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"Freak" Vehicle Makeover Brings Kiss Lawsuit
January 23, 2006 at 6:54 AM (PT)
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CLEAR CHANNEL Top 40 WKST (96.1 KISS-FM)/PITTSBURGH is being sued by a contest winner who claims that a vehicle makeover that she won from the station's morning show left her truck undrivable.
COLLEEN KUCZINSKI, who won the MORNING FREAK SHOW's "Freak My Ride" contest, told the PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW, "I thought I'd get a new paint job and new audio, something I could let my son drive. Now it can't be driven. It's been hell. It's beautiful, but not drivable. The frame was cut. It was held together with speaker wires."
According to the paper, the owner of a garage that performed subsequent repairs on the 1986 CHEVROLET S10 pickup claimed that the vehicle had been miswired and that a new suspension system damaged the drive shaft.
While a spokeswoman for CLEAR CHANNEL said she could not comment on pending litigation, the owner of the garage that oversaw the work said KUCZINSKI got a valuable show car three weeks after dropping off a "piece of junk." "I think we did an incredible job for the time frame we had," said DAVID GREENWALD, owner of GREENWALD AUTOMOTIVE, which used a dozen people at three garages to work on the truck.
The station had chosen five winners and five different garages to fix the cars. All five "freaked" vehicles would then compete in a car show. GREENWALD produced a "before" video of KUCZINSKI's truck which showed a vehicle covered in five different colors, dotted with 43 dents and rolling on four different wheels. The truck had no radio and a blown suspension, he said.
After fixing the dents and sandblasting the truck, GREENWALD's crew laid down a copper-speckled yellow paint job, hooked up an air-ride suspension and installed a stereo and entertainment system in the bed, complete with a TV, barbecue and cooler. "I didn't sleep for four days in the last week because we were behind and it was so much more work than we thought," GREENWALD told the TRIBUNE-REVIEW. "We called the truck 'Never Again' because it just wasn't worth it."
KUCZINSKI said she was "ecstatic" when she saw the truck at the competition, which her truck won. But she was immediately angry when she learned she couldn't drive it away. "At first I wanted to enter it into car shows and get recognition for GREENWALD's," KUCZINSKI said. "Now my goal is to have a street-legal truck that I can drive."

