if JF was with us,"
something good will happen.
Today, JF is not with us.
JF is not with us.
And we're on the way to El Salvador.
I can honestly say I had no desire to go to El Salvador.
But when JF called and said, you're going to El Salvador,
call this guy, Julio, I trusted him.
JF still hasn't said why I'm in El Salvador.
Although I have to say, like Baja, Mexico, it's nothing
like anyone told me it would be.
And this Julio guy, editor of Speed Magazine,
is still not here.
Allegedly the most important car journalist in Central
America, owner of a Renault Clio RS, which is a car that I
don't believe exists in Central America--
-Hey.
-This guy?
Dude, I recognize you from Rensport, dude.
-You're a freaking icon, man.
-Dude, [BLEEP].
-So good to see you, man.
-Objects in the mirror are exactly as far away as they
appear when he's driving.
You are the most interesting man in Central America.
-Oh, no.
-Dude, awesome, dude.
-Stop that, man.
-JF didn't tell me it was you.
-Really?
-Well, JF doesn't have very good taste in friends, and he
said you were a good friend of his.
-Within five minutes, it became very obvious as to why,
if I wasn't on this show, I'd watch this show, and as to
why, if Julio was looking for a political position, he
literally should be on the cabinet of the El Salvadorean
president as Minister of Commerce.
Because Julio convinced me that El Salvador might be one
of the last bastions of real car culture.
And he promised to show me why.
My family business is a car rental business.
I grew up with rental cars.
And I can say without a doubt, anyone who's ever said that
they've driven the worst rental car of all time, they
were lying.
I drove the worst rental car of all time.
It's the worst rental car I've ever driven, but it's
still a great car.
JULIO ROBERTO DIAZ (OFFSCREEN): Well.
-I mean, look--
JULIO ROBERTO DIAZ (OFFSCREEN): It's better than
walking, you know.
-Look, when you go to Pebble Beach, they review cars and
discuss the patina.
JULIO ROBERTO DIAZ (OFFSCREEN): Uh-huh.
-And look at the patina of this steering wheel.
JULIO ROBERTO DIAZ
(OFFSCREEN): Absolutely nothing.
ALEX ROY (OFFSCREEN): Also, it's the first rental car I've
ever had delivered with an empty fuel tank.
It's a-- it's a 2003 Sentra?
JULIO ROBERTO DIAZ (OFFSCREEN): Yeah.
That's right.
Made in Mexico and still sold brand new.
-This car had more loose trim than a UPenn
post-victory party.
I don't recommend renting Nissans in El Salvador.
Ever.
On the way to our first surprise stop, Julio gave us a
little tour of San Salvador.
Amazingly, despite all the warnings, and the US State
Department website, and the CIA Factbook page, San
Salvador, at least the parts we saw,
looked a lot like Brentwood.
I mean, the parts of Brentwood where everyone's a celebrity
and you have gates and guards and barbed wire.
Except that in San Salvador, everybody has gates and guards
and barbed wire.
In fact, there's more barbed wire here than I've ever seen
outside of Ossining, New York, which is
where Sing Sing's located.
And that's in addition to the security guards everywhere in
the city with M-16s, with pump-action shotguns over
their shoulders.
Everywhere.
Julio's case for why real car culture exists in El Salvador
in a way it rarely exists almost anywhere else unfolded
in a very logical manner.
If you want to buy a car in El Salvador--
and to be clear, there are five million
people in this country.
12,000 new cars are sold every year.
You really need to be ready to spend money.
If a car is manufactured in Germany, if that cars is a VW
GTI, and you want to buy one here new, be
prepared to spend $45,000.
Kids in Southern California have no idea how lucky they
are, that they could roll in and buy this car brand-new for
half what it costs here.
Used?
I mean, under $20,000.
And I imagine the used market here is not that large because
there aren't that many cars around.
Why is it so expensive to buy this car?
-Well, first thing, taxes.
We have very high taxes for the cars, depending on the
engine size.
So the larger the engine, the higher the taxes are.
Plus the dealers need to have a stock of touring personnel
for this car, parts.
And all that doesn't make sense when you sell only a
handful of these cars.
And not many people can buy this car because of its size,
and they'd rather buy taller, larger SUVs.
