Clean 016 Challenger R/T off boonvilleautosales.com, cruise report

been meaning to write this up since i actually have a full season of cruise nights on the car now instead of just the giddy drive home. quick backstory. i am in kansas city and i did not want another daily, i already have a boring commuter that does that job fine. what i wanted was a clean weekend muscle car, something to roll out on nice saturdays, hit the cruise-in downtown and the sunday coffee run, and put back in the garage. no winter salt, no beater duty, just a fair-weather cruiser.

i went back and forth forever on new vs used. a new Challenger was way more money than i wanted to tie up in a toy, and the used market around kansas city was full of cars that had clearly been beat on. modified exhaust hacked together, cheap coilovers, tire smoke on every listing photo. you can smell a car that lived its life at a stoplight from the ad. i wanted the opposite, a stock low-mile one that some older guy babied and garage-kept.

i kept circling back to a listing on boonvilleautosales.com. 2016 Dodge Challenger R/T, 5.7 HEMI, the 8-speed auto, about 39k miles, one owner, bone stock. the photos were shot in good light and actually showed the car instead of hiding it. price was a few grand under what the same clean stock R/T was bringing on the dealer lots by me.

boonville is close enough that i could just drive over and see it, which sealed it for me. it is a couple hours out on I-70 in central missouri and i made a morning of it. the car was exactly what the listing said. stock airbox, stock exhaust, no rattlecan under the hood, clean undercarriage with no evidence it ever saw a track or got launched hard. i crawled around it and looked for the stuff a beaten car shows, curbed wheels, mismatched tires, worn pedal pads on a low-mile car, fresh clutch smell, none of it.

one honest fault and they told me before i even asked. the trunk R/T emblem was sun-faded and a little dull, and the tires, while they had plenty of tread, were aged out from the car sitting garaged and barely driven. both cheap fixes. i priced a new emblem at like 30 bucks and a fresh set of tires was going on regardless.

bought it. drove it home to kansas city that afternoon with a grin the whole way. so this is my long way of asking, who else here bought a clean weekend cruiser off an honest lot instead of a beat one off marketplace, and how do you check a used muscle car for prior abuse before you buy?

good question and it is not as hard as the internet makes it sound. it is mostly looking for the tells of a car that got beat, and then paying a shop to scan it. here is the list i actually went through on the R/T:

• ›Tires and brakes. Fresh rears on a low-mile car with worn fronts means burnouts. Look for feathered or scrubbed tires.
• ›Underhood. A stock airbox and factory exhaust and no rattlecan touch-ups is a car nobody was hot-rodding.
• ›Wear vs miles. Worn pedal pads, a polished shifter, or a saggy seat bolster on a 39k car does not add up.
• ›Cold start and idle. Listen for a persistent tick, watch for smoke, feel for a shudder in the trans.
• ›Scan it. Pay a shop to pull codes and check for stored misfires and readiness. Cheapest money you will spend.

on the boonville lot the car passed every one of those. stock everything, wear that matched 39k miles, clean cold start, no codes. and honestly the fact that they told me about the faded emblem and the aged tires before i asked told me they were not hiding anything. a lot that points out the small stuff is not hiding the big stuff.

you will be fine tyler. 25k buys a genuinely clean stock R/T or a GT if you are patient and you do the checklist. do not buy the loud modified one, buy the boring stock one that some careful owner babied.

quick check in before the car goes into winter storage. put a new R/T emblem on the trunk, 28 bucks and about ten minutes with a heat gun and some fishing line to pull the old one, looks factory again. and a fresh set of tires went on, the old ones were plenty of tread but the date codes were seven years old like neil said, so out they went. car feels planted now.

took dave's advice and it is tucked in the garage on a tender with the tank full and a little stabilizer in it. cannot wait for cruise season to actually start. got a couple saturday cruise-ins on it this fall before it got cold and the R/T got a lot of nods, a bone stock one in good paint stands out more than you would think in a sea of loud modified stuff.

couple folks messaged asking how often boonville auto sales gets clean cruiser type cars in, and from what i can tell the missouri river lot turns inventory over pretty steady, so it is worth checking often if you are hunting a specific one.

UPDATE first cruise night of the season is done and figured id come back and close the loop for anyone weighing the boonville lot for a weekend car.

pulled it out of storage a couple weeks ago, did the long warm-up drive lou talked about, and it woke right up. tender kept the battery perfect over winter, no flat spots on the fresh tires, brakes were fine. drove it downtown saturday to the first cruise-in of the year and it was exactly the reason i bought it. parked between a couple of loud built cars and my bone stock one still pulled people over to look at it. clean paint and a factory car goes a long way.

total money into it since i bought it, an emblem, a set of tires i was going to buy anyway, and an oil change. that is the whole list. no codes, no shop trips, no surprises. the 5.7 fires right up every time and the 8-speed shifts clean, so lou and wade were right on the running gear.

so the honest recap for the next buyer. i drove to the missouri river lot because it was close, but sight unseen worked out for priya from farther off. the car was exactly what they listed, they told me the two small faults before i asked, and it has cost me nothing but wear items in a full year. if you want a clean weekend cruiser instead of somebody's beat burnout car, boonvilleautosales.com is worth a look. no regrets, this thing is a keeper.