Things have quieted down a lot on the car buying front. Which is weird because I will likely have a new car before the end of April. How is that possible? It’s not as interesting to share what I’m learning when it is all centered on one car rather than a comparison of several. Or at least it seems that way to me.
There was a moment of drama while we were on spring break. I had several price alerts set and got a message that the Volkswagen dealer in Lafayette marked down their 2023 ID.4s over $15,000. One that fit most of what I was looking for was marked down nearly $18,000. Crazy!
I spent a few hours back in the research rabbit hole, reviewing my numbers and lists, but eventually realized that even for that much off MSRP, I would be unhappy leasing a car that was about to be replaced with a version that fixed most of its flaws. Factoring in the Federal tax credit, even with the dealer markdowns the ID.4 was barely cheaper than a Tesla Model Y. Even less so on a lease.
So no ID.4 unless the nicer 2024s show up in April.
Last week I test drove a Model Y for a second time. The first drive in February I was just trying to get a general feel for the car, and comparing it to the Kia EV6 I had driven the previous day. This time, after nearly two months of reading and watching videos about the car, I wanted to pay more attention to the little things. I wouldn’t say I did a highly technical test drive. I just wanted to remind myself how it felt, how easily I could access settings on the screen, etc. I even kicked it into Full Self Driving mode for a moment, although I’m not sure I did it correctly so I wouldn’t say I actually turned the car loose. I wasn’t brave enough to let it change lanes on its own so took over after traveling less than half a mile with it on.
When I was finished, I was confident I had my next car. Now it’s just a matter of deciding what exterior and interior colors I want.
Unless something crazy happens in the market in the next two weeks, of course. There’s still time for one more frenzied period of comparing cars against each other.
It has been fascinating to watch the Tesla market over the past couple of months. The company had been in a cycle of steep price cuts to solidify its market lead. But on both March 1 and April 1, Tesla raised prices by $1000. I figured these were ploys to drive end-of-month and end-of-quarter sales. That proved to be true as the price increases only applied to buyers who were ordering custom builds. Cars that were in transit or on lots still get fat price cuts.
And the crazy thing about Tesla is that the longer a car sits on the dealer lot, the more they get discounted. It seems to be $400–500 per day. But sometimes it’s less, sometimes it doesn’t change at all. There’s a science to letting a car sit on the lot long enough to drop another $1000 or so before someone else snatches it up. In a period when Tesla sales have slowed significantly, I’m not sure there’s been a better time to buy one. I will likely bring home my new car at a sales price close to $30,000 less than what a friend of mine paid for his Model Y just over two years ago.[1]
One thing I’ve tried to keep in mind as I’ve gotten deeper into this process is that, as great a tool as the Internet is for researching any purchase, it also tends to focus on and magnify negatives. In my many hours of research, I’ve often slipped into worrying about which set of flaws I was choosing to take on rather than concentrating on each car’s strong points. That’s always part of the process. You don’t want to buy a car that does ten things great but one thing horribly, and that flaw counter-balances all the good. See why I stopped shopping the Kia/Hyundai EVs because of their electrical issues.
This fear of the bad gets reinforced by how negative message boards and YouTube videos can be.[2] As I get closer to pulling the trigger, I’ve had to remind myself that even with its shortcomings, whatever car I bring home will be an amazing piece of technology that makes what I was driving just a few years ago look woefully primitive in comparison.
He bought, I’m leasing, so you can’t exactly compare our outlays. And he also got his factory wrapped. But, still, I’m getting a much better deal than his. ↩
Or more correctly, YouTube video descriptions. So many will say something like “I Bought A Tesla. Did I Make A Terrible Mistake????” or something like that. Then you watch the video and there’s literally nothing negative in it. The titles are designed to generate outrage/clicks. ↩
As promised, a second Car Buying post for the week. I’ve had to revamp this one several times, because my brain has been overloaded with info the past few days, and I’ve struggled to turn it into a coherent piece. Today’s mostly revolves around Ze Germans.
Why I Am Ditching Audi
I think I addressed this a bit in my first post, more about why I’m stepping down from my Audi in terms of finances. But I know the question is out there that goes along the lines of, “Your Audi was your favorite car ever. Why not just buy it when your lease ends and stick with it for a few more years?”
A very good question. One I considered for a bit.
There are a few answers.
The first regards short term expenses. Beyond just buying the car and paying the associated taxes, the next ownership year would be an expensive one. The Q5 needs new tires. We just spent $300 to put a new tire on S’s Telluride. Multiply times four and I’m dropping $1200-ish on top of the purchase price.
