We’ve Always Had a Thing for Ugly Cars.

UglyCars.com didn't start in a corporate boardroom, and it definitely wasn't dreamed up by a bunch of “adults” who have never owned a junk car. It grew out of decades spent buying, selling, fixing, towing, recycling, and occasionally falling in love with cars that most people had already given up on.

Our roots are in the automotive business. We've worked in repair and performance, bought thousands of unwanted and junk vehicles, operated tow trucks, recycled cars, sold used cars, and built businesses around helping people figure out what to do with vehicles they don't want anymore.

After all those years around cars, we've learned one thing for certain: not every “junk car” is junk. And that's a big part of why UglyCars.com exists.

So, What Exactly Is an Ugly Car?

That's the fun part. An ugly car doesn't necessarily have ugly paint. It might be a perfectly nice-looking car with a blown engine, a truck with 280,000 miles, a minivan with a transmission that's decided it's done taking kids to grandmas, a wrecked car sitting behind the garage, or a once-loved project car somebody swore they'd finish five years ago.

It could also be a genuinely, spectacularly ugly car. We like those too.

To us, an Ugly Car is simply a vehicle whose current owner has reached the point of saying, “Okay. What do I do with this thing now?” That's where we come in.

Turning Ugly Cars Into Cash

For years, the traditional answer to an old, broken, or unwanted vehicle was simple: call a junkyard. Sometimes that's exactly where the vehicle belongs, but not always.

A car might have valuable parts. It might be repairable. It might make sense for a used-car dealer, rebuilder, exporter, or specialty buyer. Its drivetrain, components, or simply the vehicle as a whole may make it worth substantially more than its weight in scrap. Sometimes the difference isn't the car at all. It's finding the right buyer for that car.

We've seen enough vehicles over the years to know that automatically treating every unwanted vehicle as scrap metal can leave money on the table. UglyCars.com was built around a better idea: figure out what you've got, find the right place for it, and turn that Ugly Car into cash.

We Actually Come From This Business

There's a lot of technology behind buying cars today. Websites can collect vehicle information, software can calculate offers, data can help determine values, and national networks can connect sellers with buyers hundreds or thousands of miles away. We love that stuff, but our story started long before all of it.

Founder Roscoe Fauver has spent much of his life around cars and small businesses. His automotive background has included repair and performance work, salvage, towing, used-car sales, and the less glamorous jobs that come with actually moving, buying, and dealing with old vehicles.

That eventually grew into several automotive businesses and, not unexpectedly with his background in IT, a digital marketing and technology business as well. But cars never really went away. UglyCars.com brings those worlds together: automotive experience combined with technology, marketing, and a network of buyers, with a healthy appreciation for the weird side of the car business.

Not Everything Belongs in the Crusher

This is something we believe pretty strongly. Auto recycling is important. Vehicles eventually reach the end of their typical useful lives, and responsible recyclers recover parts and materials that can be used again. We've been part of that industry ourselves. But recycling a vehicle doesn't necessarily mean crushing it as quickly as possible.

We've bought cars that looked terrible but had valuable parts. We've seen broken vehicles that were worth repairing, cheap old cars become somebody else's transportation, and forgotten vehicles become projects. And we've seen vehicles that absolutely, unquestionably needed to become a cube. The trick is knowing the difference.

That's one reason we don't particularly love using “junk” as a blanket description for every unwanted car. Some junk cars really are junk. Some are just Ugly Cars waiting for their next chapter.

The Underdogs Are Usually More Interesting Anyway

We've always liked the cars that don't get invited to the fancy shows: cheap cars, weird cars, old work trucks, questionable modifications, forgotten projects, 500,000+ mile survivors, and cars where opening the hood creates more questions than answers, especially the cars with stories.

For years, we've had fun writing brutally honest advertisements for cheap used cars instead of pretending every old beater was a “meticulously maintained example” that had somehow only been driven to church on Sundays. If the headliner was falling down, we could say it. If the paint was ugly, you were going to notice eventually anyway. If the car was ridiculous, sometimes the ridiculousness was the best part. We never, ever left a funny ad about an Altima stereotype off the table.

Those ads became a thing of their own. Cars that probably should have been difficult to advertise became an excuse to have fun. We've celebrated mediocrity in a Ford Escort, sold cars as cheap for a reason, made fun of everything from Pintos and Priuses to Camaros and Crown Vics, and occasionally written an ad so ridiculous that people shared it who had absolutely no intention of buying the car.

The joke was never about hiding what was wrong with the vehicle. It was almost the exact opposite. Tell people exactly what they're looking at, sometimes to the point of absurdity, and have some fun with it. People responded to that honesty and humor, and years later those old ads are still being read and shared.

