Since he's always traveling from gig to gig, you might not expect comedian Gabriel "Fluffy" Iglesias to have an affection for buses.
But Iglesias' appreciation was sparked by his very first car: a 1968 Volkswagen Transporter bus he bought for $700. Now he wants to be known for his collection, which has a total worth of $3 million.
"It's such a simple car, it's a people's car," says the comedian on "Jay Leno's Garage." "You always hear about Seinfeld as the Porsche guy ... I want to be known as the bus guy, and I like these because when you drive these around nobody looks at you funny. It's not like, 'Oh, look at you in your Bentley.'"
While Iglesias might not be getting any dirty looks when he's driving his buses, he can occasionally run into different problems. "These were notorious for either catching fire, leaving you stranded, [or] running out of gas because they didn't have the gauges," he says. But most of the 18 buses in his collection have been completely restored — some even retrofitted with beefed up engines — and just one has a resale value of around $100,000.
Aside from the buses, Iglesias also boasts one of the earliest Volkswagen Beetles, first distributed in the U.S. back in 1950. Iglesias is still hoping to find one of the original 1950 VW buses, too. "The closest I've come is 1952," he says.
It wasn't the comedian's original intention to grow his love for Volkswagens into a full-blown collection.
"This is Jay's fault," Iglesias says. "I only had one of these when I first went to [Jay Leno's] garage about a year and a half ago, and I did all of this in one year,"