That’s certainly a way to think of it but this same person on a limited income will be making payments for 4 years (typically) past the warranty period, when that income will be paying for repairs too. Their ability to move to another car with a warranty will be severely hampered by the low amount equity they’ve…

This must have been set up with thought that of free publicity, even negative, is still free publicity. No-one could be so dumb that they didn’t expect every problem that occurred.  Could they?

I’m not a fan of being on the payments-forever-treadmill but that kind of transaction makes sense.

I’m with you. In Before Times (Sept ‘19, 300 years ago), I got my Golf Sportwagen out the door for $5k under MSRP after a handful of emails and a phone call. I feel for people who find they need a car for whatever reason but I’m happy to wait for sanity to return.

Excellent choice (even if I bristle at limiting my options base on what OTHER think).  One of my neighbors, a life-long Corolla guy, has an LC stashed in the garage for sunny days.  It’s a beauty.

Man, I’m so glad that it never occurred to me to worry about whether random strangers think my car makes me look like a douche or not. Two of them probably do. This is a terrible realization. Not.

My family had great luck with a Celebrity. It was handed to me upon graduation with 130k on it. 2 years and 50k miles later (many 1k mile round trips to visit a girlfriend, towing my GSXR750 to the track, etc), it became my roommate’s 2nd car when he bought a nice C4 Corvette and I bought my first new car (‘94 Ford…

My friend’s family had an ‘86 Accord and it was - to 17yo me - just remarkably good. It was rumored it would go 115 with 4 sets of skis on the roof. It was eventually handed down to him and he kept it into the early 2000s.

6 months ago, the Carvana offer on my ‘19 VW Sportwagen 6MT was just over my out the door price when it was brand new.

COTD

Holy crap!  Did you get ANY compensation for all that misery?

I think the other poster jumped into the weeds a little quickly.

You’re better off IMHO. You didn’t even get to the worst part of buying a motorcycle. Shopping first a Ducati, then a Husqvarna in the past 6 months was all the education I needed about lying salespeople and ridiculous fees. $7800 OTD on a $5400 MSRP? Yeah, no. Ended up with two used bikes. 848 Evo and a 701 Vitpilen.

I think this kind of problem is, if not common, not totally unheard of. My Volvo V70R had a module that controls the rear differential fail. It took out most of the gauge cluster. IIRC, only the fuel level indicator worked.

TWO YEARS? It took two years before trying to get media attention? There has to be more to this story.

I mean if it’s NOT generally true about a population, how should we react?

Central NJ here. I leased a Volt in 2011. It was 6 months before I saw another Volt or a Leaf in the wild.

Plenty of them do these days. :)

Yes to all of the above. And how many times are we going to use the thing? Name the last weekend where we sat around wondering what to do...

I’m surprised. The bicycle market, another industry that exploded in ‘20/’21, has notably cooled according to the shops who post on my local forum. It can be a long wait for some models but the days are gone when it was hard to find anything. The last shop I visited had so many bikes that it was hard to walk around…