Quick Stats: J.B. Smoove comedian/actor/writer
Daily Driver: 2010 Dodge Ram 1500 (J.B.’s rating: 10 on a scale of 1 to 10)
Other cars: see below
Favorite road trip: Chesapeak Bay Bridge
Car he learned to drive in: 1970s Datsun
First car bought: 1972 Dodge Coronet
Some people can’t recall what they did yesterday, let alone the details of a car that was customized long ago. But comedian and actor J.B. Smoove can.
Even after spending an hour chatting with Smoove, it feels like we only discussed the tip of his iceberg of car adventures.
He loves cars and road trips in his RV and he offers one secret to staying awake on long drives. “If you’re not a coffee person or a Red Bull person, here’s one thing that will keep you up,” he says. “I don’t know how it does it, I don’t know what’s in it, but sunflower seeds are the greatest. I don’t know what it is. We’ll get an empty shopping bag, we’ll buy two bags of sunflower seeds, and we will eat sunflower seeds.”
It seems like Smoove is thinking out loud, or on stage doing a comedy set when he delivers the punch lines to his own musings. “You know what I think it is? It’s the activity of you cracking them and your hands are cracking them, and you’re putting the seeds in the bag and your eating the seed,” he says. “I’m going to tell you somethin’, I don’t know what it is about sunflower seeds, but I can drive for two days with sunflower seeds. I don’t know what it is, it’s busy work.”
While Smoove has six vehicles, he mostly drives five, while one, a Maserati Ghibli, belongs to his wife Shahidah Omar. “The dealer took all the emblems off it, some people don’t like to have the emblems on the car. It’s beautiful. For some reason we love red in our family,” he says, with laugh. “It’s white with red and black accents on it.”
Though Smoove enjoys talking about every car he owns with such zeal, including his 2010 Dodge Ram 1500 which is his workhorse, he’s particularly enthused about his Dodge Challenger SRT8, which was the first car he bought when he moved to Los Angeles.
2008 Dodge Challenger SRT8
Rating: 10
“I’ve got so many cars. Let me tell you about this car. This car got redesigned. This car looks like the 1972 version of the car. It’s just updated and beautiful,” Smoove says. “I love this car. On the dashboard is a plate that says Challenger First Edition. They only made 6,400 of these cars. I’m number 3,829 of 6,400.”
Smoove says he was lucky to see it in Nebraska, after having a hard time finding one. “I was in Nebraska doing a comedy show and my hotel was across the street from a Dodge dealer and I was in my hotel window just looking out the window,” he says.
“I said, ‘Oh, that’s a Dodge dealer!’ I was looking at the cars and I saw two Challengers sitting there, so I ended up going across the street,” he says, recalling his talk with the sales guy. “I think one was red or orange and I didn’t like those colors, and he said, ‘I’ve got a grey one about 50 miles from here at my other dealership.’ I said, ‘You know what? I would love to see it!’”
Smoove did his show that night and the next morning went back to the dealership, where the new Challenger was waiting for him. “I test drove it, I said, ‘Man, I want it,’” he says, adding he contemplated driving it to Los Angeles. “I sat there and I thought, ‘I should drive it. It’s going to take me maybe 18 hours to get back.’ I thought about it and I said, ‘That’ll be a fun drive! Ah, forget it.’ But they delivered it three days later.”
What sparked Smoove’s interest was that he’d been a fan of the car since he was a kid. “I always wanted me a vintage one, but the vintage ones are so expensive. They’ve got to be $100,000 for a pristine, mint condition. I figured I would just build one. So I bought a regular Dodge Challenger SRT8, took it to my guy to customize it. I changed the rims on it, I changed the color, I put a spoiler on the back, I tinted the windows, I changed my seats, I added an intake, I added a chip, I added exhaust, I lowered the car, I put Forgiatos (custom forged wheels) on it. This car is a beast,” he says, laughing.
