My first demonstrator was an orange 1970 Ford Maverick. A salesman that had been blown out a few days before I started work had driven it previously. It had 3000 miles on the odometer. At the time I was driving a 1962 VW Bug, so for me the Maverick was the height of cool. I had grown up in a household that had only been able to afford used cars, so driving something so new was quite an experience.
The first thing I did with the Maverick was to load it up with my friends and head for San Francisco. I remember tooling around Broadway checking out the topless places with my buddies. It was an evening that is etched in my memory forever. At the time, life didn’t get any better than that.
Demos, at least here in California, are largely a thing of the past. Starting in the mid-80’s the privilege of driving a new car around on the dealer’s dime began to disappear. Rising insurance rates, generations of drunken car salesmen crashing their cars, and the lessening of perks in general, were the chief reasons for the demise.
When I first started selling cars, the salesmen were the kings of the dealership. They were respected, even coddled to a certain extent, by the managers and owners. On the side of the showroom at Hayward Ford they had their own parking spaces. Each morning the spots would fill with shiny new Ford LTDs each decked out with their own dealer plate. No Ford Mavericks for them! They were reserved for green peas like me.
At one time the salesmen even had their own license plate frames. The top portions would have their name, and the bottom would say Hayward Ford. They would put them on every car they sold. This practice had fallen by the wayside by the time I started selling cars. It had become too expensive. But I still have a Danny Teves/Hayward Ford frame hanging on my garage wall from the days when my brother was on the line.
For me, having a demo was great. Here I was, a kid driving around in a new car at no charge, the envy of my peers. I didn’t even have to pay for insurance! And on top of that I even received a $40.00 per month gas allowance. What a deal!
They mostly gave me Ford Pintos to drive. Believe it or not Pintos sold like hotcakes, and it wasn’t unusual for me to have two, three, or more demo changes in a month. As time went on, so did the quality of the demo. Though I never achieved LTD status at Hayward Ford, I did manage to procure an occasional Mustang. When that happened I really felt like I had it made.
I remember one busy Christmas season. It seemed like I was driving a different car every few days. One cold and rainy day I went to the local mall after work for some shopping. The parking lot was jammed. I spent a couple of hours at the mall. When I was ready to leave, I went walked out to the parking lot and realized I couldn’t remember what kind of car I was driving! I had to walk around in a drizzle for twenty minutes looking for a set of dealer plates on a Ford.
One time the dealership held a dinner for all the salesmen at a local restaurant. It turned into a big party. There was a lot of drinking that night. The next morning we learned that three salesmen had wrecked their demos on the way home. One guy, who was driving one of those cool old Ford Broncos you sometimes see in movies, rolled it!
In the mid-70’s I went to work at Elmhurst Ford in Oakland, California. It was there I met my first sales crew that was mostly African American. They were great guys, a hell of a lot more fun then the old white guys at Hayward Ford. Like their counterparts at Hayward Ford, the Elmhurst Ford crew drove mostly LTDs, and they thought I should drive one too. Now these guys were very cool. When the drove they did something called “leaning”. Leaning consisted of putting the power seat as far back as you could, driving with your left hand on top of the steering wheel, and leaning toward the middle of the street as you drove.
They decided it would be fun to teach me to lean. They showed me how to do it on the side parking lot and made me drive up and down the street while they howled at laughter at the sight. I guess it was pretty funny, this young, longhaired Portuguese kid driving like Super Fly!
When the Mustang II came out in 1974, my brother gave me one for a demo. It was one of the first new Mustangs on the streets of the Bay Area. Although history hasn’t been kind to the Mustang II, I felt proud that I was driving a car virtually no one had seen before. On the second night I had it, I went to visit a girl in Alameda. Alameda is an island in the San Francisco Bay separated from Oakland by a wide estuary and is accessible by a tunnel called the Alameda Tube.
Well, I guess I was thinking too much about getting laid that night because as I drove down the onramp that led into the tube, I rear-ended a truck. The car was drivable, though one headlight was out, but the front end was pretty screwed up. The truck and the guy driving it was okay, but when he later found out the car belonged to a Ford dealership his neck started to hurt. What a mess!
When I was seventeen my brother bought me my first car, a 1957 Ford Fairlane. (Cost: $100.) I promptly crashed it. My mother made me go down to the dealership to confess my sin. I was nervous as hell. Danny is ten years older then I and had moved out of the house when I was nine. I really didn’t know him all that well, and I expected the worse. But when I told him what had happened he just looked at me and asked me if I had gotten hurt. When I said no, he said well, that was the most important thing. What a guy!
Well, Danny forgave me for crashing the Mustang too, though I believe that I was demoted back to Pintos for a while. The only hang up was the car was so new there was no body parts available to fix it for over a month!
Talk to you later,
David
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