-If you live in a country like El Salvador, where there is no
law barring the transportation of an unlimited number of
people in the bed of your pick-up, then
$14,000 buys you this.
-We have this little pick-up truck called Saveiro.
This is made in Brazil.
It's small.
It's got an interesting cargo boot, which is
basic in this country.
Why?
Because people use this to take more as a people-carrier.
-Talk about transportation culture.
No law against transporting people unbelted, unsecured in
the back of a pick-up, on top of a truck, on top of a car.
No law against it.
In fact, a pick-up which actually has a step in the
side of the bed so you can more easily transport people
in a manner that would get you arrested in the US.
But if you're willing to buy a VW, say, manufactured in
Mexico, you can buy a car here that you can't get in the US
that's really, really cool.
Four-wheel drive, four-door, six-seater pick-up with a
2.0-liter four-cylinder diesel engine.
And it was called the Amarok.
I wouldn't care who manufactured it.
And that car was $25,000.
JULIO ROBERTO DIAZ (OFFSCREEN): Not only a
diesel, but it's got a four-cylinder twin turbo.
-$25,000 for this?
This car would sell in the US like hotcakes.
-It's like an eco-Avalanche on crack, designed by Germans.
Awesome.
Well, that's what you get in El Salvador at the VW
dealership.
Julio turned out to be an amazing tour guide, and he
taught us a lot of things about the local culture, far
more than I could possibly teach anyone
who came to New York.
Do you have any mythological beasts or
monsters of El Salvador?
-There are a couple of legends here.
-Tell us about them.
-One of them is this beautiful woman, this beautiful woman
that comes out at night and harasses drunk men.
[LAUGHTER]
-So what happens?
Don't laugh.
It's part of our local mythology.
So what does she do?
She--
-In LA, that's called Lindsay Lohan.
-OK.
Lilo.
-No, seriously.
So there's a mythological beast that harasses drunk men?
-Drunk men.
-And what's this thing called?
-Siguanaba.
-Siguanaba?
-Yeah.
Oh, you pronounce it well.
Correctly.
So what she does is that when you're going home drunk and
you see this beautiful woman calling you with her huge
breasts out--
-Of course.
Yes.
You come and get close to her, and when you get close to her
and speak to her and get hypnotized by her beauty,
suddenly she becomes a monster.
-Right.
Of course.
-And she either--
or she kills you.
MALE SPEAKER (OFFSCREEN): [INAUDIBLE].
-Yeah.
Or she tortures your peepee and it goes numb forever.
-'Cause I was doing some research about the other
mythological beast which only attacks sober men.
And she's very short and has a very large behind.
And as soon as you approach her, she runs away.
[LAUGHTER]
-And then you're horny for the rest of your life.
Someone mentioned to me the tragedy of El Salvador in the
essays of Joan Didion 20 years ago.
The only tragedy in El Salvador today is that the
kinds of cars the enthusiasts wish they could afford aren't
even imported here.
I'm talking about cars with which one could truly take
advantage of the unbelievable driving roads
surrounding the city.
Unbelievable mountain driving roads, not all in perfect
condition, all completely ripe for Subaru STIs, Evos, 911s.
We told Julio we wanted to get out of the city.
He told us that we should show a little bit of patience
because he was going to take us somewhere truly
magnificent.
And on the way to magnificence, we stopped in
Planes de Renderos for a little bite to eat,
overlooking San Salvador
The Planes de Renderos, one of the most beautiful locations
in all El Salvador.
Behind us, the hill, San Jacinto, and over Julio's
shoulders, the Volcano of San Salvador.
I'm constantly reminded whenever I travel that I am
statistically more likely to discover the pieces of a
mystery falling into place before my eyes, anywhere I go.
And today, I learned that the Volcano San Salvador erupted
exactly 500 years ago.
Not a coincidence, perhaps, that it was 499 years ago and
eight months, the first sightings of a Quetzalcoatl
youngling not 1,000 miles north in Teotihuacan, Mexico.
And in an even further coincidence, I just learned
from the man downstairs, whose English was quite poor, but
I'm quite sure I understood that he told me that a
Quetzalcoatl youngling's flight range in its first
month of life is exactly 1,000 miles.