Smoove also loves his vanity plates too. “My personalized plate is Puuuune. In North Carolina, pune is fast, like – pune! So I put Puuune on my personalized plate. Pune!” he says the word, like it’s a sound effect.
He loves the Challenger and has no complaints about it. “When my friends come into town they all want to hop in the Challenger and go for a ride,” he says. “They love how the engine rumbles, they love the speed, it’s a beautiful fast car and it’s a nice vehicle.”
Smoove’s well-known dapper style, with his tailored suits, spills over to his cars. He gives meticulous attention to detail, so that almost every car he’s owned also gets the bespoke treatment.
2010 Dodge Ram 1500
Rating: 10
“I got a pickup truck, I’m a North Carolina guy. I buy vehicles but then I alter them to fit how I drive, so of course off the lot, it’s going to be a certain kind of vehicle,” he says. “But then I customize it and I make it fit how I drive, make it comfortable for myself when I sit in that seat. I want my windows a certain way, I want a certain amount of percentage tint so you can still see me cruising and say, ‘Nice truck!’ I want you to see whose driving it, but I want a percentage of the sun to come through.”
Smoove says he got the Ram (a stock 2010 model is pictured above) because he didn’t want the Challenger to get dirty.
“My car and my truck are twins,” he says. “They look like identical twins, they have the same red on the rim, same stripe across the hood and the top of the car and the trunk. Same exact vehicle, it’s just that one is car, one is truck.”
He also got the truck because he likes to build things and is often making trips to Home Depot. “At first I felt bad because my truck was so clean and beautiful, but then I said, ‘How can I keep my truck clean and beautiful? I’m going to Home Depot everyday loading plants and wood and stuff.’ It’s a beautiful vehicle, I absolutely love it. I love my car, but I love my truck. I drive my truck way more than my car. I drive my car on Sundays.”
The truck gets a perfect 10 because there’s not a “damn thing” Smoove dislikes about it. “This truck is loaded. It’s top of the line loaded. There is stuff in this truck I haven’t even used yet, because there’s just so many functions,” he says. “One thing I rarely use is the heated seats. I don’t use my built in garage opener. I haven’t towed anything in it yet. It’s a strong powerful truck.”
Again, Smoove took it to his guys at Coastline Motorsport in Woodland Hills and tailored the Ram to his liking. “I put a chip in it. It changes the performance of the vehicle, so I got more power, it changes the gear ratio of the vehicle,” he says. “I put an intake on it, I changed the exhaust, I put some Flowmasters so you can hear the engine rumble. I put a bed cover on it, I got the windows tinted, I changed the tires, I put big wheels, I changed the headlights, I changed the rear lights, I changed a bunch of things on this vehicle. I love it. It gets attention everywhere it goes. It’s a great truck.”
1968 Lincoln Continental
Rating: 10
Smoove also has a perfect 10 of a 1968 Lincoln Continental, which took him two years to fully customize before he got it back in his hands to drive around in.
“I’ve always loved the suicide doors on a Lincoln. I’ve got the bags in it where I can lower it to the ground. I put steely wheels on it, I’ve got exhaust on it, I’ve got a new engine cover, a whole new interior was done on it. It’s a beautiful vehicle,” he says.
Smoove bought it for $3,500, after seeing it each time he commuted to work at “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “I kept driving by. I kept saying, ‘Damn, that car is great!’ I ended up just saying, ‘You know, I’m going to stop.’ I’ve been taking photos of this vehicle since I got it. Since I saw it on the street, I took a picture when I saw it on the street,” he says.
The day Smoove went to buy the Continental, the first thing he did was drive it around the block a few times, paid for it, filled the tank with gas, and took it straight to his mechanic, where it was for a few months.
“He fixed everything mechanical that was wrong with. I took it from him, took it to my guy that does all my custom work, dropped it off there,” he says. “I updated the radio, I updated everything, upgraded that one to Kenwood speakers, Kenwood everything. It’s loaded, it’s absolutely loaded.”
