Our “newest” car is 8 years old. Because I’m a cheapskate.
Our second newest was a 2014 VW Passat with nearly 110K miles.
For the past year or so, it’s been chugging oil like it was doing Valvoline keg stands at an Indy 500 frat party. Both the dealer and another VW repair shop told us we had two paths forward:
a. get a new engine (~$10K)
b. keep pouring oil down it’s gullet until we were doing it every week.
(So much for that vaunted German engineering… it’s pretty sad when repair shops say “yeah, that’s what happens with this model Passat at about 90,000 miles.”)
We chose Option B. But recently, it needed about $700 worth of repairs. I’ve been known to throw good money after bad before (never should’ve gotten swept up in that Beanie Baby mania…), but I do have my limits. This was the last straw. Time to dump the chump. But where? The thought of listing it on Facebook Marketplace made me break out in hives – I’m rarely on the Zuckerbook, I barely know how to use FB Messenger, and I didn’t want to spend every waking hour responding to queries. And I hate haggling.
I got on one of those “find out your car’s value” sites (Kelley Blue Book or Edmunds or ???) and plugged in the particulars. Given the car’s present state, it was probably worth about a grand. But the website also offered the opportunity to click a button and set up an instant appraisal with CarMax. I figured I had very little to lose, so I signed up.
Two days later, I was in their Cincinnati location. I sat down with a rep, answered a few questions, their tech took it for a test drive, and 20 minutes later I had an offer: $2,500. American!
I felt like this was the real-life version of Monopoly:
They did the paperwork, I signed over the title, and 10 minutes later I had a check in hand… and even though it was 17 degrees outside, I walked down the block to wait for my son to pick me up, as I was afraid they’d realize I’d sold them a lemon and want their money back. For once, I felt like the used car salesman, pulling one over on an unsuspecting customer.
I know CarMax isn’t in the charity business. I’m sure they’ve got some sort of algorithm that tells them they could sell our old hooptie (or, more likely, individual parts of it) for more than $2.5K. But when you go in hoping to squeeze a grand out of a beater, and wind up with 2.5 times that amount, it feels like winning the lottery. Especially when there was zero hassle, and it took less time than the last oil change.
Oh, and when I got home and was sifting through the detritus that I’d cleaned out of the car before I took it to CarMax, I realized I’d forgotten to remove my Band of Horses CD from the CD player. I called CarMax, they tracked the CD down, and my son picked it up on his way home from work later that week. Rock on!
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