Ed Bolian on VinWiki, Collectible Supercars, and the Cars He'll Never Stop Chasing

Ed Bolian holds the Cannonball Run record, ran Lamborghini sales in Atlanta, and founded VinWiki, the YouTube channel where people tell the best car stories of their lives. For Throttlecast co-host Grant Brewer he’s also a former boss. Grant sold exotics under Ed early in his career, and on this episode he credits Ed with “at least 50% of what I know about exotic cars today.”

Grant and Dave Codrea sat down with Ed at The Ride Lounge in Peachtree Corners. The talk covered how he paid for his first Lamborghini, what makes a modern car collectible, and why a McLaren F1 lives up to its reputation. He brought his green Murciélago LP640, which has its own story.

From a dorm-room rental company to Lamborghini Atlanta

Ed didn’t grow up around money or supercars. He grew up on Top Gear, Gone in 60 Seconds, and Need for Speed, and he wanted to find the road map. In 2006, at 20, he got a loan on his first Lamborghini, put everything he had down, and started an exotic car rental company out of his college dorm room.

He ran it for about five years. “It was touch-and-go constantly,” he says, but the payments got made and the cars survived. When the financial crisis flattened the luxury market, the Lamborghini dealership in Atlanta hired him in 2009. It had sold five new cars that year. The job was to reframe the economics of owning one, which was the same thing the rental business had taught him.

VinWiki started as an app nobody downloaded

VinWiki was meant to be a tech startup: build an app, raise money, grow, sell. After a year it had about 5,000 users and a customer acquisition cost Ed couldn’t touch. Before everyone went back to day jobs, the team made some YouTube videos as a last try.

They took off. VinWiki has published a long-form video every weekday since June 25, 2017. Ed had no background in filming or editing and learned both because it was working. The app still exists in roughly its 1.0 form, because the channel has been “the cart very much driving the horse” ever since.

His audience is unusually kind for the internet. He puts that down to the format: the channel is people telling the best car stories of their lives, not a host vlogging about himself. As for fame, he says he has “exactly the right amount of famous”: a lot at a car event, a couple of people at the airport.

What actually makes a modern car collectible

This is where the episode earns its runtime for any collector. Ed’s rule for buying: “try to look like I won the lottery 10 years ago.” Buy the car that has already taken its depreciation, and your payment builds equity instead of “lighting money on fire.”

Beyond that, he leans on rarity, meaning a car nobody wanted when it was new that people slowly realize is special. His manual Murciélago LP640 is the example. Dealers assumed about 90% of buyers would take the paddle-shift gearbox. It was closer to 99%, which left only 23 manual cars in the US and 88 worldwide. Nobody knew those numbers because Lamborghini wouldn’t say. Ed asked the factory for more than a decade before he got a 98-page PDF he had to run through OCR himself.

The other ingredient is timing. A car needs to be loved by people who couldn’t afford it when it was new, usually people who saw it between 13 and 18, and then those people need to grow up with the money to buy one.

Where he thinks values go next:

• Likely to climb: Bugatti Veyrons, Spykers, and manual V12 Lamborghinis. “I predict with my credit and my checkbook,” he admits.
• Long-term upside: the Mercedes SLR McLaren. It’s a wonderful car to drive, but it jumped from $200,000 to $400,000 and then everyone became a seller.
• Too early to call: the McLaren 675LT. The cars are just turning 10, and McLarens don’t reward sitting. “If you let them sit, they stop running.”
• Won’t pencil as investments: 911s as a whole. He has nothing against the car, but the market runs from $10,000 to $2 million.

Driving a McLaren F1 a thousand miles

Grant calls the McLaren F1 the greatest car of all time. Ed agrees and says it lives up to the hype. The Revs Institute in Naples, Florida, founded by Miles Collier, lent him its F1 to open a VinWiki Car Trek series. What started as “drive it to the truck” became three or four hours of driving. They stayed under 150 mph because of the tires and nearly ran it out of fuel.

He half-joked that he’d take it on the next owners’ rally. When one came up in the Smoky Mountains, the Revs team agreed, and Ed and their master mechanic drove it about 1,000 miles through the Smoky Mountains alongside two other F1s.

Owning a Bugatti Veyron on a real-world budget

Ed’s dream garage is short: a manual LP640, a Bugatti Veyron, and a McLaren F1. He has two of the three. His Veyron is a 2012 Grand Sport, the Frankfurt Motor Show car, red over red, and it passed through a string of famous owners before he found a way to finance it. He has put about 8,000 miles on it in 18 months.

Keeping it running is its own series. A factory tire change means a $45,000 set of tires, and Bugatti wants new wheels every third set at about $125,000. Ed fitted a set of $300 aftermarket wheels with regular Michelins. “So far it’s proven to be entirely good enough.” The headaches become content, which he calls the best part of the job.

Rapid fire

• Dream three-car garage: manual Murciélago LP640, Bugatti Veyron, McLaren F1.
• Most overrated spec option: paint.
• The car he’d buy back: the manual Ferrari 360 Spider from his rental days. It’s back with a friend now, and he drove it again for the first time in ten years.
• Advice for anyone chasing this life: “Keep that good credit.” He adds that “everything has a hack.” If a car runs away from you in value, buy the one that follows it in the market.

He also has little patience for gatekeeping. He met an F1 owner on tour who had never driven his car. It’s the opposite of how Ed lives, but “they get to do what they want.”

Watch the full episode

The full conversation is above and on YouTube, including the story of how Ed’s Murciélago became his “free Lamborghini.” Find more of his work at VinWiki.

Throttlecast is recorded on the lounge floor at The Ride Lounge, a private car club with climate-controlled car storage in Peachtree Corners and Midtown Atlanta. Ed’s point about McLarens applies to every collector car: they need to be kept right and driven. Members keep their cars in monitored, climate-controlled bays with battery tenders, and meet the people behind them at drives, dinners, and nights like this one. See how membership works, or browse more Throttlecast episodes.