Isuzu VehiCROSS, AMC Spirit, 12 Go-Karts: The Dopest Cars I Found For Sale Online

Folks, it's once again Friday. I don't really know what happened this week, but it feels like it simultaneously dragged and flew by — it's Thursday as I write this, yet it feels like a Tuesday after the slowest Monday in recorded history. Am I going mad? Are you? Is that air I'm breathing now?

I spent this past weekend on a rock climbing trip to New Hampshire, where I slept on the floor of a farm-commune and tore my fingers up climbing rocks. I had one of the scariest experiences of my life on a rock, and decided I simply had to push through or the fear would win. With that in mind, this week brings us some listings for getting out there — cars, trucks, and SUVs that'll get you to your own fear-facing experiences. Also 12 go-karts, because I couldn't see a single listing for 12 go-karts and not deem that one of this week's Dopest Cars. 

It's like a vehicle, but cross! Two doors, four wheels, an interior that's been coated in what loosk to be cheap black and red faux-leather — what more could you want? Oh, you want ground clearance, off-road prowess, and for some reason chrome wheels? Well, that's a truly bonkers list, but this is the vehicle for you. 

I see a lot of VehiCROSSes with rooftop tents, and while this one doesn't have one yet you could certainly fix that. You'd be forced to figure out whether a rooftop tent is better than just a regular tent, considering it doesn't keep you warm the way car camping does and costs you fuel mileage that a regular tent doesn't, but that's not for me to decide for you. Maybe you need to absolutely fill the interior of your car floor to ceiling with maple syrup every time you go camping and you don't want your tent to get sticky. I don't know your life. 

This Tacoma is clearly owned by someone who really liked the Tacoma TRD Pro back in the day. Remember the first one, with the lift kit and the blue paint and the snorkel that didn't actually work as a snorkel? It was just some sort of sand-deflector thing that coincidentally looked a lot like a snorkel? That seems to be the vibe that this seller is going for here, but with a set of truly terrible headlights added in to the equation. 

Swap the headlights for something normal, though, and you'd have yourself a damn fine off-roader. Sure, the wrap looks pretty cheap, but the frame's been patched — that's nice on Tacomas of this generation, which otherwise tend to fold in half like the tacos they are as soon as they see road salt. Why is that such an issue with so many Japanese cars? It snows in Hokkaido too. 

One dollar per cubic centimeter! Where else can you find that kind of deal? Sure, this DR650 may not "have electric start," or "run," but you can fix those! One of them, anyway. You probably can't fix the kickstart-only thing, which appears to be what turned the seller off from continuing with this project, but at least you can go into this project understanding the situation. This seller doesn't appear to have done that.

The DR650 got electric start later in its run, but how much do you really need that? It's been a minute since I've kick-started anything, and even longer since I've kick started a four stroke, but I imagine you could make it happen on a big one-lunger like this. Once you're over that hurdle, you get a fun little project while you get it up and running. Who doesn't like a project bike?

This Porsche has something in the listing that you probably don't want to see on most ads, but that's nice to see on a 996: A new engine. Some prior owner must have grenaded the first engine's IMD bearing, because the new motor has an upgraded IMS already set and done. It's paired to a Tiptronic automatic gearbox, which isn't ideal, but you look at that green-over-tan spec and tell me you wouldn't at least consider it. 

The seller of this 996 also did it up with a double-din head unit complete with Apple CarPlay, which isn't always an easy task on German cars. They love their complicated electronics, so this is a job that's nice to have already done and working by the time you get your hands on the car. You're probably saving a fortune in adapters alone, converting proprietary Porsche plugs to something universal enough to plug into a Pioneer. 

Fun fact: The Lexus GX470 was actually my first car! They weren't cool yet when I had mine, they were just mom cars that hadn't yet become appreciated as cheap Prados with luxury interiors, and thus I didn't treat mine as well as I probably should have. I wasn't the one total it, though, so at least I've got that going for me. 

The GX may have started life as a mom-car for hauling the kids to school (as evidenced by my mom buying it to haul kids to school) but it's become appreciated for its off-road prowess in the years since. This one could certainly take you to any crag you could possibly want to visit, and it'll do with Lexus comfort and refinement too — much of the interior looks near-mint, which is wild for a 21-year-old car. It's like the original owner was single or something, most of the seats look entirely untouched. 

The AMC Spirit isn't the proto-SUV that the Eagle was, but it's not really all that far off. Sure, it was introduced to replace the Gremlin, but it looks more like a short-wheelbase Eagle than it does like a Gremlin. Plus, this one's pretty beat to hell, so you don't really need to feel bad as you sling it through dirt roads like a rally driver on your way to something scary. 

This does raise the idea that whipping a rusty Spirit with a leaking transmission and the 4-liter inline six out of a YJ through a gravel back road might be the scary thing you should try, and I fully endorse this activity up to the very limits of liability. I think it would be fun to do this in a safe and controlled manner, and if you screw it up then you clearly weren't doing it safely and controlledly and I'm not liable for anything that happens. Take that, legal. 

Some bike people fascinate me. The seller of this FTR is looking to trade it for a Shovelhead or an Evo Softail, but he also says he has a shovelhead and multiple Evo bikes for sale. Do you want them or not, man? Are you a flipper or something? 

For $6,500, this FTR doesn't feel much like a flip. That's a solid price for one of the prettier bikes ever penned by human hands, even if it's wildly heavy for what it is. That's the tradeoff with the FTR, though — if you want to beat its performance, you're probably going to end up looking at an MT-10 or something. That's something no one wants to look at, especially when the alternative is an FTR. Disregard whatever the seller has going on and just snap up this Indian before someone beats you to it, I imagine an asking price like this won't last forever. 

This Mustang has the absolute wildest ratio of photo quality to vehicle quality that I've ever seen. Its listing photos are absolutely gorgeous, using garage chandeliers like studio lighting to show off the fantastic black-and-orange paint, and then the car itself is a junker with a 4.6 and five-speed out of an '08 Mustang. 

In other words, it's perfect. It's fully caged, yet most of the photos have the body in some extreme state of disrepair. If you buy this, you need to do the absolute minimum to get it up and running and then keep it looking exactly like this forever. You can't replicate damage and repairs like this artificially, no matter how hard you try, and this Mustang deserves to show off its history. Let it wear its years with pride, and with the beating heart of its much-younger brother implanted into its chest. But, less morbid than that sounds. 

Don't you just love a relatively niche British bike that hasn't started in half a decade? I say that only semi-jokingly, because if I had the time, space, and money for a project I'd absolutely have some hellaciously hard-to-repair machine in my garage. I love the search for parts, crawling eBay for the thing that will save my bike, and something like this Rocket 3 ought to give you that experience in spades. 

I will say, this was not a good-looking era for the Rocket. Really it was a pretty rough time for Triumph in general, but this chrome-slathered bug-eyed roadster really epitomizes the issues. I wonder how it would look if you blacked all that chrome out. Buy this, do that, then send me pictures. I think it could actually come out pretty cool, in a sort of "rejection of the excesses of the pre-2008 financial crash world" way.

12 go karts for $8,500! Plus engines, spare body parts, and more. That's barely over $700 per kart! C'mon, now. Just buy 'em.