That's a big part of what UglyCars.com is about. Buying and selling cars doesn't have to be miserable, and an imperfect car doesn't have to be presented like something it isn't. Sometimes the dents, bad decisions, weird modifications, and questionable history are what make the story worth telling.

Sometimes They're Worth More as Fun

Not every Ugly Car needs to be repaired and put back on the road. Not every one needs to be dismantled either. Sometimes a car is simply worth more in smiles than it's ever going to be worth in dollars.

We've watched that happen more than once.

One of the cars featured in our long-running Misadventures of a Drift Newbie series started as a forlorn 1985 Nissan 300ZX sitting at Roscoe's waiting for its fate. Instead of going to the crusher, it went to someone who wanted to learn to drift. That old Z went from junkyard candidate to project car, then to novice drift clinics and actual track events. That's exactly the kind of second life we love seeing.

We're fans of the Gambler 500 for much the same reason. Take inexpensive, forgotten, and completely inappropriate vehicles, go have an adventure with them, clean up some trash along the way, and don't take yourself too seriously. We support what they're doing, and one of our own staff members participates.

Then there are the cars we actually abuse ourselves.

Our Subaru Forester is one of those. It was an old car whose financial value wasn't nearly as interesting as its potential entertainment value, so we started beating on it around our little track. It refused to die. Naturally, that meant we needed to make it faster. That project has also given us an opportunity to test prototype parts from one of the automotive companies we work with through our marketing business. It's a pretty good example of how all the weird pieces of our automotive and business lives tend to overlap eventually.

Not everything on our Motorsports & Projects page belongs to us, and we don't pretend it does. Some are our projects. Some belong to friends, staff members, customers, or people whose automotive adventures we simply think deserve attention. We cheer for the people who take an overlooked car and actually do something fun with it.

We're probably always going to root for a $500 car being driven past its limits over a $150,000 car being polished at a cars-and-coffee.

That's the underdog part of Ugly Cars. Saving every old car isn't realistic and isn't the goal. But when somebody can take a vehicle that was headed toward the crusher and turn it into a drift car, Gambler car, race car, ridiculous project, or just something that makes people smile?

Hell yes. We want to see that.

Business Can Be Honest AND Fun

There's an unfortunate idea that professionalism requires everyone to act like they have absolutely no personality. We disagree.

You can answer the phone, show up when you say you will, pay people what you promised, admit when you make a mistake, and treat customers, employees, and business partners with respect. You can build good technology and operate a serious business while still having a sense of humor. Actually, we think business is better that way.

UglyCars.com isn't going to pretend every car is beautiful, every transaction is life-changing, or every day in the automotive business is glamorous. Sometimes cars are broken. Sometimes they're gross. Sometimes things go all to hell. And sometimes a car is so unbelievably ugly that everybody involved needs to stop for a second and appreciate the achievement. We're okay with that.

Small Businesses Still Matter

Some of the best people we've met in the automotive industry run small, Mom & Pop businesses. They're recyclers, towing companies, repair shops, dealers, and buyers who know their communities and have spent years building their reputations one customer at a time. We understand those businesses because we've built them ourselves.

As UglyCars.com grows, we want independent operators to be part of it. A national company doesn't always need to replace the local guy. Sometimes the better answer is to connect them.

Big Companies Aren't the Enemy Either

We're also not interested in pretending small automatically means good and big automatically means bad. There are larger automotive companies doing excellent work. They have technology, logistics, purchasing power, and national reach that would be incredibly difficult for an independent operator to duplicate. Those capabilities can solve problems that a local buyer simply can't.

That's why our philosophy toward partnerships is pretty simple: we want to work with good companies. Some will be small independent businesses. Some will operate nationwide. What matters to us is whether they treat sellers fairly, communicate clearly, honor their commitments, and share the basic values we're trying to build UglyCars.com around.

The goal isn't to make every vehicle fit one buyer. It's to build relationships with enough good buyers that we can find the right solution for more vehicles.

Built From Real Automotive Businesses

UglyCars.com didn't appear out of nowhere. It's the result of lessons learned from businesses we've owned, operated, and worked alongside over the years.

Roscoe's Junk Cars

Roscoe's Junk Cars grew from our hands-on experience buying unwanted vehicles in Virginia. That means dealing with the entire process: talking with sellers, evaluating vehicles, dispatching trucks, towing cars, processing paperwork, selling parts and vehicles, and figuring out what actually happens after a seller says yes to an offer.

That experience matters. It's easy to design a car-buying process on a computer screen. It's a little different when you've actually had to put the car on the truck.