But Smoove kept the aesthetics in the proper period. “I kept all the same light switches, everything, dashboard is beautiful,” he says. “I just restored the dashboard to as it was. I put a CD changer in the trunk, all my stuff is in the trunk. I got a remote that controls my radios, my SiriusXM and all that stuff. But the look of the car, you can’t see anything modern in the vehicle, it’s all hidden away in the trunk, it’s all stored away.”
While driving his Lincoln Continental, Smoove listens to his favorite SirusXM channel – the Studio 54 channel. He said he loves driving it, and that he loves driving any way he can, adding that if a car could go as fast as a plane, he would drive from L.A. to N.Y. instead of fly.
2013 Damon Outlaw
Rating: 8
When Smoove takes road trips with his wife, which includes the requisite snacking on sunflower seeds, they take the RV.
“I’ve got this amazing, damn RV that’s a 2013 Damon Outlaw,” he says. “It’s beautiful. It’s a 36.7 foot RV,” he says. “It sleeps 10 people, it has four TVs inside, one TV outside. It’s a toy hauler which means I can fold the back down and I can roll ATVs and bicycles, all into the back of it. It also is a patio on the back, so that ramp could stop halfway and it’s a patio with railings, where I grill at.”
While all his other cars get a 10, the RV gets an 8 out of 10 because he likens it to driving one’s house around. “It’s like a rolling house, so when you’re driving it, things get loose,” he says.
He points out with an RV, one needs to be handy. “You’ve got a bathroom, you’ve got a kitchen, you’ve got all these moving parts in it and you’ve really got to stay on top of it. I’ve got two entrances. I’ve got to keep up with the engine stuff,” he says.
When he first bought it, Smoove drove it to Vegas for its inaugural trip to test drive it properly. “I wanted to see how it handles, how to drive it. On the way back it was really windy, and there were a lot of hills,” he says. “I didn’t like how the power was, how it climbed the hill. I didn’t like the handling of it when it was windy so I took it back to the dealer.”
Smoove was given his choices of what they could do to customize it to his liking. “I looked at all the performance stuff. I said, ‘I want to be able to drive it like I drive my car, I want a little more juice in it,’” he says. “So I put a little chip in that, I put a Banks performance kit on it, which is better gas mileage, more hill climbing, more passing power. I also put (an anti-roll) bar in the rear. That means when the wind is blowing, it can handle a lot better. I put a steering stabilization bar on the steering column. That means when I’m driving it, and it’s windy, the steering wheel will stay straight.”
Before Smoove added the stabilization bar, he insists his steering wheel kept turning at a 60 degree angle in windy conditions.
“I’m sitting there holding it like, ‘Wait a minute, how am I turning but I’m not turning?’ That’s how hard the wind was blowing it. It had to overcompensate for the wind,” he says. “Upgraded that, upgraded the handling, upgraded the engine, upgraded the power. I put a solar panel on the roof so when I’m traveling, I don’t have to rely always on plugging it in. I can go camping, I can go to the desert, I can go anywhere I want to go because I can run the vehicle off of the solar panel. I just added everything to my convenience, because I like to travel and do that cool stuff.”
2016 Smart car
Rating: 10
“We have a Smart car also,” he says, laughing. “We both drive it. It’s really convenient,” he says. “We put this inside the RV so when we travel we can just park the RV in the RV resort and we back the car out and we drive the car around Vegas, around Palm Springs, run errands.”
The Smart car ensures that Smoove always has a car to cruise around in when road tripping in his RV. “This little thing, let me tell you somethin’, if you have not driven the new Smart car [the latest Fortwo is shown above], you are doing yourself an injustice. This little car is amazing!” he says, ebulliently. “How do you get a full powered Smart car? Power everything, the only thing that’s not powered is the seats.”
