We all love a bargain, don’t we? I’ve had some excellent deals on cars before, but my 2006 BMW 325i is likely my all-time best deal because I essentially paid for a new clutch and flywheel and got an entire car for $650. Even crazier, that simplification is discounting all the other value adds that came with the car.
Alright, so I wasn’t the first person to drive on the clutch that’s in the car, but it was done recently before purchase, and clutch replacement on a modern car can cost solid money. A new LuK dual-mass flywheel for my 325i sticker on FCP Euro for $671.99. The corresponding clutch kit costs $301.99. Add 5.8 hours of specialist book labor at $110 an hour since I didn’t have to replace the clutch and flywheel myself, and you end up with a price tag of $1,612 or so, and that’s not including gearbox mounts, which were done. Total cost of the car at the time? Once converted from Canadian to American dollars, $2,265.28.
Oh, but there’s more. The oil filter housing gasket was recently done, as were the front dampers, as was the valve cover gasket, as were the spark plugs, the gearbox mounts, the water pump, and several control arm bushings. Sure, it may have proper mileage on it, but a decently maintained sports sedan for sensible money is something great. Of course, I took things a bit further — I essentially traded the value of a rusty but trusty Infiniti G35 for it.
On the other hand, maybe you got a crap deal on a car. Our own S. W. Gossin recently bought a Nissan Juke that blew up several miles down the road, which is a rotten bit of luck in the grand scheme of car purchases. Mercifully, he was able to sell the non-running Juke and break even, but not everyone has the Midas touch like that.
So, what’s the best or worst deal you ever got on a car? Whether you absolutely stole a deal or lost your shirt, we’ve love to hear your car-buying exploits in the comments section below.
(Photo credits: Thomas Hundal, Stephen Walter Gossin)
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This will be a bit of a story.
I decided it was time to buy a Miata about 5 years ago. I spent a LONG time looking for the right one: a NC PRHT with fabric seats. This wasn’t easy to find; seems like most PRHT’s have leather, which removes about an inch of headroom. Something a tall guy like me really needs.
After about 6 months of looking, a Ford dealership near me suddenly had one! $19k was about market price for a car with really low mileage (30k kms). I drove it, and was happy to buy it. Thats when the dealership went all dealership on me. They refused to send me a final quote with all fees and taxes included. Just kept saying “come on in and we’ll work out a deal.” I ended up walking away from it.
4 months later I saw a private sale for a True Red 2010 Miata. It had more KMs, but was listed for $17k. I wanted to see a few more pictures of the car before driving out a couple hours to see it – which the seller happily agreed to do. Queue a couple days of back and forth without pictures, and then the seller seemingly ghosted me. I emailed him one more time just to confirm I’m very interested.
His response: “I traded the car into an Audi dealership this afternoon. You can talk to the sales guy and he may hook you up.”
F@&k!! I figured out the email address of the sales guy and contacted him. He responded almost immediately and said I could look at it Friday or Saturday. This was Thursday, so I took the next day off and made the drive to Etobicoke.
The car was absolutely MINT. The dealer hadn’t actually detailed the car yet when I saw it, but it didn’t need it. It was super solid when I drove it, so when I got back to the dealership I told them I’d buy.
Best part: The dealership had listed the car at $16k.
Bester part: In the first email exchange with the sales guy I asked what he’d sell it for. His response? $15k.
I asked him if he was honouring that $15k price and he said “absolutely.” In my mind, I paid $4k less for a car that is absolutely flawless.
$100 for a ’91 or ’92 Caravan in 2010. A quick tune-up, shocks, and trans mount later and I got a floaty front drive quicker than expected (with the v6) rust free (in northern Illinois!!) daily driver used to haul bikes, music equipment, and all the decor for my wedding. It gave 4 years of service before the trans finally gave out.
Beige on beige on beige 2004 Lexus ES330. Affectionately named the OLC ( old lady car ). 85k miles and a fat stack of dealer service records.
It is a crime how Dealerships treat old folks and had convinced the nice old lady that it needed $3500 in work and was “unsafe”.
