Tag Archives: trade in

New whip…

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After a great deal of consideration and a lot of shopping, I traded off both the Tundra and the Wrangler in favor of bringing home a shiny new Land Rover Defender. 

As a young man, it’s a one of those vehicles I saw in magazines and occasionally on television or movies and thought, if I ever make it, that’s the kind of car I want to drive. As the years passed, I made the rounds – sedans, coupes, sports cars with great growling V8s, pickup trucks, and 4×4’s. I’ve never been particularly brand loyal. At various times, I’ve owned Fords, Chevys, Pontiacs, Toyotas, and Jeeps depending on what caught my fancy at the time. But putting one of the great British overlanders in the garage was always a dream, even if it was one that felt unlikely.

Given the state of the automotive industry, with its ongoing emphasis on transitioning to hybrids or all electrics, it finally felt like the time was right. If I didn’t do it now, I might never have the chance to own a proper petrol-powered Land Rover. It was a now or never moment before the motor car transforms forever from internal combustion to whatever comes next.

So here I am, with what’s sure to be a quirky, expensive to maintain, premium fuel guzzling, British (by way of Slovakia) import.

All the forums question the reliability of these new model Defenders. I got the same warnings every time I bought another Jeep and had two remarkably reliable vehicles. Ask me in four or five years how I feel about it, but for now I absolutely adore my Pangea green, white roofed, old fashioned steel wheeled throwback.

Whatever else it is, it’s a very pretty thing that I’m dearly glad to have.

Fleet management…

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I’m trying to mentally nudge myself in the direction of accepting that I’m going to need to buy a new vehicle in the not terribly distant future. With both the Tundra and the Wrangler approaching a point where they should be let go, I’m starting to poke around the margins at what might replace them. 

And that, of course, is where it gets complicated. 

Is the right answer a 1:1 trade of old Tundra for new Tundra? The price point of doing a straight up replacement of my current truck runs me somewhere north of $65,000… and that feels like an absurd price to pay for a pickup truck. 

Maybe I should be looking to bundle my trade and let both the Jeep and the Tundra go to bring home… something. The math gets more involved when I remember that the Jeep is where all my trade in value is. A 12-year-old tundra, wrecked once, with 145,000 miles on the clock it is always going to have a limited audience even when it looks remarkably clean and has otherwise been well maintained. 

There’s the question of whether I need another truck at all. I’ve had a truck in the fleet for 15 years, but the bed stays empty aside from running the trash to the dump once a month, bringing in canned gas for the lawnmower once or twice a summer, and periodically hauling flat packed bookcases home from IKEA. It would certainly be less convenient, but is it more cost effective just to rent a truck when I really need one or plus up my budget for big item delivery?

If the right answer for the next vehicle isn’t a truck, what is right? A SUV? Something low slung? Certainly not a sedan. 

I haven’t quite convinced myself that I wouldn’t terribly miss having a truck, even if I don’t strictly need one. That said, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little attracted to having a fully enclosed vehicle… and perhaps on that had a less temperamental top… and windows that didn’t scratch if you brush against them… and maybe something that behaved with just a bit more polish on the highway.

Cutting the fleet by 50% would create obvious operations and maintenance savings – costs that are bound to increase the longer I hang on to a 12-year-old pickup and a 6-year-old Jeep. Is that cost savings enough to convince me any reasonable person can get by with just one vehicle? Hard to say.

As it is, interest rates are probably too high to consider anything seriously… but the ideas are definitely percolating. I’ll either get a wild hare and pull the trigger on something or I won’t. I honestly have no idea which way I’ll break or when it might happen.

Let’s make a deal…

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I use to have a blog over at Blogger that went by the working title “Falling into it.” That’s mostly because at odd moments, I seem to trip over good situations. This weekend is a case in point. To say the least, I wasn’t planning on getting a new truck. In fact, I was extremely happy with the one I had. Usually getting a call from a car salesman on a Saturday isn’t something I’d look forward to. The only reason I picked up at all was that I was driving and had the bluetooth in my ear and didn’t feel like fishing for my phone to screen the call. I’m sure it’s an old line in the car business, but he was adamant that they had someone looking for my “exact model truck”and would cut me a good deal on anything they had on the lot if I was interested in trading.

I wasn’t interested in trading, of course, but since I was driving past the dealership anyway, I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to slip in and let them buy me a cup of coffee. My “old” truck was a 2008 and was getting along towards 50,000 miles (a couple of trips to Maryland every year will rack ’em up fast). No way were they going to be interested when they saw the mileage, so I should be on my way in a couple of minutes. I handed off my keys to the appraiser and hopped on the golf cart for a window tour of the lot, commenting on other trucks here and their and throwing out a laundry list of things I wanted: full sized crew cab, power everything, sunroof, 4×4, towing package, cloth seats, and nothing in white, tan, or silver. Pulling through the lot he passed truck after truck that got disqualified for one or more reasons (4×4’s in the south are surprisingly hard to come by). As we pulled back to the front, I was sure that we were all but through. Until, he mentioned that there was one more Tundra in the showroom that he thought I would like… The infamous one more thing. Sure, I though, he wants to get me inside to make it psychologically harder to leave. OK, I’m game. Let’s go have a look.

So there it was sitting in the middle of the showroom floor, with the exact specs that I had told him it would take for me to even start talking about a deal. I still had my safety net, though, as I knew the appraiser was never going to come back with an offer high enough to pay off my loan on the old truck. Well, the short version is that he came back with an appraisal that was well in excess of what I had been expecting and more than enough to pay off Bank of America. Still, I knew there wasn’t a chance of the finance people coming up with a number that I was going to be willing to work with, so it wasn’t even close to a done deal. In my own mind, I was no closer to buying a new truck than I was when I walked in the door.

Their first deal wasn’t bad enough to be insulting, but was way off in terms of where the numbers needed to be to convince me it was worth while. It’s a car dealership, there’s always haggling and that’s half the fun. Back he scurried to the sales manager’s desk, coming back 10 minutes later with an offer that was a little better, but still not sweet. One more time, I say, tell your guy that this one needs to be his best and final offer since we’re not going to do this all afternoon. Back to the sales desk, about 20 minutes this time, and he comes back and hands me a sheet of paper. And that was the offer I couldn’t refuse – 0% financing, and a monthly note that was about $2 more than I was paying already.

So to get this straight, I’ll give you my two year old truck, with 50,000 miles on it and in exchange you’re going to give me a brand new truck, 2 years of free scheduled maintenance, not increase my payment, decrease the length of my loan amortization, and let me use Toyota’s money at 0% to make it happen? Yeah?

Sold.

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Gone…

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Surprisingly, it wasn’t seeing the Mustang sitting on the dealer’s lot that bothered me. True enough, it was a great car, but we never bonded the way the Jeep and I did. It sounds totally asinine, but I would actually drive out of my way in the mornings just to avoid seeing the Jeep on my way to work. I guess it’s sort of the same feeling as seeing the ex out with someone new. Theoretically, you know it’s going to happen, but that doesn’t mean you want to see it. It’s funny the attachment you form with your vehicle, especially one that’s been around for a while. It must be a little bit like what the cavalry felt like when they handed over the reins to their horses in exchange for the levers of the early tanks. You know it’s a far superior bit of equipment in every way, but you can’t quite shake the nostalgia.