It’s Smoove’s second Smart. He had one for two years and traded that in when the lease was up. “It’s got everything,” he says. “Everything is power. This little thing is so cool. This little thing is amazing. It’s like driving a fast golf cart, you know what I mean? It’s really convenient, it’s easy to park, it handles well. It’s faster than you think it is.”
Smoove explains the nuances of his Smart car’s speed. “Fast and quick are two different things,” he expounds. “It’s quick. Quick means it just does little stuff really quick, rrr!” he says, making a high-pitched sound, the kind you hear in old school cartoons when the character quickly escapes.
He continues his train of thought on the virtues of a car being “quick” rather than “fast.” “You can just do little stuff quick. It’s not a racing car, but it’s quick. Quick is better sometimes than fast. Fast gets you tickets. Quick gets you there,” he says, cracking himself up. “I love cars. I’m a big car guy, I’m supposed to be going to visit my buddy Jay (Leno). He invited me to come see his hangar with all his cars in it. I can’t wait to go see that. Oh my God.”
Car he learned to drive in
“I’m a New Yorker, so I learned how to drive the hard way,” Smoove says. “I learned to drive in a friend’s car. It was a little tiny car. An orange Datsun. It had to be a ‘70s, an old Datsun. They don’t even make Datsuns anymore.”
Smoove seems baffled at how easy that first driving experience was for him. “When I learned how to drive, you know what it felt like? I knew how to drive! Isn’t that weird? It was just this weird thing. I felt like I knew how to drive already!” he exclaims. “I don’t know if it’s from playing video games or what. But I knew how to drive when I learned how to drive. It was so weird for me.”
He felt he just needed a one-hour session with a driving instructor. “I’m one of those guys that learn fast off of mistakes. So I took just an hour little driving instructor, you know the kind with the two steering wheels in the car?” he says, laughing. “I guess I was scaring the dude because the dude kept hitting the brakes. I was laughing. I’m trying to tell him to relax, ‘Relax! I got this!’ He thought I was a good driver, but he just kept hitting the brakes, I don’t know if he kept hitting the brakes because that’s his job, or he’s hitting the brakes because he was scared. I ended up doing good, I passed my test on the first try.”
In his stream of consciousness mode, Smoove suddenly recalls that at some point after he got his license, his uncle had a 1970 Cadillac Deville which he asked to borrow to go to a function at his college. “It was beautiful, oh my God! I’m a fast learner, I had that thing down to a science, man,” he says.
First car bought
“I bought a 1972 Dodge Coronet. I paid $300 for it,” Smoove says. “I always had after-school jobs. I had an after-school job when I got that car.”
Smoove was going to join the wrestling team in high school the day he was offered the after-school job. “I put in for a job with my counselor. I was in the wrestling room. I remember I was wrestling, and the counselor came into the wrestling room on the pad and said, ‘Jerry, you put in for an afterschool job?’ I sat there like, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘I have one.’ I’m like, ‘Oh man.’ I said, ‘You what? I need that job more than I need the wrestling,’” he says, laughing. “So I walked out. I started working that day. She said, ‘Can you go today?’ I said, ‘Yeah! I can go after school!’”
Smoove worked at a perfume company, which entailed mixing perfumes, stocking and shipping. “Once I got that job, I said, ‘Well, guess I’m good!’ and I ended up getting a car, that little Dodge,” he says. “I didn’t really drive it to school because we had a bus, but I wanted a car so bad, and that’s why I put in for that job. I really wanted my own car.”
He had the Dodge for just a short while and he said his mom drove the car more than he did. After the Dodge, Smoove upgraded to a 1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme and still remembers the details of it to this day.
“Oh my God, that car was so gorgeous. Ah, it was midnight blue, with the crystals in it. If you stand back, it’s like space. It had these little silver crystals in the paint. It was gorgeous,” Smoove says. “I had whitewall tires on it, white Landau top, white bucket seats, ah! I had the wire spoke rims on it. I had the G/T Qualifier letter tires on the rubber, I had the dual exhaust on it, the posi rear. It was an in-the-floor shift.”