Needed brake pads which still had at least 20% remaining and a valve cover gasket.
Brake pads cost me $54 from amazon for both front and rear sets and $20 for a valve cover gasket.
Rear valve cover does not leak. Front valve cover left a large mess and discovered the bolts on the valve cover were barely finger tight – coincidence?
$1,000 for a car that needed some easy maintenance and some tlc. Good for another 100k miles because Toyota.
Brand new 2017 GTI bought December 2016. Base model, no options – glorious plaid seats and 6sp manual. I flew from CT to DC and was picked up by the dealer, bought the car, and drove back to CT that night. Out the door at like $18k. Got rid of it in Jan 2019, but used MK VIi GTIs like that were selling for $21K with 40,000-60,000 miles in 2022.
Best and worst deal was the ’96 XJ with a 5-speed that I got for free from my next door neighbor when he was moving. We got it to drive the 50 feet from his driveway to mine despite having no hydraulic fluid in the brakes and broken cables on the parking brake. I knew it had some rust in the trunk floor, but I figured I could fiberglass patch that. While running new brake lines I realized the carpet was the only structural element in the floor. The drivers seat was wobbly because the bracket it was bolted to had rusted through as well. After a lot of David Tracy articles to give me strength, 3 years, a lot of welding, and probably $3k in parts, I am finally driving it. It did snow a lot last weekend and with new snow tires on it, I did think it was nice to have.
I got a beat to shit ’99 Dodge Caravan for free, then sold it for a dollar.
Literally infinite profit!
I may have cleaned it up a bit while I owned it so I would have sold it at an overall loss.
Two excellent deals:
I’ve counted through the waste-spark systems I’ve owned and I think in each case the OEM has specified single-electrode plugs.
What is wrong with using single-electrode spark plugs?
I should have been more clear – not so much “single electrode” as “copper single electrode” are the problem.
Waste spark burns through plugs twice as fast, so cheap copper plugs yield poor performance much more quickly than comparable platinum or iridium plugs. The engine was running quite poorly, in large part due to the use of Autolite copper plugs. I put iridium plugs in, and while the whole “burns cleaner” thing isn’t really true, I replaced them around 290k (so close to 100k on the plugs) and they were still pretty serviceable. And those iridium plugs are in fact single electrode, so… yeah, I should have been more cautious with my writing.
OEM spec for the 5VZFE was NGK BKR5EKB, which was dual-electrode platinum.
That makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying.
I guess the best deals I got on a car were technically the three cars I own that were given to me in one way or another at one time or another, but that seems against the spirit of a “deal”, so I’d say the best deal I’ve ever gotten was paying $16k for a 911 SC that required nothing more than a set of tires and a few trivial things for the first two years and has brought me endless amounts of joy.
Hmmm, so hard to choose.
$50 Celebrity wagon, drove it 80 miles a day to work and back for several years. Ran badly but always ran. Junked due to too much rust.
$679 ($700 with $21 in change scattered throughout) Celebrity sedan, bought in 2003 with 100k and is still my summer daily driver at 311k. Would still drive it anywhere.
$30 6000 wagon, from a coworker’s backyard. He offered it and I told him I’d give him whatever the junkyard would give if he hauled it there. Sitting for 6 years with blown head gasket. Put in gas, battery, brake line, drove it home. Scored Jasper rebuilt 2.8 for $50, installed myself. Drove for 9 years, countless 350 mile midnight winter trips, ran beautiful but junked due to too much rust.
$750 Ciera wagon, immaculate, elderly owned and never driven in snow. Sat for months on CL because I was the only one who wanted it for something other than a derby car, but for personal reasons I couldn’t get it for awhile. Never gonna find another one that clean around here. It’s my Radwood show car.
Yeah there’s a pattern, because the GM A bodies have treated me the best. I’ve sometimes gone years without having to fix anything on them, and when I do it’s always cheap and easy.
I’ve had many other cars, including a $700 POS Geo Tracker that will never die, and a $1500 Jeep XJ that runs great but always needs something fixed. At least it’s easy. Was given a crappy gen 2 Escort wagon but wasn’t really a fan so I sold it.
