New Car Advice?

YellowSnow said:

1to392831weretaken said:

YellowSnow said:

1to392831weretaken said:

YellowSnow said:

1to392831weretaken said:

I know this thread wasn't made to be taken seriously, but a real take on new Chevrolets is that they're getting fucked by a poorly crafted tax incentive. A long time ago, I saw a meme that gave me media room big belly laughs. Took me a while to find it, but here it is:



That buck in the middle there is GM. They took electrification seriously, devoted billions to R&D, and were first to market with affordable plug-ins. The problem is that they're now fucked. Being first meant they hit their tax credit quota before any other manufacturer but Tesla (totally different customer target) had even really gotten started. Now, they're having to compete with all of the feet-draggers at a $7500 disadvantage.

I'd be pissed if I were them.

This thread can go where ever we want it to go. Initially it was making fun of Caribbean Messicans, but we can do GM hot talk.

I am descended of three generations of Chevy dealers. I wouldn't touch one with a 10 ft pole now.

If I every get a new and larger SUV, I'm rolling Sequoia style like @creepycoug .

Weirdly, I've never owned a Toyota. I've owned five Fords, four Hondas, three VAG (one each of Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche), two GM, one Mazda, one Chrysler, and one BMW. My wife is a descendant of two generations of Chrysler dealers (grandpa passed down to uncle), but I would have swore I'd never own one of those even before I met her. Yet there one is in my driveway right now.

Things change quickly in the automotive world. Whereas for the longest time a Chrysler transmission was a ticking time bomb right off the showroom floor, they now use the exact same German ZF transmission that Honda and Acura uses. I talked my wife (then-girlfriend) into selling her Jetta prior to it eclipsing 100K miles so that she could still get good money for it before every electrical system in the car started going to shit, yet wouldn't hesitate to buy a new one today if they made what I want. Perhaps the biggest automotive crime against a company's customers is Ford's 3-valve modular engine, a crime they never took responsibility for. What vehicles did this affect? Oh, only every single Ford vehicle with a 90 degree engine in it that was sold from 2004 to 2010. So millions. Poor design in the oiling system when upgrading the engine from two valves and fixed timing to three valves and cam phasing leads to premature failure in all of these engines if not babied by the book (if anybody's interested in what it looks like, I could show you pictures of the inside of mine). Yet would I buy a Ford truck today? Fuck yeah I would; the new ones are great.

The two biggest myths in the automotive world that I've personally encountered are that BMWs are unreliable and expensive to maintain and Hondas are super reliable and high quality. To the former, I have never encountered a four-wheeled vehicle that's more logically assembled and easy to work on than my E46 BMW was. If you're dumb enough to take it to the dealer, you will indeed get bent over for maintenance. Independent shops cut that cost in less than half and do at least as good of a job, and doing things yourself is even better still. And the car was so easy to work on that I didn't mind doing things myself.

To the latter myth, there is only one car company who I absolutely won't do business with again, and that's Honda. They're the only ones who have fucked me and then rubbed it in and asked, "How you like them apples?" Once again, it was a case of a manufacturer upgrading their engines and fucking it up, the engines failing prematurely at a high rate as a result, and then the company not taking responsibility because the price tag was too high. In this case, they were sued and lost, forcing them to own up, but only if the customer was savvy enough to look up the problem and hold them to it. (In other words, I pity the fool whose Honda V6 with VCM, which they sold hundreds of thousands of during the affected years, shit the bed a year out of warranty and they don't own a code reader and suck at Google.) By 2012, "reliability" just stopped being that big of a concern with new cars. Everything is built so well and precise that it just comes down to design failures or not, and every company is susceptible. Yet here's our 2012 Honda needing new axles (shitty CVs) at 30K, an engine rebuild at 60K, and another engine rebuild at 70K. When I asked American Honda to buy it back from us at fair market value so that I could upgrade to a newer one without the problems (a win-win for everyone, I thought), they told me to fuck off. When I asked them why they would pass up a deal that would cost them peanuts and release a pissed off former customer out in the wild to talk shit at every chance, the response was (and I quote): "Oh, I think Honda's reputation will be juuuuuuuust fine."

Fuck those guys. The Chrysler (manufacturer I swore I would never buy from) that replaced it is better in every way. Circle of life.

Long story short, the most unreliable piece of shit I've ever encountered was my dads' Chevy Caprice Classic wagon that they bought when I was bout two years old. This was before lemon laws, and that thing was a legit lemon. They paid many multiples the purchase price of the car on repairs over the decade or so they owned it, starting nearly right after they drove it new off the lot. I didn't give that two thoughts when I bought a new Chevy three or four years ago. Things change, and it's been a great car, minor niggles aside.

Wife drives a 2016 Acura MDX that only has 27K on it. No issues whatsoever to date. But I'm a bit worried that Honda's declining quality will rear its ugly head down the road. Plus the car was made by cousin fuckers like @SECDAWG down in Alabama.

I've had my 2006 4 Runner since 2009 and have had ZERO issues with it. It's remarkable how many 2nd, 3rd and 4th gen 4 runners you still see on the roads. You hardly every see 20 year old Fords and Chevy's still going strong.

2016 is after Honda fixed the VCM issues, so you shouldn't worry about that. I don't mind a company fucking up; it happens. I mind the way they do or don't take care of the customer after that point. I'm a reasonable customer, and I expect the same treatment from the manufacturer.

As for Toyota, I always wanted an old 22R-E based pickup. Was my dream truck in college. My girlfriend at the time had one, so I drove it all the time and was envious of it relative to my shitty work truck ('78 Ford Courier). That motor was pretty much bombproof, and Toyota stuffed it in a lot of things.

More recently, I was bragging at work at how reliable my BMW had been. At that point, I had put about 250K miles on it (traded it in with over 270K). I had replaced the VANOS seals (cost of seals and an afternoon), replaced the accessory belts and tensioners once (cheap and an afternoon). Replaced the water pump while I was in there (an extra four bolts and a cheap water pump), replaced the fuel pump ($130 and 10 minutes), and replaced the CCV (biggest PITA job I did, but still less than a day). All told, I had about $1K in repairs and five or six afternoons of work in to get a quarter of a million miles out of my car. One of my coworkers says, "Oh yeah?"

He bought a new Corolla about the same time I bought my BMW. He lives a bit further away from work than I do, so he says, "I've got 350,000 miles on mine, and I've changed the oil."

Another friend of mine recently traded in his Tundra. He bought it used with low miles and traded it in with nearly 400K on the ticker. Amazing.

Axe @dflea about ISIS Toyota truck mileage