Smoove had the Cutlass Supreme while he was going to community college in Westchester. “That was my dream car. I loved that car so much and I had that car for a few years and then it got stolen. Ah, man, it got stolen in New York. I got it back but the people who stole it, they must’ve hit the curb or something because they jacked up the front end on it, the suspension on it.”
It was too expensive to fix the Oldsmobile, so Smoove sold it and bought a burgundy 1979 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. “That Monte Carlo was beautiful too. That car got me through college. I drove that back and forth from Norfolk, Virginia to New York so many times.”
His friends would all pile into the car as well. “A lot of my friends I met in college were from Jersey. I would pack six people in that car and drive the six hours back and forth constantly. I would go home weekends sometimes just to go home. That car got me through college, got me back home. I had a lot of cars,” he says, with a laugh. “Those two cars were so amazing. Ah, beautiful car.”
After college, Smoove got a job working as a graphic designer, which is what he studied. “I sold the Monte Carlo and ended up getting myself an Isuzu Trooper. It was a total opposite direction. That was fun,” he says. “For some reason I fell in love with trucks for a while. So I got me an Isuzu trooper and I drove that around for years.”
It was the car that also got him to gigs then. “I traveled like crazy in that car. That car was cool. But this was my early years, so I stayed in the New York area, Jersey, Connecticut, in that car,” he says. “I hooked it up a little bit. I put some big tires on it, some antennas and stuff on it, I made it like a real off road vehicle. That one had problems like crazy. I think my rear end went twice in that damn thing, but I loved it. And it was a five speed. It was awesome.”
Smoove considers the next car as his first splurge car – a Pontiac Grand Am. “That Pontiac Grand Am was awesome. That was a turbo GT Pontiac Grand Am, it was four door red. That was my car right there,” he says. “It had the aluminum head engine, it had the dual exhaust on it. I hooked that car up so cool, I tinted the windows, I put some nice tires on it, I put the G/T Qualifiers on it, I extended my exhaust pipes, man, that car was great.”
It was a used Grand Am. “It looked beautiful. You couldn’t tell what year it was. They didn’t change the shape of that vehicle for years. It was a later ‘80s model because my daughter was born in 1993 and I was taking her to school in that vehicle. It was a great car.”
The Grand Am also got him to comedy gigs and by then, he was going to gigs farther away. “I put a nice sound system in that car, that car used to bump. Oh my gosh, I loved that car. I drove that car everywhere. That car took me around the country,” he says.
One time the air conditioning went out while driving to Florida for a standup gig. “Going there was cool, for some reason. I remember I started in Richmond, Virginia and I just kept driving, kept driving, kept driving. Back then when I was doing comedy, sometimes we get a last minute gig, or you’ll tell a comedy club, ‘Hey, I’m in town, I’m passing through, headed to Raleigh, North Carolina’ and they’ll say, ‘Stop by.’ I remember I was in Tallahassee. I called a promoter down in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. I said, ‘Hey man, I’m in Tallahassee, what’s going on own there?’”
Smoove didn’t realize how hot it would be on the way to Miami. “I had to do two shows that night. Normally after my last show I like to leave while I’m up. I got in my vehicle, it might’ve been midnight. It was raining and I love to drive in the rain because I always feel like I can make good time in the rain,” he says.
With his bags in the trunk and the car ready to go, he started driving in the rain all night. “By the time I got to Atlanta, it was so damn hot, and my AC wasn’t working. I got down to my clothes off completely, that’s how hot it was. I was driving in my boxers and my sneakers. I am not playing around. I had no shirt on, I had my baseball hat on backwards, I took my pants off, my socks off, I was in my boxers driving on 95 going to New York. I could not believe how hot it was.”
