Goodbye Jeep

When we bought our 2008 Grand Cherokee it was with the idea that we would keep it forever.  Now Les and I have a little reputation for buying and selling cars... an expensive activity.  Remember the 2004 Cadillac CTS?  A beautiful car!  We paid an extra $1000 for a diamond white color... kind of a pearly-sparkly-creamy white.  Beautiful!

As soon as we brought that car home I noticed that every other CTS out there was white.  Boy did that burst my bubble.

So the next year we traded it in on a leased 2005 CTS - silver-green.  That was a beautiful car, too.  And I only saw one other of that color in the entire valley.  Mary's happy.

It was a 3 year lease so in 2008 with the mountain top almost in sight, we did lots and lots of homework to figure out our next car.  We needed a 4x4 or an All Wheel Drive.  We investigated Nissan, Toyota and Subaru.  Nissan and Toyota had nothing we wanted.  We had heard wonderful things about Subaru, but felt we needed something tougher. 

We investigated Chevy, GMC, Chrysler... even Ford.  We looked at cross-overs galore.  It finally came down to one vehicle -- Jeep.  It had a truck chassis, high ground clearance, skid plates all along the underside, enough power to pull a trailer, and it was American.  Yeah!  The advertised gas mileage didn't seem too out of line -- 16 city 18 highway.

We started our quest for a new Jeep.  We found a black 2008 at a Ventura dealer that was absolutely loaded.  The salesman told us that this Jeep was $10,000 off the sticker because it was the last year's model and they were clearing out room for the 2009's.  Not only that, but we got 0% financing and they threw in a life-time bumper-to-bumper warranty.  How could we go wrong? 

Well, first of all, they lied about that gas mileage.  We are conservative drivers and only averaged 11.5 miles per gallon.  We tried everything to get that mileage up... a Predator Tuner, using high grade gas, additives... nothing worked.  11.5 average... that was it.

Also was the fact that it was black.  We knew this going in to this that a black car would be hard to keep clean.  Heck, Les had a detail shop years ago... he knows.  But we also figured that since we'd be out in the country, we'd soon get over our fixation about having a clean car.  NOT!

As much as I didn't want to go out and buy another car, Les convinced me.  We did the math.  Basically, fuel costs for the Jeep would be roughly 2.5 times than for a Subaru Outback.  Insurance is cheaper.  Tags are probably cheaper. 

Long story short... check out our new car.