Carnundrum

As I drive around San Diego County and prepare to head north today with the entire family (Kim, Carolyn, John, Charlotte and Evelyn), I have noted that the car culture of Southern California makes me ponder many things. As examples, I am impressed by how much the quality and appearance of cars has improved over my adult life. I feel like fifty years ago you would drive around and the cars on the road were half nice looking and half shitty looking. These days you occasionally see a real rattletrap, but generally, most cars look pretty decent, even if they are a decade or more old. I can only attribute that to better manufacturing and design. I then find myself being amazed that so many people find it easy enough to figure out how to acquire and drive such nice vehicles. Cars are expensive and as such, you either have to be a good saver, a big earner, or a very creditworthy person (which is usually a reflection of the prior two traits) to get one…and everyone seems to be able to get one…or more. I’m not sure why that is so startling to me, but it is.

When I add up the homes I have bought over the years, I get to something like seventeen. Try as I might with cars, I have a harder time accurately adding up the number I have owned…and that’s even if I ignore motorcycles. I start to lose count after thirty-five and what makes it especially hard is figuring in all the vehicles that were bought to keep at various vacation homes and for use by the kids. The good news is that we are now down to two cars, one for me and one for Kim, since we own no vacation homes any more (Thank God), and our kids all have their own vehicular dynasties underway. In fact, what we have is more like one family car (Kim’s) that we use for trips and family outings, and one workhorse (my truck) that we use to haul this and that around locally. I seem to be half modern (my truck is an EV) and half traditionalist (our car is a gas-guzzler). I have 18,000 miles on my truck after 21 months, so its safe to say I average 10,000 miles a year running local errands on battery power. As for the family car, we have 56,000 miles on it and have had it for 38 months, so we’ve been averaging 17,000 miles a year, mostly due to a few long trips we took around the country. I suspect Kim would rack up 12,000 per year without the big trips, since she seems to scoot around more than I do. It’s hard to estimate how much roadtripping we will be doing in the future…some thoughts suggest more and some suggest less. What I do know is that we are most comfortable having one vehicle that gets filled at the gas station so that we can be more comfortable using it for roadtrips if we want. We have not yet owned a hybrid. Hybrids have been solidly in the US market for 25 years, but even in their peak adoption year of 2013 have only ever represented 3.19% of new car sales. By comparison, today EVs represent about 8% of new car sales in the U.S. Where these market shares go in the future is a subject of much debate, but in this household we are almost at a point of indifference about whether we will next buy a gas car or a hybrid car for our next family vehicle.

What is currently causing me lots of head gear-turning is trying to figure out what and when we should be doing with the family car program. After a recent trip to the Mercedes dealership when I was presented with yet another $2,000 repair bill, I got very sore at Mercedes and said that after over fifteen years of buying and driving GLS450’s, I was done with Mercedes and would not do a new lease swap, which they have been offering me for almost six months now. Instead, I started looking at new alternatives. Kim has been very bullish on Subaru because they give money for dogs. We have agreed that’s nice, but that shouldn’t drive our decision given that cars are so important to our day-to-day lives. We test drove one, and it was fine for us, but probably too tight in the third row for our annual grandkid visits in July. I rented a Chevy Traverse and thought it drove well and looked good but besides the “How can you have a Ford and a Chevy in the same driveway!?” problem, both the traverse and the Subaru Ascent get only so-so ratings compared to other alternatives. These present themselves as $50,000 cars fully loaded, but I know that will inch up closer to $60,000 when all is said and done. For the record, the Mercedes GLS450 is about a $100,000 car if you keep your options wits about you. So, I went looking for other comparable cars to be more thorough than I usually am in my car buying.

After a lot of online research and comparison, I concluded that the Toyota Grand Highlander was the way to go. Kim and I went out on Saturday to the Toyota dealer to see what these beasts were like. It was a shocking revelation…not so much about the physical attributes of the car, but the process of trying to buy a new car these days. To begin with, we were told that they had no Grand Highlanders for us to test drive or even see. They said they were very hard to come by…even though their website showed a healthy inventory (their excuse is that corporate controls that information and that inventory includes cars “on the way”). So we began discussing ordering since our Mercedes lease runs another 10 months anyway. They said it would take 6-8 months to order one and that there was no assurance that the factory would accept the order as we chose to design it. I asked why the website tells you to “Build your own” and they shrugged. They explained that the process is that if I put down a $500 deposit (that is fully and unconditionally refundable), they will ask the factory if they will consider building the car we want. The salesman showed little or no confidence that our order would yield a positive answer from the factory. When we asked if we could see cars of different models in the colors to get a sense of them, we were told that was futile since each model has different shades of the colors (What?). Kim asked about some interior fabric swatches and was told they had none. They also said that since COVID, Toyota also does not provide ANY brochures for any models. It was then when I said OK to the refundable deposit that we were told we could, after all, see the two Grand Highlanders that they had in inventory (Oh, yeah, we lied to you), so we were able to see at least the exterior color and get a feel for the sizing and features by sitting in the cars that had big orange SOLD signs on the mirrors. My suspicion is that this is all about selling current inventory and creating low expectations about ordering. I bet those two vehicles would have suddenly become available if we had wanted one. Before leaving the dealership with my deposit receipt, I was told as an afterthought that all cars sold by that dealership had to have the $1,900 security system, the $750 edge protection and a $5,000 dealer markup, so take the build price and add $8,300 with tax. That brought a $62,000 car up to $70,000. Hmmm…

I know I can buy for cash, lease or finance. I tend to lease, especially with a car I may or may not like. I also have now been driven to check my Mercedes lease and discover that I can buy out the lease in 10 months for $42,000 (something like $3,000 more that what Kelly Blue Book says, but who knows how accurate that is…so more or less at market value). Bottom line, the new car sales process has driven us to think that Mercedes repair bills are small beer in the equation and that we should just buy our car, which we like and drive it for another 60,000 mile or more (Mercedes says its cars go 200,000 – 300,000 miles if properly maintained.) So maybe all that MB repair money makes the best deal for us a new used car that we have been driving for 38 months. So ends our current carnundrum. Now let’s see if I can get my $500 back from Toyota…