Smoove didn’t think the air conditioning would be that big of a problem because it never had been until then. “I knew it wasn’t working working, but you know how you have your AC and it’s weak. But it depends where you live at. If you’re in New York and it’s 80, you can survive with low Freon,” he says. “But by the time I got down there, it died completely and I’m driving this thing, almost naked.”
So he drove back home through the south without AC. “I was like, ‘Forget it. I turned it off and I just opened the windows wide open and took my pants off at the rest stop, took my socks off, took my T shirt off, put my hat on backwards because I had to go home,” he says. “I just kept on driving.”
Through the border of North and South Carolina, Smoove had to keep pulling over buying something to drink, pouring water all over himself before getting back in the car and continuing on.
“It was easily over 100 degrees, and you count the humidity, I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “By the time it started getting to evening time, I was so happy, ‘Oh the sun’s going down!’ ”
Favorite road trip
“I love my RV,” Smoove says. “My favorite place to drive is still across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which connects Virginia and Maryland. It’s one of the longest suspension bridges I think in the country,” Smoove says. “I’ve been over it a thousand times and I still love it, every time I drive over it. I like the serenity of it. It used to be one bridge, a two lane bridge going across. I guess it got a little dangerous. There’s only a stripe in between the lanes separating the cars, so they ended up building another one, so now they have one going one way and one going the other direction, a whole different bridge.”
He saw the new part of the bridge as it was being built. “I like seeing how they did that, I watched them build that bridge because I was traveling so much. There’s two bridges but they share the same tunnel,” he says. “I still love that route. I still love going over that bridge. It’s my favorite.”
Nostalgia is also part of the reason Smoove loves driving over that bridge. “I had to go that way to go home. So I would drive it all the time,” he says. “I’m from North Carolina, so when I go to North Carolina, I would take it that way. I absolutely love it.”
Smoove takes a lot of road trips, and one his favorite memories was the cross country drive when he moved from New York to Los Angeles with his wife, making it in record time so that he could get to the set of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
“We left on a Thursday night at 7 p.m. and we’re the same kind of person, we don’t like to stop a lot,” he says. “I had to be at work that Monday. We left that Thursday with all our stuff in the Penske truck, and we had to tow her car at that time which was a Mercedes Benz, hooked that to the Penske truck and we drove the Penske truck cross country.”
The two took turns driving and arrived in Los Angeles at 1 p.m. on Sunday. “We drove through three storms. We drove through a snow storm, we drove through a freezing rain storm, we were boogying, we didn’t get a hotel,” Smoove recalls. “We’d pull over, take two hour naps and start driving again. We got here, I went to sleep and had to get up early in the morning to go to work on Monday, my first day on ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm.’ So we made that happen. We’ve been here ever since then.”
The longest trip they’ve been in their RV was to Tennessee. “My wife Sha, she’s a singer and an artist, so she’s done the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee twice, so we drove 34 hours each way in the RV to the festival. These things have TVs. I can watch Direct TV, I’ve got SiriusXM radio, I can play music. We talk, we have the radio on, we have plenty of snacks,” he says, with a laugh. “We like to talk and snack. And we’d be on the phone. It’s so cool because on all the long trips, you’d be surprised when you’re on the phone, you can drive forever!”
“Real Husbands of Hollywood” Season 5 in October
While it was recently it was announced that “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is returning to HBO for a ninth season, Smoove can be seen back on BET’s “Real Husbands of Hollywood” in October for its fifth season. Smoove will also be in the movie “Almost Christmas,” out in November.
Fans can catch him doing stand up Aug. 27 and 28 at the American Comedy Co. in San Diego.
For more information please visit jbsmoove.com
More Celebrity Drives here:
- Lee Loughnane of Band Chicago
- Josh Gates of Travel Channel’s ‘Expedition Unknown’
- Motocross/Rally Driver Travis Pastrana
The post Celebrity Drive: Entertainer J.B. Smoove appeared first on Motor Trend.
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