About
Real cars. Real costs.
Bought Busted started with a father, his 16-year-old son, and a silver 2015 Infiniti Q50 Premium bought at auction. The car showed up filthy on a trailer with a transmission that would not shift past third gear, and it turned into a months-long lesson in fees, transportation, diagnostics and repair decisions.
Why we started documenting it
Most first-car stories skip the invoice. The bid gets quoted, the finished car gets filmed, and the middle — the fees, the tow bills, the estimate that costs more than the car — disappears. We decided to keep the middle. Every number that gets published here is labeled confirmed, estimated or planned, and nothing gets described as finished until it actually is.
The Bought Busted promise
- Real costs. The public budget shows the actual figures we can share, with private paperwork kept private.
- Real repairs. Diagnoses stay labeled as suspected or reported until they are proven.
- Real mistakes. When we get something wrong — a bid, a theory, a purchase — it stays in the record.
- Updates and corrections. When numbers or outcomes change, the pages change with them.
- More cars later. Project 001 is the Q50, but the project is built to follow whatever comes next.
Privacy
This is a family project involving a teenager, so some things stay off the site: his name, his school, our exact location, and any document that carries personal or account information. We do not publish the invoice, the history report, the VIN or title paperwork. The figures we quote come from those documents — the documents themselves stay private. We also do not name the shops and installers involved.
Follow the build
The videos and the written record run in parallel: episodes on YouTube, the detailed cost and repair entries here in the Build Log.