A year ago I bought my wife a Mazda CX-5 diesel and paid 10K for it. Now I found out that it has an engine defect that will be extremely expensive to repair, so the car is a write-off, at best I can get 2K back.
If it’s a 5k euro fix on a 10k car, please consider it. Especially if you can get warranty from the repair shop for a few years, it’s still likely cheaper than vehicle payments on a 3-5 year old used vehicle that may have issues still. I’m not saying fix it, or not to, but look at it as costs of transportation and having to buy a new vehicle still.
Well, my wife still needs to get to work whilst it is getting fixed and the repairs are going to take months. If we choose to repair the car we will not be able to buy a new one so it’s a bit of a Catch-22.
Even if the car was fine, we would be still selling it. She had trouble with parking a car as big as a CX-5, and that car burns a bit too much diesel for her 70 km a day commute.
We are most likely to buy a car that’s at least 10 years old, we can’t afford any better. Probably we will be buying Toyota Auris for about 6K.
That sucks. I had something similar happen when I bought a car with a “new” engine that blew up on me after just 5000 kms. Out of curiousity, what’s the defect?
Yes, but it would be as expensive as the car. It is also technically possible to replace a bunch of parts in order to fix it, but they are hard to get and expensive to get from the manufacturer.
That might be the “extremely expensive” repair. On a 10k car it’s possible, though it might well be worth doing. Especially if owner or shop can source a good engine cheaply. But it’s not going to be a small amount of work.
Selling the rest somewhere for repair or parts and cutting your losses is a good looking option, though that’s not cheap either.
The engine repair guy said the repair would cost at least 3000, but the parts are hard to come by and it might take months just to get them. Getting them from the manufacturer would quickly inflate the price. And even if we replace all those parts, it would still prolong car’s life for 3-5 years.
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