Then the next scheduled maintenance for the Audi is a beast, with a whole swath of “required” tasks hitting at the 40,000 mile mark. I was quoted $1500 by the dealer, and that’s before any unexpected repairs or replacement parts. I would likely take it to an independent shop to reduce the cost a bit, but I don’t think that would knock more than a couple hundred bucks off the price.
Audis, like most German cars, aren’t known for aging affordably, either. Looking at cost of ownership curves online, once you get five years into ownership, you can count on dropping at least a grand each year on service and repairs.
Between tires, maintenance, taxes, and the lease buyout, I was in the ballpark of what it would cost to get into a new, non-electric car. It always seems smarter to start over rather than stick with a car with miles and wear-and-tear on it for the same price.
Then the EV market got flooded with incentives and they became an option, which totally changed my thinking on what my new car would be.
The second reason for not staying with the Audi is the normal annoyances that come with driving something every day for three years.
I’ve had the tailgate fixed three times. Do I trust it to keep working normally after it is out of warranty? Not really. I’m shocked it hasn’t glitched out again since its last repair.
My biggest issue with the car has been the transmission and the Auto Start/Stop function. The transmission is sluggish in low gears. When I’m backing out of the garage and changing directions, for example, it often seems bubbly and hesitant. It reminds me of cruising at idle speed in a boat and that weird, wet, gurgling sound I would hear when I first started our boat and backed it out of the dock. If you ever need to punch it to go from low speeds to high quickly, the car is hesitant as hell. The engine revs, trying to supply the asked for power, but the transmission just can’t move it to the axles fast enough.
The Auto Start/Stop is terrible on Audis. It will get you killed if you’re not careful. There have been so many times in the past three years when I was coasting into a roundabout or yield sign, the car decided to shut off the engine, then I needed power and it refused to reengage immediately. Your heart rate will crank up a few notches when you see a car coming right at you as you mash the gas pedal and nothing happens for a few seconds, then the engine reluctantly kicks in and gives you just enough power to avoid being smashed.
Contrast that with S’s old Jeep Grand Cherokee or current Telluride, where the engine supplies full power quickly.
Or compare to an EV, where the power is never truly cut and the car responds instantly.
Even if you turn Auto Start/Stop off – which must be done each time you re-start the car – the Audi struggles in those quick stop-and-go situations.
I’m all for saving gas and cutting emissions, but not at the expense of safety.
I’ve also found Audi’s drive-assist functions to be annoying. Adaptive Cruise Control is far too conservative. Lane assist is too aggressive. For 2021, Audi had a pretty good package of “self driving” functions. I was never confident enough to use them all at the same time.
Obviously these are super first world problems. I’m lucky to have an Audi in the first place, let alone be in a position to either keep it or replace it with something that might be less expensive but is still very nice. I’m sharing all this more to explain my car shopping than as true complaints.[1]
VW ID.4
I’ve written about the Volkswagen ID.4 a little already.
Kyle Conner, the main guy behind the Out Of Spec videos, is the biggest EV geek I’ve come across in my research. He owns and drives high end EVs on a daily basis. His videos are often about squeezing as much performance out of an EV as possible.
Where other reviewers are lukewarm about the ID.4, he absolutely loves them. He agrees they are quirky, not as exciting or technologically advanced as competitors, and have a few things that will drive you crazy. But, he counters, they perform just fine as a daily driver.
Last week I wondered how important it was to have a car that can leverage the Tesla charging network when I rarely take long trips, and when I do they are almost always to big cities with mature charging networks. And do I need 400 horsepower when that is mostly a party trick to use momentarily? The instant power of any EV will allow me to easily floor it to pass, merge, or momentarily avoid trouble.
Suddenly I was looking at ID.4s again. And there were still some great deals.
So I went and test drove one Monday.
I think Kyle’s assessment was perfect: it is indeed quirky, but it also a completely competent and enjoyable ride. The screen graphics seem 20 years old compared to a Tesla. There are some wild controls scattered through the cabin. The infotainment system is frustrating. The steering wheel buttons are easy to accidentally hit and, for example, turn on the steering wheel heater when you are making a right turn. It lacks some key functions that leverage the promise of electric motors.
It rides nicer than the Tesla Model Y, though. It has Apple CarPlay, supports SiriusXM, and has HomeLink integration. It manages an estimated 275 miles on a full charge, enough to get to Cincinnati and back without charging in ideal conditions. It comes with three years of free charging on the troublesome Electrify America network. For all of EA’s issues, the cities I will visit most often – Cincy and Louisville – feature EA chargers at the same locations as Tesla Superchargers, and these are often the best maintained and functioning EA spots.
For getting around town, which is 80% of my driving, it does the job just fine. With all the current incentives it comes in cheaper than the Tesla Model Y. Plus, VW Finance would waive my Audi turn-in fee since VW owns Audi, saving us another $500.
