Megadeth’s David Ellefson Talks About His BMW X3, and Why He Prefers SUVs

Quick Stats: David Ellefson, bassist, Megadeth
Daily Driver: 2019 BMW X3 (Dave’s rating: 7 on a scale of 1 to 10)
Other cars: see below
Favorite drive: Belmont Township, Minnesota
Car he learned to drive in: late 1970s Chevy Silverado
First car bought: mid-1980s Pontiac Firebird

Megadeth bassist Dave Ellefson believes in leasing. It goes back to his dad’s then-new Chevy Silverado that he learned to drive on.

“My dad always bought brand-new cars, which is why I like to lease new and drive new cars myself,” Ellefson tells MotorTrend. “When you’re driving an import car, when you lease it, after three years when things are about to break, you can expense it. You turn it in and go get another one.”

His current lease is a 2019 BMW X3 with the M Sport package, which he rates a 7. “I’m in it right now. The engine’s a little small for my liking. I just drive around town. Once in a while I’ll drive from Phoenix over to Los Angeles, but I like to fly for anything over six hours,” he says with a laugh. “I’d rather fly and rent a car. I’m the king of the rental car now. But I like to have a good reliable car at home.”

Driving around all day in a torrential rainstorm was no problem for the BMW. “I was in my car most of the day driving, and this car motored through those storms, 2 feet of water, and major drainage backup, and I drove through those with the greatest of ease,” he says. “That was an awesome driving experience. I get why they call the BMW the ’ultimate driving machine.’ It hugs the road. I like the smoothness of the Mercedes, but the Beemer’s a bit more of a kick-ass rock-and-roll car.”

He also loves that the controls are more intuitive than in a Mercedes. “I love the whole Apple CarPlay, because I’m an Apple guy, so when you get in, the phone interfaces perfect into the system,” he says. “Usually when I’m driving, I listen to comedy channels on Sirius because too much of my life is serious, so it’s good to laugh when I’m in my car.”

Ellefson has a few cars in his garage that are all paid for, that family members drive, including a Toyota Highlander, a Honda Pilot that he handed down to his son, and a Scion that his daughter drives. “It’s perfect for her lifestyle as a college student. I say buy Japanese, rent German,” he says with a laugh.

For the last 15 years, he has always owned SUVs. “Even though I have roadies and techs to move my gear, I’m a bass player. Just before this phone call, I was leaving Fender in Scottsdale and I have three basses in the back,” Ellefson says. “If you’re in a regular sedan, you can’t fit three basses. I contemplated getting a BMW sedan and I quickly moved off of it because I thought, first and foremost, I’m a bass player and bass players have long instruments and occasionally your amp in the car. For me, hauling and moving gear around is part of a musician’s lifestyle.”

Car he learned to drive in

Ellefson learned how to drive early, at age 12 when he was growing up on a farm in Minnesota. Cars weren’t a stretch, though, since Ellefson grew up driving tractors.

He learned to drive a John Deere tractor from a farmhand named Gary, who plowed the corn fields. “They had eight-track players in them because that was the big technology. Gary had a Bachman-Turner Overdrive ‘Not Fragile,’ and that eight-track singlehandedly got me into rock and roll. I would ride with him, if for no other reason, he was cool and I wanted to listen to BTO,” he says, laughing. “So I learned how to drive, learned how to fall in love with rock and roll, and I learned how to play the bass from that one BTO record that inspired me to become a musician.”

The car he formally learned on was his dad’s 1978 or 1979 maroon Chevrolet Silverado.

“One day my dad said, ‘Take the pickup truck up to the farm.’ He was very commanding. I don’t think I ever said to him, ‘Dad, you know I don’t know how to drive,’” Ellefson says with a laugh, “because I’d been driving tractors and mowing the lawn and I grew up always behind the wheel from a very young age driving something. So when he said take the pickup truck, I don’t think it dawned on him that I don’t have a driver’s license. I learned by trial by fire, which is how I became a musician.”

Ellefson took his driving test in that pickup because he was so comfortable with it and drove it everywhere. “I took girls on dates; it’s what you do when you have a truck and live on a farm. The only negative point I got on my driver’s test: I was backing up into parallel parking. I don’t need a self-driving car to parallel park. I’m really good at it myself,” he says. “I remember backing up, and at one point the car was still in motion going backward and I turned my head to look forward to make sure I wasn’t going to clip the right corner of the car as I was backing in. And he checked that and said, ‘Whatever direction the vehicle is moving, your eyes have to be in that same direction.’”

When Ellefson moved to California after he graduated from high school in 1983, he drove a nice 1981 or 1982 Ford Econoline van. The back seat folded down into a bed, which came in handy on certain dates.

“My dad let me take it to California with me and my buddies. That was what we traveled out there with a U-Haul attached to the back,” he says.

When he met fellow bandmember and Celeb Drive alum Dave Mustaine and started Megadeth, they hauled Marshall amplifiers in it. “That was the Megadeth van. I was the only one who had a car when I met Dave. I’m a guy who [likes] to drive places,” he says.

