The one complaint he has is that it can't haul much cargo. He has a 1996 Chevy Tahoe (which he calls his "junk heap") for those tasks. Olivet gives the Tahoe a 3 rating.
"It's pure utility and it was on the earlier side of the Tahoes," he notes. "The exterior styling wasn't as good and the interior was kind of junky. But it was big, which is what I wanted and it wasn't as long as the other SUV's of the era."
At the time he bought the Tahoe, Olivet lived in San Francisco (he was an executive at the Gap and Bain & Co.), where street parking is a factor. "I wanted a big truck, but you also had to park it. So, big and somewhat short was the key criteria and it met that really well."
Car he learned to drive in
Olivet was born in Connecticut, but the family moved west to Aurora, Colo. It was there he learned to drive his dad's 1976 Lincoln Continental Mark IV Givenchy Edition.
"It was very easy, but it's a very floaty car, so you pretty much had to start turning the thing three seconds in advance of when you would normally turn a car," he laughs. "It's like turning a cruise ship. It was sort of bird's egg blue that Givenchy did in the edition, with the white leather top. It was a fun car to drive. It wasn't normal."
Olivet carpooled with friends in high school and he got to drive it once a week, as well as on weekends. But he wrecked it coming home from a basketball game during a snowstorm.
"We were going down a big hill on sheer ice and as I was approaching the bottom of the hill and needing to make a turn, the back end swung out and hit a jacked up pickup truck and his bumper was just under my window and completely trashed the side," he explains. "We weren't hurt but the car didn't look so good."
Olivet still has misgivings about the wreck. "My dad gave it to me to take to college, after I wrecked it in high school. Then five or six years ago it was on one of the lists of the ten 30-year-old classic cars that were still worth money! I was like, 'Oh, I should have taken care of it,'" he says, with a chuckle.