-What the [BLEEP]
are you talking about, man?
-It's just--
this week on Made-Up History, the origins of Quetzalcoatl,
also known as the Medusa of the South.
[LAUGH]
JULIO ROBERTO DIAZ (OFFSCREEN): [INAUDIBLE].
-Can we add that in?
Julio pulled off quite a number convincing JF to send
us down here, and quite a number on me, convincing me
that we should just do whatever he says.
But the case unfolded even further.
And he promised us something special before
the end of the day.
And as we headed further into the mountains,
we came to a driveway.
And I could tell, looking up this driveway, something very
special awaited us at the top.
If you graded a car collection on a curve based on distance
from a major dealership and other collectors, well, pretty
much everybody in Connecticut would be
pretty low on the scale.
Who would expect, on top of a mountain in El Salvador, that
you would find several original and several
extraordinarily rare replicas of some of the most expensive
Porsches ever made?
And now we have the real reason JF sent me to El
Salvador, because here, without irony, I can truly
say, in this secret location we're about to meet a man for
whom, when it is said "stay thirsty, my
friends," he's not joking.
He is the most interesting man in El Salvador, a man who's
going to show us his car collection.
Julio's good friend, Gino.
-Welcome to my home, Alex.
Thank you for coming.
-Thank you so much for having us.
Show us your car collection and tell us about
your passion for cars.
What is this?
-Does this car ever leave the house?
-You drive this car on the-- you take this out?
-I don't even want to ask what this is worth.
This is the-- one of the-- this might be the coolest Bug
variant I've ever seen in my life.
And this, I kind of know what it is.
Tell us about it.
-And you take this out on the roads in El Salvador?
-Let's be clear.
He drives this car to Nicaragua and back.
I cannot believe what I'm hearing.
Open the back of Car and Driver and you'll see ads--
replica kits for AC Cobras, replicas 356s.
But there are some replicas so rare that they could only have
been built by someone who bought the plans from Porsche.
In fact, there are some replicas so rare that there
are only two originals and one replica.
And they're here in El Salvador.
-But what moved me the most and reminded me of my own
father and his love of cars, the same love of cars he
passed on to me, was the most interesting car Gino had in
his collection--
a 1959 Willys Jeep, heavily modified, which looks like it
could have driven over a Hummer without a dent, which
he'd painted on the side "La Preciosa," named after his
wife who had been born in 1959 and who passed away.
I've seen a lot of cool cars and I've seen some car
collections, but I wish every trip brought me a new friend
who actually surprised me every
time he took me anywhere.
Julio promised me something really special and really
unexpected for our next day.
And he was right.
So, JF, stand by.
Stop.
Wait, wait.
Hold on.
JF, why am I in Houston Airport?
Uh, to El Salvador.
Houston.
Airport.
Layover.
Also the Energy City, home of rollerball champion Jonathan
E. What happened?
Well, I have some good news for you.
You're not here, so the episode's going to be awesome.
What's the bad news?
I heard a rumor he was sampling the devil's lettuce
and missed his flight.
JOSH (OFFSCREEN): Who missed their flight?
-Tom.
JOSH (OFFSCREEN): Stop it.
-Yeah.
Tom missed the flight.
JOSH (OFFSCREEN): Are you serious?
-All right.
Just tell me this one thing.
Julio, does he smoke cigarettes?
OK.
But just promise when we get there, there'll be something
to do in El Salvador that makes sense.
All right.
Just keep the ransom money ready, because it's the eighth
most dangerous country in the world, and that's today.
If you don't hear from me in 24 hours, I'm dead.
Because Tom would get us kidnapped and completely--
and he would piss off kidnap-- in fact, if he was with us,
we'd use him as bait and say that he's the wealthy guy and
we work for him.
If he was with us, it'd be a lot safer.
That's OK.
And now, remember, I want to use positive, life-affirming
security protocols.
We call you every two hours to verify we're alive, like
astronauts.
And if we don't, call the State Department immediately.
OK?
Yeah.
And remember, I'm worth a lot more than Josh, because you
know, I've got the white jacket on.
See you later.
Goodbye.
Thank God you're not with us, because, um, they don't make
currency that small, small enough to ransom you out.
See you later.
Bye.