All of my cars I would consider good deals, considering I’ve never lost an engine or transmission or had a catastrophic failure on any of them, despite going over 300k on many of them. Every one of them has gotten me 350 miles downstate round trip many times. Being in Michigan, rust always takes them out first.
Looks like I found my long lost brother! I absolutely loved the A-body gm cars and they were consistently ‘good.’
Ciera notch coupe, $50, iron duke savage, drove for 2 years, junked due to rust. 87 Pontiac 6000 2.8 FI. $300 and worked great, sold for $700. 84 Ciera wagon 3.0v6 brown on brown. $500. Drove 50mi/day for a year and sold to a friend $600. Century with the 3.8FI ‘quick car’ and looked good. My favorite one. Paid $1000 but sadly rear ended and a-body’s always folded for some reason.
Awesome that you still have one man!!! it turns out the General Motors x body platform these are based on are some awesome vehicles that would run poorly, longer than most cars will run at all!!!!
My worst deal so far was for a 2007 Zap! Xebra. Admittedly I only paid $700 for it but this photo was taken right after I got it home, just before I put the ramps on my trailer and slowly coasted the Xebra down onto the ground, during which its steering linkage shattered irreparably:
https://live.staticflickr.com/815/41442798171_50d5d2c1ac_c.jpg
I ended up cutting the whole thing into pieces for disposal, so the price was a bit high for something that only ever moved its own length, once, during my ownership. It wasn’t all that long of a vehicle, either.
My best deal so far was later saying no to another Zap! Xebra.
I paid $85,000 for my Viper new (sticker price $142,500) almost nine years ago. I have put 22,000 miles on it and today it’s worth a lot more than I paid for it.
Honorable mention: I paid $6999 for a brand new Fiesta 1.0T (MSRP $16,700), drove it for 80,000 something miles, and sold it for $9000 four years later.
I have bought plenty of money pits (mostly powered by diesel), but nothing bad enough to cancel either of those out (so far).
Did Vipers usually sell that much below MSRP when you bought yours? If not, why was yours so cheap?
It was a weird time, the car came out for 2013 and tanked right away, reviews were mediocre, the price had gone way up over the Gen IV, pricing out traditional Viper buyers, and the $125-150k buyer wanted a more refined driving experience. Upshot of all this being lots of leftover cars sitting. Mine had been roped off in the dealer for 2 years before I bought it.
Dodge was offering a $15,000 discount on all unsold units, and dealers were fire saling them so there were deals out there, but my deal was exceptional even given that.
Once the 1:1 program and the ACR came out and the discontinuation was announced, demand started picking back up, but there was a brief period where you could really get a deal. I just got lucky to be in the right place at the right time. I had been planning to get a C7 Z06, but after that car’s poor reviews and given the Viper discounts, my choice was easy.
That’s an awesome deal and awesome car! Nice how it worked out. Very cool!
And the Z06 is awesome but the viper is way more unique and looks amazing.
Interesting. I can’t believe there was a time when Vipers sat unsold on car lots. That is hard to imagine today when cars like the Viper are no longer built and probably will not be built again.
I can see why some buyers would expect more refinement from a $140,000 car, but to me, a lot of the appeal of the Viper is that it is an uncompromised sports car. I have never had the opportunity to drive one, but they look like they would be a lot of fun to drive.
It’s funny how things change; in 2014-15, stuff like the computerized AWD GTR was still ascendant, and you could buy a GT3, a McLaren, or an R8 for well under $200K.
A manual-only, raw and unrefined Viper at $130-$150K wasn’t such a hit, especially when the traditional buyer was priced out. Yes, the base price was more like $100K, but the majority of the cars sitting were expensive GTS models. Dealers couldn’t wait to get them out the door to make room for the hot new Hellcat. The dealer I bought mine from sold their two in the same weekend, both at enormous discounts, and were already bringing their first Hellcats in to sit behind the ropes where the Vipers had been.
