fluffy rambles: Car updates

Car updates

January 26, 2024 3:58 PM (3 months ago)

Today I had an appointment at the Nissan dealership for them to appraise my car as part of a potential used-sale deal. They offered me $5500, or $6000 if I was willing to part with it same-day, and were giving me some pretty hard-sale tactics for an immediate agreement, but I told them that my replacement car hasn’t arrived yet and I couldn’t guarantee that I’d be actually buying the replacement.

They made me an offer of the full $6000 if I sold it to them now and just continued to borrow the car for the next week, but I again said no, as I’m not positive I’ll be buying the Niro.

This was also after they tried to FUD at me about the Niro, like they said that the Niro is “uninsurable” because of the break-in problems (which don’t affect the Niro, and the models which do have the problem haven’t had significant insurance difficulties either), and tried to bargain me into upgrading to a Leaf SV Plus, which is both outside of my budget and also doesn’t actually address the two critical issues I have with the Leaf (namely, CHAdeMO charging and a lack of thermal management on the battery).

I don’t know why they were trying to buy it from me so quickly. One of the sales tactics was to tell me that the price would probably go down after next week, and I’m like, wouldn’t it be in your best interest to wait, then? But whatever. I can’t imagine that it benefits them to immediately buy my particular car; it’s an unphenomenal 2018 Leaf SL with a standard-range battery and a not-insignificant amount of wear and tear (as it had when I bought it). The hard pressure made it feel like they’re expecting the price to go up or something? Or maybe they just really want it to sell now because they’d expect their profit margin to drop faster than their appraisal price.

Anyway the $5500 offer gives me a negotiation point with Carmax assuming I do buy the Niro from them. Given the rest of the experience I’m not terribly interested in using the Nissan dealership offer as anything other than leverage (and anyway Carmax’s offer estimate was already higher by a little bit).

Regarding the Niro, it’s now arrived in Renton and is undergoing a “final quality check,” so hopefully I’ll be able to test drive it soon (maybe this weekend, but probably early next week).

Funnily enough, I know several people with Niros now (both EV and Hybrid), and also one of my friends just bought an EV6. It feels like Kia is really winning at EVs right now, and for good reason — even without the tax credit they (and Hyundai) are still by far the best value in electric vehicles today.

It’s kind of funny how many people are like “I’d buy a Kia or a Hyundai if they had the tax credit” but don’t look at how all of the credit-eligible competitors' vehicles still cost more than $7500 more for similar specs.

Also, a used EV gets a partial credit now, with certain limitations, which the Niro I’m (probably) buying happens to meet, making this upgrade an even better deal. Also the Niro is going to cost about half as much to insure as the Leaf, for some reason.

My main worry with the Niro is that someone’s going to see the old-style Kia badge and assume they can pull a #KiaBoyz on it and try to break in, so I plan on designing a replacement badge to go over the Kia logo. Ideas welcome. Although it looks like you can also buy a modern-day version of the original Korean logo which might be enough to throw would-be thieves off anyway? Who knows.

Maybe I’ll ask opinions on Reddit.