Richmond Auto Exchange

Not every car we encountered through the salvage world deserved to be dismantled. Some still had useful life left. Richmond Auto Exchange became another outlet for cheap, honest vehicles, including the kind of imperfect cars that don't necessarily fit neatly onto a traditional franchise dealer's lot.

That reinforced something we'd already suspected: there's an ass for every seat if you're honest about what it is and price it fairly. It also gave us an excuse to have entirely too much fun writing used-car advertisements. If you have low expectations, we have low prices. Used cars, cheap for a reason.

Sensible Services

Eventually, building our own businesses led to helping other businesses. What started with websites and marketing grew into Sensible Services, where our experience operating real-world businesses influenced how we approached digital marketing, advertising, websites, analytics, and technology.

That experience now comes full circle with UglyCars.com. We aren't just using technology to market an automotive company. We're using technology to solve problems we've personally dealt with in the automotive business.

And Then There Was UglyCars.com

UglyCars.com itself isn't new either. The name and website have been around through different versions of these businesses and ideas for years. Long before the current plan to build a larger network for buying unwanted vehicles, Ugly Cars was already a home for the parts of the automotive world we found interesting, useful, or just funny.

It's where the funny used-car ads found a permanent home. It's where we documented projects, motorsports, weird cars, and some of the things happening around our other automotive businesses. As social media grew, that same kind of content found an audience there too. People apparently enjoy questionable automobiles almost as much as we do.

Over time, the pieces started fitting together. We had the hands-on experience of actually buying cars. We had local automotive businesses that could buy, tow, repair, recycle, and resell them. We had years of experience building technology and marketing businesses online. We had relationships with other automotive companies. And we already had UglyCars.com.

So rather than turn Ugly Cars into something completely different, we're growing it into more of what it probably should have been all along: a place for people who have Ugly Cars, people who buy Ugly Cars, and people who simply enjoy seeing what happens to them.

Why Build UglyCars.com?

Because after years in this industry, we still think there's room to do things better. A person with an unwanted vehicle shouldn't have to become an automotive expert just to figure out what it's worth. They shouldn't have to call twelve different junkyards, decipher intentionally vague offers, or list a broken car online and spend three days answering, “Is this still available?” And they shouldn't automatically assume their only option is selling a vehicle for scrap.

We think the right technology can make that process easier. We also think the companies doing the actual work—towing, buying, dismantling, repairing, reselling, and recycling these vehicles—deserve better tools and opportunities too.

UglyCars.com sits between those two worlds: help sellers find good options and help good buyers find cars. That's the basic idea.

More Than a Place to Sell a Car

We don't want UglyCars.com to become another sterile website with a giant GET OFFER button and 5,000 nearly identical pages explaining that, yes, you can sell a junk car in whatever city Google says you're currently standing in. The automotive world is much more interesting than that.

So UglyCars.com is also a place for the other stuff we love. You'll find strange cars, funny used-car ads, automotive stories, useful advice, cars submitted by their owners, Ugly Cars spotted in the wild, interesting vehicles being sold by independent dealers, and probably some things that don't fit neatly into any category.

That's intentional. The internet used to be a lot more fun when websites had personalities. We're bringing some of that back.

Still Having Fun With Cars

There was a time when being in the automotive business meant personally having a hand in nearly everything. You answered the phone, looked at the car, made the offer, drove the truck, fixed something that broke, sold the parts, cleaned up the mess, and then did it again the next morning.

Businesses grow, and responsibilities change. Eventually it becomes impossible to personally touch every vehicle, answer every phone call, or be involved in every part of every company. That's a good problem to have, but we never wanted growth to mean losing the part that made all of this interesting in the first place.

UglyCars.com is our opportunity to keep having fun with cars—just on a much bigger scale. Instead of personally buying every vehicle, we can build a network. Instead of knowing only the buyers in our backyard, we can work with good companies around the country. Instead of telling one person the story of a ridiculous car, we can share it with thousands.

And instead of trying to make the automotive business look polished and perfect all the time, we can celebrate some of the wonderfully imperfect stuff that makes it interesting.

What We Believe

We believe an honest answer is better than a sales pitch, a promise matters, and not every junk car is actually junk. We believe local independent businesses still matter and great national companies can make great partners. We believe technology should make things easier for people, not simply add another layer between them, and we believe experience still counts.

We believe there's usually somebody out there who wants that cantankerous old car. We believe an ugly car can still be worth good money. And we believe business is always better with a little humor.

Have an Ugly Car?

Perfect. Tell us about it.

Whether it's wrecked, broken, unwanted, ancient, questionable, embarrassing, or simply taking up space you'd rather use for something else, we'll help you figure out your options. And if your Ugly Car is especially magnificent, we'd like to see that too.

Sell it. Share it. Laugh about it. That's UglyCars.com.