Car Conundrum

I’ve never been a car guy. That’s due to my early adoption of motorcycles, I suspect. I was fine with my Tesla X for many years due to the novelty of the EV, and I am now very pleased with my Ford F-150 Lightning because my truck serves my gardening. But for almost more than 15 years, we have driven a Mercedes Benz GL450 (technically now a GLS) due to comfort preferences. We think of this as Kim’s car, though it’s really the family car as well. We have now had 9 of them, as hard as that is to believe, since we have leased all but one of them. The one we now drive is a 2022 with 51,000 miles on it.

We used to get great service from MB Manhattan, but have found the service from MB Escondido far less agreeable for reasons I have chronicled in the past and will refrain from repeating. Recently, Kim and I have, for a number of reasons, decided (or so we thought) to move away from Mercedes at long last in favor of a Subaru. Kim loves their donation policy that supports animals and I have yet to find anyone who has ever had a bad experience with Subaru. Our friends Sam & Chris drive one, as does my youngest son (he’s on his second). Someone suggested to me that only people from Oregon and lesbians drive Subarus. Sam & Chris recently moved to Bend, Oregon and our best lesbians friends (from Utah) do not drive one, so I’m not sure about that comment. But we thought we were ready for the switch.

Naturally, Mercedes is nothing if not an aggressive marketer who understands the value of forced brand loyalty. Given the stereotype of German mentality, insisting on continued loyalty seems in keeping. We have 15 months to go on this expensive lease and there seems to be NO way to get out of it. It is ironclad and unyielding. So, we were resigned to stay the course until early 2026 and then trade out for a Subaru Ascent Touring model. At Mercedes there is no top end to what you can spend on a car. A Maybach will take you up into the quarter million or higher range. But at Subaru, the MOST you can spend is about $53,000 and that’s with every accessory they make. I like that in this day and age of limitless spending. By the way, staying with our $95,000 GLS for another 15 months is no hardship. We like the car snd it does drive well though the slightest visit to the service dealership will cost me $2,000 minimum, compared to my one Ford 10,000-mile check-up which ran $39.95 (paid for with Ford “points”).

But Mercedes, after previously jacking me up to trade in my car, only to pull that rug out from under me, has sent me a trade-up offer that actually will save me $500/month for the next 15 months by getting a 4-year lease on a 2025 GLS. That offer has had its intended effect. It has given me pause since the offer expires in 4 days. So today, Kim and I are going to Subaru to test drive an Ascent and see if we like it enough to stay the course on our plan or throw in the towel to Mercedes marketing and trade-up as a concession to yet another forced loyalty program.

I hate that I have spent six months railing about Mercedes and talking up Subaru only to find that Mercedes has waved some money in my nose and discombobulated all my best laid plans. I’m sure you all know of my impulsive nature, and you can imagine how difficult it is for me to patiently wait for another 15 months to transact on a car. There is something so fulfilling about doing the trade and being done with it, and yet there is now such a unsatisfying feeling attached to resigning myself to staying with Mercedes after all this time and all this amount of grousing. Mercedes deserves to lose my business and loyalty. Subaru deserves our business based on its policies, its egalitarian ways, and its benign patience with me. I want you to be that guy who swapped down from Mercedes to Subaru and is proud of it. Kim wants to feel better about the car she drives and what it represents in a world heading off the brink of transactional and luxurious oblivion. I am so impulsive and we are so weak, I can’t stand it. Please pray for us and our visit to Subaru today and I will continue this story after that dealership visit and perhaps a showdown at MB Escondido. We’re taking Buddy along for moral support.

So, now we’ve gone to Subaru Temecula. We were assigned a junior guy (Daniel) who’s job was to show us the car options they offered and go with us for test drives. There was also a senior “deal guy” who got all the details on our Mercedes and went about calling all his buddies at the various Mercedes dealerships to figure out what could be done to get us out of our current lease and into a Subaru ASAP. I gave Matt the deal guy all the disclaimers that he was on mission impossible and he seemed to know the score, but was willing to give it a shot. After going through some perfunctory Q&A, Daniel figured out that we were not his typical buyers and that this little accessory or that little accessory was not going to be the deal driver. Where we were 100% consistent with the normal American car buyer was that there were colors and interior materials that we would and would not accept. It seemed that the dealership only had one Ascent Touring model and it was in Autumn Green with black interior with green contrast stitching. I thought it looked nice, but it was clearly too butch for Kim. We decided to test drive it anyway. I went first and I have to say that I was very impressed with my comfort level in the car. It truly was 1-2 inches roomier in every dimension than our GLS, which is always surprising when its a smaller car. The salesman sat behind me just to make the point that even with the seat all the way back, there was still plenty of room in the back for passengers, something that is not so easy to claim in the Mercedes. I was very impressed with how the car drove as well. All of the dashboard and instrument technology was more appealing than I thought. The only bell or whistle that I was less impressed by was the video rear view mirror, but that could be turned off or on as one wished. Kim had a similarly positive impression of both the roominess and the drive.

We then went in to hear what Matt the deal guy had discovered and he told us mission impossible was indeed impossible (economically speaking, that is). He went so far as to pull a Macy’s to Gimbel’s trick of suggesting that we should go to Mercedes to try to trade the lease up. That had the desired effect of causing me to say no, that we would not be returning to Mercedes for our next car. For the record, he did point out a few of the benefits of staying the course with Subaru and we all agreed that the plan for us now was to come back in 11-12 months and have them order the exact Ascent that Kim wanted so that we wouldn’t have to settle for anything less than perfection. We all shook hands and agreed that while we hadn’t bought a car today, they had made a Subaru sale for the future. We were impressed with the pleasantness and low-key salesmanship and decided that Temecula would, indeed, get our patronage early next year. We decided as we walked out that going to MB Escondido served no purpose other than to aggravate us with their deal-doing aggressiveness. Car conundrum solved for the time being. Buddy was pleased because he got a Jack’s cheeseburger out of the deal for being a good boy.