Christmas gift-buying is a crap shoot at the best of times because most people do not leave the human factory with the ESP option.
Consequently, a gift giver must think long and hard about potential gifts for their recipients because the perfect one may require serious brainstorming on the gift giver’s part.
Jim Sutherland
The good news is car guys rank among the easiest Christmas gift recipients in the world because parts wear out and rust is willing to work like a bandit on an endless 24/7 shift. These two vintage ride scourges mean the typical car guy is just one small step away from a repair or restoration and can use a wide variety of automotive-related Christmas gifts.
MyStarCollectorCar would like to present five perfect car guy Christmas gift ideas to our readers so they can pass them along to their non-car guy spouses. We want to make the gift return aisle less crowded after Christmas because we believe our ideas will be a home run with the recipients.
The first gift on our list is extra indoor space. We recommend an extra story on the garage for the dyed-in-the-wool car guy on your Christmas gift list.
The ultimate solution would be a giant shop, but local zoning laws and very angry neighbors will nuke that option. Even a larger garage will be a monumental battle with local bureaucrats and the loud guy down the street, but it will be the perfect gift.
A bigger car guy workspace requires our second ideal Christmas gift for car guys, namely a lift. Every car guy who ever crawled underneath a vehicle to work on it likely has more envy of another car guy’s lift than if he was married to a Playboy model.
The confined space and lack of proper leverage working under a car on the ground sucks what little joy is left in the experience, so an ability to stand tall under a vehicle to work on it is car guy nirvana at its finest. Buy the car lift and bring back the joy of Christmas to a needy car guy.
The third perfect car guy gift is any part that meets or exceeds OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) standards for their project vehicle. The modern car guy world is a minefield of crappy parts built by companies who offshore their manufacturing production to countries with non-existent quality control-and are very happy to remove high standards from their business plan.
The good news is quality parts still exist but will require plenty of research to find them.
The fourth ideal car guy Christmas gift is even tougher to find than quality replacement parts: NOS (New Old Stock) parts that somehow survived decades of merciless cleaning toss-outs and are still around somewhere in the world.
At some point, the retro parts are discovered and offered for sale by somebody who may know they have the automotive equivalent of pure gold and will put an appropriate price tag on them.
The person who buys NOS parts for a car guy will have bought the best Christmas gift since Ralphie got his BB gun.
The fifth and final perfect car guy Christmas gift is any cutting-edge tool that is also steeped in quality.
Every car guy with busted knuckles and permanent scars already knows how poor tools work, so any tool that makes their job easier and safer will be a Christmas gift for the ages in their world.
The perfect car guy Christmas gift can be found in any of our suggestions. Just be prepared to write big checks for them.
Jim Sutherland
BY: Jim Sutherland
Jim Sutherland is a veteran automotive writer whose work has been published by many major print and online publications. The list includes Calgary Herald, The Truth About Cars, Red Deer Advocate, RPM Magazine, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Windsor Star, Vancouver Province, and Post Media Wheels Section.
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