Poking Fun at Ugly Cars to Attract Donations

“Ain’t nobody gonna hit the bucket,” says Larry Lockett, creeping his 1982 Chevrolet Citation into a busy intersection near Los Angeles International Airport. Cars in both directions slow down to let him in. “See what I mean?” Mr. Lockett says, gliding into traffic. “Who’s gonna want to hit this car?”

In a city teeming with Land Rovers and Hummers, a guy in a two-tone brown beater with more than 200,000 miles rules the road. Last month, Mr. Lockett’s ride gained notoriety after it won a contest as one of the three ugliest cars in the United States.

The contest was set up by the Vehicle Donation Processing Center, a Fontana, Calif., company that operates donation programs for more than 300 charities across the country, as a way of poking fun at ugly cars, drawing attention to vehicle donations, and letting people know they can still get a tax deduction for donating a car to charity. It is difficult to know how many cars people donated in response to the contest, but it attracted publicity in Newsweek and other national publications.

Since January, when a new federal law took effect limiting how much people can write off on their taxes for donating their cars, many Americans have gotten the wrong idea that 2004 was the last year they could get a tax break for giving away a vehicle. As a result of the confusion and lower tax deduction permitted under the new law, car donations have plummeted as much as 40 percent at some charities.

Before now, Mr. Lockett never knew he could get a tax break for donating a car to charity. And even though he was one of the winners of the ugly-car contest, he remains a reluctant donor. A connoisseur of fine — and not-so-fine — cars, he figures why give something away that works perfectly well for him?

Mr. Lockett, 47, has bought and sold — and sometimes just left on the side of the road — more than 20 used vehicles in the past two decades. His collection has included some of the most tastelessly designed cars to reach the market, beginning with his first, a 1968 Ford Country Squire Wagon, which he bought for $75 after graduating from high school, in South Bend, Ind.

From an early age, Mr. Lockett saw no reason to burden himself with a car payment when he could take someone else’s worry off their hands for next to nothing.

“You just need a car to get from A to B — it’s not about how fancy or pretty it looks,” says Mr. Lockett, reaching under the dashboard to turn on the malfunctioning fan motor he’s rigged to work from inside the car. It’s a warm day in L.A., and he doesn’t want the engine to overheat.

Aside from the high mileage, broken fan, missing steering-wheel parts, shimmying brakes, and the fact that one of his car’s six cylinders is blown, Mr. Lockett’s car runs like a dream. “See?” he says, accelerating into the fast lane on Interstate 5. “She don’t even need the sixth cylinder.”

Mr. Lockett is drawn to cars with muscle. In his 20s, he could outrun anyone in his Oldsmobile 4-4-2, which featured a 330-horsepower engine used in police cars. “That thing could fly,” Mr. Lockett says. The only problem was it didn’t have a hood. In his 30s, he owned a straight-six Dodge Fury, which thundered over the San Gabriel Mountains and into the San Joaquin Valley on regular trips he took with his wife, Sharon, and their two kids.

But on the highway, where Mr. Lockett has spent much of his life — he used to deliver recreational vehicles to dealers across the country and now chauffeurs the rich and famous around Hollywood as a limousine driver — he has learned that size matters.

“Driving anything is dangerous,” he says. “But if you’re in something big and heavy, you’re a lot safer.”

He admires sturdy German cars the most, and once bought a 1977 Opel GT. But its electrical system went out after a few months, and he hasn’t purchased another foreign-made vehicle since.

Of all the cars he has owned, his favorite was a 1972 Cadillac Coupe DeVille. “That bad boy glides across the freeway,” Mr. Lockett says. It did until he got in a fight with an ex-girlfriend and she put sugar in the gas tank.

With the exception of a few months, Mr. Lockett has always owned a car. One time he didn’t came after his only major traffic accident, when he totaled his family’s 1992 Ford Taurus wagon. “I was going too fast, this guy made a U-turn, and I nailed him,” Mr. Lockett says. The other driver was cited in the accident, and Mr. Lockett collected an insurance check to help pay for a new vehicle. Instead, he pocketed the money and blew most of it on a family trip.

When he got to L.A., he bought a 1976 Dodge Charger — the police car that used to chase theGeneral Lee in the 1970s TV hit The Dukes of Hazzard. It didn’t take long before a policeman pulled him over after the car caught an officer’s eye. “Gangbangers use that car to do drive-by shootings,” Mr. Lockett says the police told him. “They wanted to know if we were bangers.” Mr. Lockett was giving a co-worker a ride home; they were security guards.

Cops are not the only people wondering about Mr. Lockett and his hatchback crammed full of junk. When he is caught in highway traffic, Mr. Lockett likes to steal glances at people driving beside him. They are often eyeing him cautiously, perhaps wondering how a car built more than two decades ago can still pass an emissions test. (It can’t, but he drives it anyway.)

His own kids are embarrassed when he drops them off at school. “They don’t want their friends to see them get out of the car,” he says. “They make off real quick — they don’t even want to give you a kiss.”

But when Mr. Lockett first laid eyes on the current love of his life, he knew she was the one for him. She wasn’t the prettiest or youngest on the block, and she cost more than most of the cars he has owned — $750. But she was roomy enough for four, heavy enough to take an impact, and sure beat public transportation.

“We had been moving on the buses and trains. We got tired of that,” he says of the five months he and his family went without a car last year. “Just being able to roll again and not wait for the bus or train, that was nice. Now we have the ability to take ourselves wherever we want to go.”

The 1982 Citation would become the latest in the line of “buckets” in Mr. Lockett’s life, a term he uses affectionately to describe the vehicles he has owned. Like a bucket, he says, his cars are simple, don’t need fussing with, and are easy to kick to the side of the road after they’ve seen better days.

This particular bucket holds more of a special place in his heart than most. Between jobs last year, when he and his wife couldn’t afford their rent, the whole family packed up the car with all their belongings and slept inside the vehicle for several nights.

“She held us, man,” Mr. Lockett says. “She held everything.”

Today, Mr. Lockett is driving about 50 miles across town to a big lot in Fontana where hundreds of donated cars are awaiting an auction. The lot is clean and tidy, with the nicer cars up front, including a few dinged Lexuses and a couple of dusty Alfa Romeos. The cars and trucks with engine problems or that require too much maintenance to salvage are parked in the back, where tow trucks drop about half the vehicles that come in; they will be sold for scrap.

If Mr. Lockett sold his car, he figures he might get $500. That is about the average price of the cars that sell at auctions held by the Vehicle Donation Processing Center every month here and in San Francisco. Profits from the sales are split between the company that runs the auctions and the charities in the program. Since 1996, the company says it has passed more than $30-million on to charities across the country.

The two men in charge of the donation program have thick arms, don’t talk much, and eye visitors suspiciously; they don’t like people coming around unless there’s an auction. They say that because donations from individuals are coming in at a slower rate this year, they have had to start doing more to arrange consignment deals with police departments to attract more used Ford Crown Victoria police cars and vehicles seized in drug busts and other arrests. In the future, they expect to rely less on donated cars — but they believe that some people will still give their vehicles to charity.

Mr. Lockett might even come around. He is not ready to part with his car just yet, but, now that he knows that donating it is an option, he says he might be willing to help out a good cause.

When he drives off the lot, he grabs a wire sticking out of his steering wheel and taps it twice to a metal bar in the center of the wheel. One thing the bucket can still do is give a friendly honk.