Yes, simply because they get to drive around in a shiny, showy car for a few years without having to worry about the big bills that would take place… down the road… if they kept it beyond the lease term.
Good to know. We discussed it. She liked the car. Most of the money for the purchase of the car came from trading in my new truck.
Is that ok? Or have I done something wrong?
Geez.
I think that the operative word is “had”.
The Lincoln Blackwood–which was essentially a pimped-up Ford pickup–was sold for only one model year–2002.
Actually, recent Consumer Reports show they have above average reliability. They are more expensive to fix than many other brands when things go wrong. Don’t confuse cost to repair with reliability.
Reliability is so good these days that the cost to repair is quite low. I was just looking at the cost to repair new minivans since Mrs JT wants one. Toyota is $797, Honda is $855, Dodge and Chrysler are both $994. Less reliable to be sure, but the cost is still low. The source is Edmunds, and you may not like manipulating extended warranty cost to back out repair costs, but the warranty companies make money doing it. Don’t focus on the exact cost, but instead on how close they are.
The real cost is in maintenance, and it is much more predictable. Odyssey 5 year maintnenance is estimated at $4058, Sienna at $5109, Dodge at $3528, and Pacifica at $3764. That’s a whole lot more than repair cost estimates. Many people here may do their own work, but most people do not and this is useful information.
When I look at cars to buy, I don’t just stick to labels like reliable. I want to have some idea what that means. I’m comfortable playing with risk since I do it all the time at work.
We’ve had a few problems with the four GM cars we owned since 1998, but the cost of repairs were nothing compared to the money we saved on the initial purchase. It’s OK if you use different metrics to buy a vehicle. You should be comfortable in the process. I’m comfortable with mine.
Recall the premise they gave for abandoning sedans. They have decided to retreat from that market to put all of their R&D investment into electrics. In the meantime, to keep the operation afloat, they continue their most profitable lines. Businesses aren’t much different than living organisms. They must continue to change and grow or they die. Like the bushes in front of my house that are 15 years old and poorly maintained before me, they cannot be effectively trimmed anymore. I had to cut most of them off near the ground to start over. I left a few branches to sustain them while they recover. I won’t have any foliage or flowers for a couple years but with care, they will come back stronger than before. Sometimes that is necessary to survive. This is what they are attempting to do. I hope they are successful and don’t repeat past sins. Time will tell…
And that’s why GM is discontinuing the Volt???
Eh. The Volt was cool, but it also wasn’t a real electric car. It had something like a 30 mile range on battery, and then the engine kicked in to keep the battery charged. It was more akin to a diesel locomotive than an electric car, where the engine provides power for electric motors rather than directly driving the wheels through a transmission.
Most vehicles are fine during the warranty period. It’s AFTER the warranty and beyond is the problem. So leasing an unreliable vehicle won’t yield much more problems then an unreliable vehicle because of the interval. After the first couple years (when leas runs out) do you really start to have problems.
That’s basically what GM said when they discontinued it. Their strategic goal is to move car production to electric. The Volt was a bridge to an all-electric fleet. They never did like hybrids. Recall that their initial models (after the EV-1) were all mild hybrids. They didn’t want to pay the small company that owned the high voltage hybrid patents royalties. They also didn’t want to ignore the patents as Toyota did.
There was also the Lincoln Mark LT, based on the following generation F-150 from 2005 to 2008, and also Cadillac had a luxury version of the Avalanche until 2013. At this point, the higher trims of the mainstream pickups (F-150 Platinum, Sierra Denali, etc.) have de facto replaced the luxury badged ones.
There is a line in the theme song for “All In The Family” where, lamenting the old days Archie Bunker sings “Girls were girls and men were men”. Well, I think of the old days when “Cars were cars and trucks were trucks”. Cars used to built to transport people. The cars had bench seats and could seat 6 people. Today’s cars can only seat four passengers. Most pickup trucks in the old days had 8 foot beds and could handle a 4 X 8 sheet of building material. The beds on the new four door pickups have a hauling capacity of one cubic centimeter, but have cabs to transport five or six passengers.
Archie Bunker complained that the roles between girls and men had become blurred. I have no problem with women taking on what had traditionally been men’s jobs, or men becoming nurses. My problem is seeing trucks becoming people transporters and cars dropping out of existence.
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The days of front bench seats in family cars is gone and for a good reason . That center person in an accident will have a very low chance of survival . As for the trucks having more passenger capacity for a family that needs a truck with hauling and towing ability that can be a decent solution .
Heh heh. Thing is after a couple generations, no one realizes how far things have gone. Ya gotta remember with a bench seat on a date, the girl sat in the middle. Can’t do that with bucket seats. As kids we used to yell at the teens driving by with their dates asking if they had a hard steering car. Well we thought it was funny at the time.
A few blocks down they were finally finishing the rebuilding of the road that was started last year. They had a couple folks with the flags directing traffic when I came down the hill. They both were girls and they didn’t look too happy. It normally was a cushy job on a construction site. At any rate when I drove past the sign in the road said “flagmen ahead”. I thought maybe that’s what they were upset about and tried to think of a better sign, but had trouble with it. I didn’t know you could still buy those signs anymore. Maybe that’s why they’ve gone to just symbols now on everything.
Speaking of that, I got my copy of Motor Trend yesterday and Automobile too on the same day. I thought I had canceled but 30 minutes going through them they ended up in the recycle bin. At any rate one of the sections was MT Speaks or something. I thought MT is what we used to put on all the empty gas cylinders for people that might not be able to read “empty”. I thought it kinda fits the mag now. Soon they’ll be talking about how much fun the train is and will forget all about cars.
That would be a first. GM has a very long history of ignoring patents. Pretty much the auto industry as a whole does.
By the time GM got around to hybrids, Toyota already lost the suit and was paying a royalty on every hybrid they built. It seems GM figured if Toyota couldn’t get away with it, there was no sense in throwing money away.
Nope. 20 y.o. Ford F350’s cost around $40K deluxed out… still sell for $16K if in good shape (100K miles).
I find it amusing that I have almost as much bed capacity in my ancient Mitsubishi minitruck as some of the guys in the F150 quad-cabs have. And I actually put stuff in the bed. They don’t, 'cause they don’t wanna scratch the paint.
Gee our old LaSalle ran great. 
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I think big 3 focus on what consumers want which are profitable pickups and CUVs is the right way to go. If fuel prices rise CUVs are decent on fuel.
What motivation is out there even for Honda who lost down 80k in 2018 sales for Accord and Civic. CUVs were up…
lol Yep, that’s what Dodge thought when they dropped the Neon and replaced it with a car that was 10MPG worse (and uglied up to look like their trucks). That was the year gas prices spiked. By the time they came out w/ the upgraded Neon (now called a Dart) prices had leveled off and SUVs were taking off again.
If I recall correctly, Ford has plans on 2 cars, the Mustang and was it the Fiesta? I understand the latter was supposed to be made in China for 2019, but plans may have changed with the US tariffs and China’s retaliatory fine on US auto makers. The auto industry changes so quickly, it’s hard to keep track.
I wouldn’t try the same load capacity in that Mitsubishi. Volume - yes. Weight - no way.
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