Only later has the manual/uncompromised performance nostalgia really set in. Even given that, my specific car is still relatively unloved compared to other Vipers. Absolute base models trade for about their original MSRP, TAs above it, and ACRs can be double MSRP, but I would not get $142K for my car unless it had <5,000 miles.
Best deal? Other than gift cars, right? In fall of 1999, I bought a 99 Ford Contour with a 5 speed that arrived at the dealership in March of ’99. It was a discontinued model, and nobody wanted the manual transmission. It was rarely, if ever, test driven before I got there because it had just 18 miles on the odometer. MSRP was a little over $16,750, and I paid $11,000 out-the-door including tax, title and temporary tags, so I got over $6,000 off a car priced under $17k.
Worst deal? In 1991, I paid $2,000 for a super clean 1986 Buick Regal with a 3.8 liter V6. The oil pump wasn’t working well, if at all, and the dash light didn’t light up either. (I suspect sabotage by the seller.) The engine seized the next day, less than 20 miles later.
I paid another thousand or so to have a mechanic put a big block Olds motor (403?) and transmission in the Regal, but it never shifted properly enough to drive further than to the grocery and back. Why the Olds motor? A coworker had one with low miles and practically gave it to me.
A few weeks later, I traded the Regal to a guy who had a built and blown Chevy small block and transmission ready to drop into it. He gave a ’72 Chevy Nova with an I6 and three on the tree, in great condition. I have no idea why he wanted the Buick instead of dropping that sweet Chevy engine into the Nova, but I was happy to make the trade.
I later sold the Nova for $3,000, just a couple hundred less than I had in it. But I was severely inconvenienced for months, so it really sucked at the time.
Given my grandfather’s old LeSabre when he couldn’t drive it any more back in 2007 and I had crashed my old Hyundai Elantra station wagon. We paid registration fees, got an inspection, new plates and off I drove. I had that car for about 4 years and 70k miles all up and down the East Coast. Until one day in 2011 when a jack went straight through a lift point. I promptly traded it for scrap value on my Cruze Eco. Which I got a fair deal on. I got a good price and the dealer got a quick sale. Still have that car.
The best deal I ever got was paying full list price for a Miata in April of 1990. 200,000 fantastic miles later it still makes me smile every week.
The year was 1993. The car I ended up getting was a Honda Civic CX hatchback. This is not the story of that car.
This is the story of the one I almost got. Who else was making little commuters back in the day? Well, the only other one I liked was the new Mitsubishi Mirage. I really liked the little two door coupe. Sure, the Civic was the right choice and I loved it and it lasted forever. But this really isn’t the story of the almost-car.
This is, however, the story of the almost-car salesman. Or…sales-woman. Look, I was 20. The saleswoman was a young girl my age. Within a year or so. Very knowledgeable about the car. Very, very cool. And very, very attractive.
And very much the daughter of the owner of the auto franchise. See, the way I took it from her, she didn’t want to sell cars, but the family biz is the family biz, and they wanted to at least have her take a crack at it, so the way she explained it to me was that they wanted her to get sales numbers, so they were willing to make all sorts of stupid deals to sell cars.
Google might not be very reliable, but the Civic was something I paid like $10k for all in, with the aftermarket head unit added (Blaupunkt!) and the optional passenger side mirror as my only options. She was telling me numbers of something like within $500 of that, all in, for the highest trim-level Mirage, which was a savings of a couple K….when we all know there’s no margins on those little cars.
She was very, very nice, and very, very cute, and how I didn’t sign immediately on the dotted line I don’t know. I actually was enough of a doofus that I had a hard time speaking around her.
You don’t have to believe me. But somewhere in Albany, NY, was a very nice girl whose last name was DeNooyer, and I hope she found the career she wanted, and that it wasn’t selling cars.
This happened to my cousin, but too good not to tell. I was visiting him about ten years ago and noticed a very clean, very original ’67-ish Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40 in the corner of his driveway. The conversation went like this:
“Is that your old Land Cruiser? Looks nice!”
