Editor’s note: Content creator and consultant Lucky Lopez has half a million YouTube subscribers thanks to a savvy blend of insider info about car flipping, car financing, and the automotive world in general. He talks to Playboy about the way it all got started and how an early fascination with cars became his livelihood.
Playboy: How did your love of cars begin?
Lucky: My love of cars actually began at a Monster Truck Show. I think I was five or six years old, I saw Grave Digger and King Krunch. Two monster trucks are driving around, and we were able to actually sit inside of them after the show. I was super excited. And then the very next week, there was another car show here in Vegas where I got to see the Batmobile.
So my father, he loved cars, but he wasn’t really a car fanatic. He just enjoyed and appreciated them. He had a few classic cars and stuff he collected. So I think that’s kind of where the bug rubbed off on me. I would say the true turning point in my life was when I was probably about 16 years old, I was trying to get money to buy a car to drive around for school. And I started going to these tow yards to buy cars at auction. And, you know, [with] tow yards, you don’t know what what you’re going to get. Sometimes you buy them as is, no keys could run that. I was so broke only at a couple 100 bucks, I figured this will be the best way to get a car.
And I started buying these cars. I would clean them up, then I would just sell them. And then I sold a few of them, and I actually doubled my money. And I showed my dad, [saying] look, I bought this car for 300 bucks, and I sold it for six, and this one for five, and I did 1000 and so it was so funny. He thought it was like crazy dishonest or bad, but I just kept doing it.
It got to the point where my parents driveway — you know, I’m surprised they didn’t murder me — was full of junky cars that I was picking up from tow yards, from people. I was calling people in the newspaper. So I was just calling everybody about anything that was under $1,000, asking “Will you take 400? Will you take 500?” and just anything they would say yes to, I would just buy it and drag it back to the house. And so that’s where my love for cars came from, and it just grew from there.
Playboy: What’s the first business you owned, and what did you take away from that experience?
Lucky: I was 18, and I opened up my first auto repair shop. And one thing I’ve learned out of that industry was, life is cruel, and if you’re not basically fixed in, the world will take advantage of you. I was trying to make everybody happy. So people would bring in their cars. If you have a beat up car, it’s just like a joke: if you fix one thing, you put pressure on something else, something else will break, especially if the cars are junky or beat up. And so if I would fix, let’s say, a water pump, a week later, they come back [saying] “my radiator’s leaking. It was working fine before you touched it, so I want you to fix it.” So I would fix it.
At the very end, I remember busting my butt. And at that time, I had a BMW and a Land Rover. I sold everything just so I could pay for rent for six months. And I literally slept inside my shop to make it happen. And after struggling not being able to get an apartment, and basically I was living off Top Ramen and Spam, I looked at my numbers, and I was like, I’m losing money. How am I losing money? I got a shop full of cars. People are referring me to all these people.
And, you know, I wasn’t charging correctly. I was trying to help people. I was trying to do the right thing. Because you’re taught if you do the right thing, people will stay and you’ll get good business. Nothing could be further from the truth. It used to make me mad. I had a friend of mine at a shop across the street from me who would treat his customers like scumbags. He would fix the car, and if it broke down a week later, he wouldn’t care. It could be a single mom with three kids melting in the sun, wouldn’t even phase him a minute. He’d just be like, whatever, and but he was just making money hand over fist, and I’m sitting here trying to do the right thing and help people.
This is when I learned a term from one of my friends, a life lesson that stuck with me: No good deed goes unpunished. So I would say my life lessons out of my first business was be a good person, but be a firm business owner. I think I was just too worried about being a nice guy, and I didn’t want to be the shady mechanic that everybody hates. I wanted lifetime customers. I didn’t just want to whack them one time and then send them down the road.
Playboy: Tell us the story of how you launched your YouTube channel.
Lucky: I sold my dealership because I got tired of the BS. I was going to go to South America and just party my way all the way up the coast. The week I was going to leave, Covid hit and I got locked down. And so at that time, I didn’t know what to do. So the company I sold my dealership to, they’re like, well, just come hang out here and and teach us about this. And so I started doing videos.
I actually did really funny sales videos. So they asked me if I would do videos for them to make them just as popular. So this one that kind of went viral, which was the pandemic special: for $10,000 I would give you all this toilet paper and hand sanitizer. And this was when people were like fighting over all this stuff. We had a bunch of it, so we put it in the car, and we’ll give you all this toilet paper and all this hand sanitizer, and we’ll throw in this free 2010 Ford Expedition.
It was just kind of a joke, right? And that made a lot of people pissed off, but more people just thought it was hilarious. So it was on CNN, it was on Fox. I think the Facebook feed got over two, 2.9 million views, and it was shared like, hundreds of of thousands of times.
I kind of missed making those funny videos, and I was like, you know what? Maybe I’ll start looking into doing YouTube. And so I started getting on YouTube just to do research, and I saw so many bad videos of people explaining, how to buy a car, how to do financing, how to actually operate and own a dealership, how to open a shop. And I’m like, Who are these hillbillies giving the worst information I’ve ever seen?
So I started making videos about how to start a dealership. How to get your rental car license, how to fix cars, how to flip cars, how to make money. I didn’t really have any subscribers, like in 2020, I think I had 500. I did a handful of videos that were really good, and they just didn’t do anything. I did a few car flipping videos, and it just kept bumping. And finally I got to 10,000 in 2021 and I was like, this is kind of neat. I’m getting people asking me questions, and it’s feeding my consulting business.
Then I started doing deep dives: the economy of financing, like how we do auto loans, how banks rate people, how banks rate cars, how we give auto loans, the the percentage of cars that get repoed. Then I finally did the auto loan crisis video. That’s the one that, like, made me break over 100,000 in like, three months. It was on every news station and I had 1000s of calls. So then my mentality changed to mostly explaining how the financing worked, how it works with business, and that’s what set my pace and grew my channel.
Playboy: How did you get into flipping cars, and what was the first car you flipped?
Lucky: [As mentioned before,] when I was like 15, 16, I started going to the tow yard auctions look at the cars, because that’s the only place that is open to the public. I read a magazine on how people were making a living flipping cars. And so I thought I would give it a shot, and it worked out really well.
I would never do just one at a time. When I was younger, I did maybe one, two at a time, but, but I always bought them in threes, because two, you’re probably going to make money, one, you’re going to lose money. So I just try to keep buying them in threes to keep that funnel going. So as I’m fixing one, waiting for parts, I’d start on the other. I always had a car for sale. And so I started learning that the more cars I had, the more options I had, the more I sold.
Once I started selling more cars, I refined my process. I got a mobile mechanic license to get discount on parts. I started buying in bulk to save more money. Little things like that sped up my knowledge of flipping cars. And that’s when I opened up my auto repair shop.
Playboy: Who are your favorite automotive makers, and why?
Lucky: Probably one of my favorite automotive makers is Mercedes. The reason why I love Mercedes is it’s a simple blend of like luxury and technology. I feel like a lot of the luxury cars try to go one way or the other, like they may get two luxuries, but the tech is trash, or they make the tech really cool, but then the build quality is trash, like a Tesla. I think Mercedes probably has the best blend of all those things in the one.
Another one of my favorite automakers, which people are probably going to lose their minds [over me saying], is Ford. I’ve always loved Ford. I know that they’ve had issues through the years. They’ve had made some really shitty cars, but the fact that Henry Ford started it all … the automotive industry has touched everything because of him. Labor unions were because of him. I’m a big fan of the history.