I once heard somebody say, “You are what you drive.” I thought it was ridiculous when I first heard it and I feel the same way more than twenty years removed. But just because cars don’t tell you everything about their driver, it doesn’t mean they tell you nothing either.
I’ve been thinking about cars lately because after a lousy experience, I’m starting to think differently about what I value most from my motor vehicle.
Here’s the situation. My wife drives an Audi Q7 that came off lease during the peak of the supply chain issues in 2021. We were paying just under $900 for the lease, and because of the car shortage, getting a new one would have been 30% more or some crazy number. So instead we bought it out for whatever the terms were, and my monthly payment went down to $800. Nice!
One thing Robyn and I didn’t consider at the time was the 60 miles a day she puts on the car driving to work. So here we are three years later, and with 80,000 miles on the odometer, its book value is crashing relative to how much we still owe. We’re ~$15,000 underwater. Not nice.
Not only has this been a horrible financial outcome, but to add insult to injury, the car is crapping out. I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but it’s been a constant headache. We had two major repairs, each over $10k, that fortunately were covered by my warranty. Sidebar- my car was in the shop for a week, and they didn’t have any loaners. Ugh.
So we had to lease a car for her to get to work, and when I asked for some financial assistance from the dealership, they told me to call Audi corporate. They apologized for the