“Yep. Funny story about that. I always wanted a Land Cruiser like that but never had time to find one. One day I’m visiting my wife’s mother in the very nice older section of Hollywood, and this Land Cruiser is parked in a driveway across the street with a For Sale sign on it. I’m curious, so I walk over and ring the bell. This nice woman answers the door and explains that they have too many cars and she and her husband agreed to sell this one. He’s busy producing a very popular television game show so he’s left it up to her to sell it.”
“How much were they asking?”
“She just said ‘make me an offer’. I had no idea what they go for, so I just came up with $3500 as a starting number. She agreed, so I went to my bank and got a cashier’s check for the amount.” [Note: I may be mis-remembering and it may have been $2500, but I’ll go with the higher number.]
“So what was wrong with it?”
“I came back the next day with the check. The husband was there and looked like someone had shot his dog. But he agreed we had a deal and wasn’t going to renege on it. Then he said ‘Take this folder – it has records of what I’ve done to it.’ When I got home, I took a look and added up $25,000 in receipts for restoration. It’s basically perfect.”
I guess the moral of the story is, if you see a for sale sign on an interesting car, it never hurts to ring the doorbell.
$1590 drive away with 6 months rego, full tank of fuel, a 1 month warranty, and working cold aircon for a 1990 Nissan Pintara SuperHatch T with the 2.4L KA. I put new oil, plugs and leads on it when I got it ($60 maybe?). 2 years later new tyres. At some point raided Dad’s stack of nuts and bolts to fix a broken brake pedal light switch, and just kept topping up the oil (no further actual oil changes, just top ups), and I got the last of the gear change bushes in the country to sort a pretty loose lever. I had that car for 5 years, no issues. It fit my mountain bike in it without taking a wheel off. You could park it anywhere, any how, visibility was amazing. It was the one car you could lend to a mate without any fear. I later sold it to a mate for the remaining rego cost, and he had it for at least another 12 months.
It was genuinely the perfect car.
The story of how it came about, at the time I’d sold my Jetta TSI, had the motorbike only and coming in to a wet winter. I’d found a ‘decent’ E46 M3 which was to be the next car, but after doing the normal pre-purchase inspection a number of redflags came up, so I was likely to be carless for a while. Found the Pinata with a 5min search of up to $2000 with rego and roadworthy cert, but was down the coast, and the guy was only prepared to hold it for the day, but he was down the coast. Found out Mum and Dad were heading down, 2h later cruising back home in the Superhatch!
Super glad I got it, as it took a good 6 months to find another M3. But that’s another story.
Well to start with, my X1/9 was free on the condition I don’t crush it, so that’s a decent deal. My Scorpion definitely takes the cake though. I had less than 24 hours notice that the car would be running at the local dealer auction the next day, so I asked my father in law (a car dealer) if he was going to the auction and if I could tag along. I found myself the next day kneeling next to a little silver Lancia trying to peek underneath and peeling up a tiny corner of carpet to look for rust. After a brief test drive where it started, ran, barely stopped, and didn’t have reverse, I oked bidding up to $5000 as a low-ball. The seller cut it loose at 3k. When I went to get the car at the lot I found a binder in the front full of receipts form a $12,000 mid-90s restoration and tucked behind the passenger seat was a print off of a then two year old value guide that set it at about $10,000. Needless to say I was quite happy with my purchase
We bought my wife’s 2019 Volvo XC40 for about $39K. IIRC it was about $2500 below MSRP after the loyalty offer for our C30 trade in and all that.
Not a screaming hot deal or anything but if you bought a car in 2019 and were able to avoid all of the pandemic ridiculousness, it turns out in hindsight you probably made out like a bandit.
A 91 miata in about 2005 for $400. The timing belt broke while being driven, and I even told the seller it’s a non-interference engine but he didn’t want to deal with it. ~150 to replace along with plugs, wires, etc. and I got 3 years of use out of that car, sold it to a friend for 2K, and he got about 60K miles out of it before trading it in. (He even offered to give me back the car for free, too)
I bought a 1989 Honda Prelude for I think 300 dollars in the late 90’s, it was pretty rough and I spent nearly the price of entry on new rubber, but it made it across iowa, just surged a bunch. it was kind of a pain because the surging was definitely a vacuum leak somewhere and the engine had those in mass quantities, I did end up getting it to at least stay running and my sister in law seemed to love the little gremlin that it was, so I let her have it for 500. But I learned the lesson of Cheap vs reliable.
haha this is funny because I worked with a dude back in 1999/2000 who had your era Prelude (automatic) and it would surge up and down at idle non-stop. But it never failed him.
