Sure if he buys a highly-modified hunk of junk, put together by some ricer that has no clue what he's doing. Otherwise, Evos do just fine without $20k worth stuff going wrong. If they were that big of a POS, none of us would have bought them in the first place.

 

Hey so I was on facebook looking for evo's and I came across an evo 8 GSR for 18k ill post the link but do you guys think its a good buy or no?
https://www.facebook.com/marketplace...0-55ecf66aa9cf

 

any car modified this much is going to have lots and lots of problems

 

care to elaborate?

 

I looked at it Shawn. Sure, it appears to have been rode hard & needs some TLC for sure. But, if the drivetrain & unibody are in decent shape, it may not be a bad deal at some value below the $18K. Didnt catch the odometer miles?

 

thanks for helping. The guy said it has 186k miles on the body but the engine he just fully rebuilt and that only has about 3k on it, the head has about 10k, coilovers have 10k, and the fuel pump only has 5k miles on it. Not sure about the transmission tho. I was thinking of offering 17k or 16.5k for it if I do end up buying it. What do you guys recommend as the first thing I should do to it if I buy it?

 

I say go for it if you can get the price down just a bit. Some will say to have it inspected & maybe even check the compression. If the under body is rust free, you may be looking at a nice clean-up project. Pics show it needs some underbody, exterior front bumper cover work & interior work.

If you get it, i would send it directly to the tuner & check the tune status & adjust if necessary. The chassis def has some miles on it which makes me wonder whether this was daily'd in the winter?

 

Awesome thanks for the input! If it needs a little work I’m ok with that I love working on things I’ll get more details on it once I make a decision thanks for everything guys!

 

If I was 18 again, I wouldn't be chasing clapped out, high mileage, modified ****boxes that max out my budget on car purchase price alone. Evos can be extremely expensive to fix when things go wrong, and yes, the insurance will be ridiculous on it. The average 18 year old is going to cause a lot of things to go wrong, too. They can be extremely fast vehicles and downright dangerous in the hands of a novice driver, even if you don't mean for it to be. Pennsylvania gets snowy, and it takes one overestimation of your car's abilities on slick surfaces to write the car off or put your life at risk. The number of badly wrecked Evos I've seen over the years on IAAI & Copart is a testament to that, or you could just ask the previous owner of my Evo, who drifted the car into a curb within the first week of ownership and wrote it off.

I like the suggestion of the Fiesta ST. They're still pretty new, very reliable, pretty safe for what they are, inexpensive and teach good driving fundamentals.
Do your time with the econoboxes, and then buy the best example of the chassis you want when you have the knowledge and experience. There is no glory in getting into the worst example of a sports car and then having to rely on it for every day use, trust me.

 

^^^^
This but when you're 18 you'll learn by experience

 

For reference, I sold my 05' SSL with 192k miles for $12k. I know this car is a 9 but I think it might be priced kind of high for the miles based what I sold a perfect running car for.

For more reference, I'm looking at an Evo 9 with 93k miles listed for $20k but negotiating to $16-17k because it has lower compression across the board. (90psi)

If you're really serious about one, I wouldn't get a high mileage one for a daily driver. Look for an 03/04 Evo 8 as they tend to be a little bit cheaper but sell quickly.

Honestly if you're wanting to learn how to work on cars you might be better off splitting your money and getting a nice reliable DD and something else as a project car. I was building a sick DSM when I was your age and gave up and sold it and bought a sport bike instead. But the DSM taught me every single thing I know about cars today and it was nice when I got my first Evo I was pretty familiar with the 4g63 already. If I was a complete noobie, the Evo engine bay would have scared me but I dove right into the car no problem.