Ever since we made it an official project car back in the summer of 2014, Project Angry Grandpa, my daily-driver Chrysler 300C, has gone from your basic used-car-lot refugee into a dual-mode machine. Most of the time, the only indication that anything is amiss about our 2006 model is the bark coming from the Magnaflow pipes. In the right mood, however, that gold brick that is sitting in my driveway will repave roadway, drift corners, and hoon like anything else we feature, all with the satellite radio thumping away, the air conditioning on, and my ass sitting in comfort inside. I’m pretty sure that no 300C painted Linen Gold Metallic was ever meant to have rubber on it’s rear haunches, but mine has it in spades. It’s been a fantastic car…we’ve put well over 60,000 miles on the car since it went official and over 100,000 miles on the clock since the day I traded a 2005 Ford Mustang GT for it back in early 2013. It’s been driven all over this country and has held up to abuses that I’ll be honest, I’m still surprised it lived through. Land speed racing, drag racing, road racing, autocrossing, and backroad hooning…Grandpa has done it all.

As I was trolling through for another Rough Start find, I forgot to trip one of my normal search markers. Normally, I hunt for cars twenty years old or older, but this time I didn’t. And this off-white Chrysler was staring back at me, looking familiar. The only differences between Grandpa and this car? All wheel drive…I don’t have it, but this one does. The LX platform’s AWD is is a bonus to some and a limiting factor to others, but part of the charm of these Rough Start hunts is usability. All I can spot wrong just from the photos is that you’re missing one center cap from the wheels and that the interior can use a wipedown…nothing out of normal for a twelve-year-old sedan. If you were to duplicate the Angry Grandpa build, you’d probably be in the mid-13s (higher weight for AWD) all day long, but without overly stressing the drivetrain so long as you weren’t doing high-torque launches. $4,800 certainly will pay for a lot of car here, and as long as you keep up with the maintenance and make sure that the recall works have been addressed, you’ll have a decent car for a while.

Craigslist Link: 2006 Chrysler 300C AWD