He kept saying it was the EGR valve, but you’re probably correct on the vacuum issue on these. Or maybe it was EGR+vacuum related because, well, that’s how older EGR’s worked.
Two that stand out for me:
In the fall of 2017, I picked up a 2003 Suburban with 170k for $1200. It had been sitting in a pasture for four years, and was in dire need of maintenance and a deep clean, but it ran and drove just fine. It was a two-owner OK truck that had never been wrecked and had zero rust, and the AC even worked! I gradually brought it back up to snuff over the next few months, and even had it repainted the following year. That truck served as my daily for the next five years, and never once failed to start or left me stranded. It hauled me, my family, and a variety of trailers all over the country without complaint. I sold it on last year for $5k, with 230k on the clock and still running like a top.I’m an aircooled VW guy from way back, with a specific bent for baywindow buses. Four years ago, my father-in-law called me to tell me that “a funny lookin’ kinda VW pickup” had shown up in a local farm auction bill (he was a rancher in far southwest OK), and would I be interested in something like that? You can bet that I was. It turned out to be a 1-owner 1970 VW singlecab that had been parked in a barn since 1980 or so. Zero rust, very few dents, and 100% complete. Since the auction was fairly well advertised, I didn’t hold out much hope of being able to buy it, but I authorized my FIL to bid what I could afford at the time and kind of put it out of mind. Following the auction a couple weeks later, my FIL called to inform me that he’d indeed purchased the truck on my behalf… “I had to give $2500 for it.” Holy crap! I hauled it back home with the Suburban I mentioned above, and put another $4k or so into getting the bus running and driving again over the next year. When the time came, I ended up selling it for $15k. Probably the closest I’ll ever come to winning the lottery.
The best deal I ever got on a car was right after I graduated high school. The car I’d been driving up until then finally died its final death and I needed something to get me to college. I took a summer job at KFC and one of my coworkers had a 1981 Datsun 200SX which would have been 13yo at that point and they sold it to me for $500. That car was an absolute shitbox but it had a 5 speed and RWD and $25 used tires on each corner and I definitely wrung $500 worth of fun out of that badboy before I finally killed it 2 years later. Best $500 I’ve ever spent and it’s still the metric I use today to weigh all large purchases. The boss’s wife bought a $1000 purse and I remember thinking to myself, “that’s 2 Datsuns! No way that purse is twice as much fun as my Datsun!”
After racking up the 1980 Plymouth Volare that I got from my dad as my first car (summer 1989), I was a college sophomore at UF in need of wheels and started looking over summer break. My dad owned an auto parts store and had heard of an elderly couple with an “old Mustang” in the garage and they were looking to unload it. No information other than that… just an “old Mustang”. The entire way over there I was muttering to myself “Please don’t be a Mustang II” under my breath like a mantra. We pulled up to an open garage door and a 1974 Mustang II fastback parked in the garage. I immediately started looking for objections, but I honestly was coming up short. It had 29000 miles on the odometer. The tennis-ball yellow paint looked brand-new, as did the white pleather upholstery. The avocado green carpets were perfect as well. This was the old couple’s “retirement toy” and they had bought it new. I test drove it and it was surprisingly nice with the V6. For this I paid the sum of $600, probably about 1200 2024 dollars.
For the next two years, that car got driven all over the great state of Florida. Never broke down, never failed. I kept it pretty near perfect. It served as a rolling advertisement for my fraternity’s “70s Night” party during Rush Week (for some reason, there was a wave of ironic 70s nostalgia in the early 90s). We got 8 people home in it when we were partying in the Newberry Caves outside of Gainesville and the guy who drove most of the crew in his VW bus buggered off with some girl. Road trips to Crescent Beach, Jax, Daytona, you name it.