First car bought and first rock star car

Ellefson traded in the Ford van after it got hit. “I woke up in my apartment, I came out and someone had run into [it]. Fortunately, he was a military guy and had Allstate insurance and he left all this information in my front window, so I called Allstate and they fixed the van top to bottom,” he says with a laugh. “All the broken windows, everything from us moving gear around, my whole car got fixed, it was amazing. I had an almost new condition car, so I drove over to a Pontiac dealership in North Hollywood on Lankershim and traded that car in for a used Pontiac Firebird.”

The circa 1984 Firebird was a red four-speed model. “My brother had a Trans Am for a while when we were teenagers, so I loved this Firebird,” he says. “Living in Hollywood and being a young budding rock star, it was a cool rock and roll car to have. I felt grown up because it was the first car I bought on my own. I go in and I did the deal in the dealership by myself.”

He recalls calling his dad and telling him about how great of a deal he got on his car payment. “I was 23 years old, he said, ‘One day you’re not going to want to have all those car payments.’ It’s funny, now I am that guy,” he says. “We own a bunch of cars in the garage, and my extravagance is leasing a Beemer. I don’t want to get under the hood. I did that once. I changed my oil filters when I was really poor, when I had my van,” he says.

Ellefson had the manual Firebird for a year and a half when the clutch kept going out and he traded it in for a Pontiac Fiero. “It was the last year of the Pontiac Fiero, which was a very cool car. It had a cool spoiler on the back. The problem was it was a two-seat and it couldn’t fit a bass guitar in it,” he says.

Favorite drive

“There are many favorite roads I’ve traveled across this mighty earth of ours over my lifetime, but the one that always brings me back home, literally and figuratively, is the narrow Belmont Township gravel road that leads directly to the farmhouse where I grew up 6 miles north of Jackson, Minnesota, 1 mile west of Highway 71,” Ellefson says. “It’s the road where I learned how to drive our family’s tractors for the farm and eventually my dad’s pickup truck when I was a young teenager.”

As kids, Ellefson and his brother would wait for the school bus on weekday mornings, looking down that road as far as they could, looking for the bus’ lights to beam. That was their signal to walk down their quarter-mile-long driveway to meet the bus as it pulled into the driveway.

“That road single-handedly holds the most memories for me, and every time I go back to visit the house where I was raised on that farm, that road brings with it a lifetime of some of the best memories of my childhood,” he says.

Ellefson’s Sleeping Giants

Ellefson has a solo album, Sleeping Giants, a collection of three new songs that he wrote and collaborated with business partner Thom Hazaert, who is co-author of his book More Life With Deth. The two also run Ellefson Coffee Co. together. There are demos on the album that go back to 1993. “These are really great songs that I thought deserve to be pulled out of the vault and see the light of day,” he says.

It’s on Combat Records, which Ellefson now owns. It’s the record label Megadeth started on, and he relaunched it three years ago.

Ellefson Coffee Co.

EllefsonCoffeeCo.com began as an online venture, but now its products are in shops across the country. “We started online, which was great because we were 100 percent profitable right from bag one. We do have a couple dozen accounts across the country, everything from record shops, head shops, rare stores, and oddity shops,” he says. “Our flagship roast is called Roast in Peace, and we also do some other signature roasts for a bunch of rock star buddies of ours.”

More Life With Deth

More Life With Deth is Ellefson’s third book and a follow-up to his first memoir. It chronicles the last several years of his life when he became an entrepreneur, which includes a management company.

“My mantra in the book is ‘Say yes to life.’ Say yes and continuously abundance flows, and I had to learn that lesson because I said no a couple times and, boy, the phone stopped ringing quickly and things went dark real quick,” he says. “It took me a few years to pedal as hard and fast as I could to try and get a spark going again. So when things are flowing, just keep saying yes and keep going.”

In November, Ellefson said yes to a one-off gig with former Judas Priest guitarist K.K. Downing. “In my book, I’ve been very clear I love the band, I love K.K. Downing. Judas Priest took Megadeth out in 1990,” he says. “As much as K.K. has ‘retired,’ as soon as you call a musician up and you want to jam a couple songs, everybody comes out of retirement because we’re musicians ‘til the day we die. Whether you’re playing in someone’s living room or you’re rocking the big stage halfway across the world, that’s what we do. That’s what we’re born to do, and that’s why we’ve been put on the planet to do that.”

It began as a call to sign books at K.K.’s Steel Mill, and it turned into a concert together. “I grew up on his music, and he and his band helped usher Megadeth into one of our most successful trajectories of our career in the early ’90s, yet it’s funny how when I’m learning songs of his for our concert, how we are basically brothers from another mother and we’re basically in the same band,” Ellefson says with a laugh. “It makes me realize how much all musicians, we’re all so much alike and our bands are all basically very much the same.”

This month, Megadeth will be touring Europe with Five Finger Death Punch. For more information, visit davidellefson.com.