Is Your Car Flooded? Broken? Bricked? Rich Benoit Can Rebuild It.
There’s a simple formula to becoming a viral YouTuber today: get an expensive car, then destroy it. Cody Detwiler, the Gen Zer behind WhistlinDiesel, burned a Ferrari F8 ($400,000) for 14 million views and mangled a Cybertruck ($100,000) for 24 million views. Suk Min Choi, who goes by Alex Choi, shot fireworks from a helicopter at a Lamborghini Huracan ($250,000), a stunt that might land him in prison. Even Jimmy Donaldson, who runs MrBeast, the most popular channel on YouTube, resorted to this formula when he used three military tanks to fire at a Lamborghini Gallardo ($200,000), then put another one of the supercars through a giant shredding machine. The result? Over 201 million views.
While these videos were hugely successful, they also encompass everything people hate about YouTube influencers: gross displays of conspicuous consumption, idiocy as entertainment and the legitimization of a kind of man-child mindset. But there’s no need to despair, as there’s another YouTuber who has racked up over 217 million views by using the exact opposite formula: getting a cheap car, then showing people how to fix it.
That would be Rich Benoit, the man behind the channel Rich Rebuilds. The car that launched his channel, back in spring of 2016, was a Tesla Model S. Normally, that’s also an expensive car — when you buy it in working condition. But Benoit paid just $14,000 for his used EV, which was flooded by salt water during Hurricane Sandy.
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