That car changed my mind about the Mustang II. Unfortunately it was T-boned by the idiot with the Buick GN who lived across the street from my fraternity house and totalled. The adjuster was sympathetic, especially given the condition of the car, and the payout was $1250.00.
It was replaced by an early 80’s Chrysler 5th Avenue. The less said about that the better.
I’ve had a few great deals over the years, but I kind of look at the deals as the purchase price minus the price I sold it for after I was done with it.
My high school/college car was a 72 Cutlass that I bought for $3500. I drove it for 4 years and then sold it for about $2000. Most of the repair parts were pretty cheap, but boy it drank some gas over the years. I got about 10mpg no matter if it was city, highway, AC on, or windows open. It was a 350 auto with a 4 barrel. The ice cold AC took 4.5 pounds of R12. Luckily it never leaked out while I had the car after an initial re-charge. Net cost – about $375 a year plus lots of gas and many DIY repairs, but parts were cheap.
My next car was a ’97 Buick Lesabre that I bought in ’98. It was only about an 18 month old car, but it was my dad’s co-workers company car. It had about 80,000 highway miles on it and a ton of hail damage on the exterior. I got it for about $5500 and drove it for 2 years until I started having odd intermittent electrical problems that noone could figure out. I traded that into a dealership during a rainstorm at night, so I don’t think they saw all the hail marks and it must have not had the engine shutoff during their test drive, because they offered me $5000 on trade and I was happy to take it. Net cost about $250 a year and very little went wrong until the intermittent electrical problems.
I managed to qualify for all the discounts, including GM family, and lease a 2004 Pontiac Grand Prix once for $144 a month with nothing down for 3 years. They didn’t even have any on the lot to test drive, so I agreed to lease one that was still being shipped to the dealership. I figured… for that price, how bad could it be. It had no options and was sight unseen, but they did give it to me for that price. With my trade in that was on it’s last legs, I think I had a payment under $50 a month for that lease. They were kind of ugly (that was the first year of the last generation of Grand Prix), but it was comfortable and had the 3800 V6 in it. Net cost, under $2000 a year, but that was for a new car.
My last best purchase was probably my 2014 Chevy Volt. I bought that in 2017 (lease turn in, CPO) for about $17,500. I drove it for 4.5 years and only used about 200 gallons of gas in those 5 years. When I had to buy my truck, I was able to get about $12,000 trade in because it was late 2021 when used car prices were insane. Net cost – about $1200 a year plus it saved me about $600 a year in gas costs vs. electric.
Worst deal was probably my truck, bought in mid 2021 that I traded my Volt for, but I needed something that could tow, and my Volt was getting close to that 8 year mark where the warranty on the battery goes away. I still got a supplier discount and some all weather mats and a bed-liner thrown in, which was pretty good in mid-2021, but it still was an expensive purchase and there was almost no negotiating off MSRP then.
Gosh, how could I forgot the 79 MG B. Bought for $5200 and then the next day I took it in the tire shop to have the 10 year old tires replaced. I told them not to lift it by the sides and to use the engine crossmember and the axle. I had about a 2-3 minute conversation with the guy. Then he ignored me and they proceeded to lift it from the sides, including about 2″ in front of the back wheel wheel where it is just the sheet metal and no structure at all. They bent both wheelwells inward and cracked some bondo that I didn’t know about in one of the the sidesills under the door. Their insurance ended up writing me a check for about $4900, but didn’t total it and let me keep the car. Since it’s not that noticeable and doesn’t seem structural, I just call it my starter MG and drive it. It’s really not worth putting that much work body work into a 1979 MGB, I’ve put about 6000 miles on it over 3 years. Net cost – about $100 a year plus the cost of tires that they didn’t refund. Plus lots of sweat equity (pulling the engine and trans for a clutch replacement and lots of other repairs). Still driving it. Hagerty Insurance is about 20% of the cost of my other cars, and registration is just $29 a year.