I got quotes from our insurance agent Tuesday. A Tesla Model Y would increase our premium by $400 a year. An ID.4 would decrease it by the same amount. So the ID.4 saves us almost a grand right there before you even get to sticker price, lease amount, and so on. Throw in the forgiven disposition fee and that’s nearly $1500 in savings.
Would it make more sense to go ahead and get a 2023 ID.4, despite their flaws and the fixes expected on the soon-to-arrive 2024 models, as the dealers try to push them off the lot?
For about 24 hours I thought the answer to that question was yes.
The big catch is I would have to buy one right now. With two payments still owed to Audi. There was only one on the lot that I liked, a gorgeous Silver Mist Pro S rear wheel drive with Cosmic interior, and I can’t imagine it will sit there for six more weeks.
The more I thought about it, though, the more it made sense to sit tight. Tesla prices are fluctuating again. They just went up, but many expect them to take another drop soon. For a couple grand less, the ID.4 makes sense. If they are priced equally, I think you have to go with Tesla. Once the updated 2024 VWs land, the trim level I would want will check in about $4000 higher than the Model Y. The software in current VWs is being eliminated and replaced with a new Android Auto system, likely in the 2025 models. Even on a lease, not sure how comfortable I am buying a car running software that is no longer in development.
VW showed off the 2024 models a couple weeks ago, but there is zero guidance on when those will show up. If you go to VW’s website, it still allows you to spec a 2023 model then points you to existing inventory. There isn’t even a Coming Soon page showing the improvements in the ‘24s. The VW sales guy I met with – who was a very tall, very German guy, which seemed perfect – said they haven’t been told when to expect the new ones or when orders will open up.
I spent pretty much all of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday making lists, watching videos, reading reviews and message boards, and generally making myself crazy trying to figure out what the best path forward was.
Tesla Questions
My re-interest in the ID.4 was prompted not just from reevaluating what my driving needs are, but also because I have one serious concern about Tesla.
As I’ve mentioned before, Tesla has dropped radar/ultrasonic sensors, relying solely on cameras and “neural network” processing to control all the driver assist functions. This can cause phantom braking, when the camera thinks it sees something and slams on the brakes for no reason, among other issues.
That seems like a huge flaw to me. While I won’t be on the highway a ton, if I can’t trust the adaptive cruise control and, thus, can’t use it, the Teslas take a big step back. Tesla is constantly tweaking its software in attempts to make improvements. I’m not sure that a bunch of new code will ever replace sensors shooting energy out and making calculations based on the returns.
Then I read five bad things about the ID.4 and it seems dumb not to go with Tesla, even with their issues.
I’m glad spring break is coming up so I can stop thinking about cars for a few days.
Electrical
We had an electrician out Wednesday to run the line for a garage charger.
I don’t think I shared how crazy the process was to find someone to even give me a quote. I sent messages to seven or eight different services, and only got responses from two. The first company sent a guy out and gave me an estimate on the high end of what I expected based on my research. The second had me send them pictures of our electrical box, basement, and garage plus a video of where the line would run. They quoted me about 30% less. I went with the second folks. They were also on the official Tesla Approved list of businesses, so hopefully that means I can trust them.
The bummer of the project was that our garage wall is on the far north side of our house while our electrical box is in the basement on the far south side. That required running about 75 feet of wire. If our box had been directly below our garage, or even in the garage in an older home, we would have saved another 50%.
There is a car YouTuber I’ve watched over the last month who, multiple times, has said a good problem to have is a “Third World Problem.” I mean, come on… ↩
I said in my last car post that despite deciding to get a Tesla Model Y, I would continue to research EVs until I actually pulled the trigger to make certain of my final decision. It doesn’t take much to send me down research rabbit holes, and I spent a decent chunk of the weekend re-evaluating my choice and diving back into review videos and posts.
It started Friday when my brother-in-law in Boston, Uncle Maaaahk, mentioned that if I had time for more test drives, he has a friend who owns a Volkswagen ID.4 and loves it. The ID.4 had, in fact, been on my initial list of EVs. But I was underwhelmed with its specs and while reviews were generally positive, they also pointed out serious software flaws in the vehicle.
I checked prices Friday and was floored to see the ID.4s at our local dealer were all marked down anywhere from $10–12,000. They support Apple CarPlay, SiriusXM, and have HomeLink modules, all things missing from Tesla. Reviewers and owners raved about how nice they rode. Maybe I owed them another look!
Here’s where things got weird. Last week Volkswagen showed off the updated ID.4s to the public for the first time. These updates make the car more powerful, solve a lot of the software flaws, and smooth out some other issues. If these fixes worked, might the ID.4 be on equal footing with the Model Y? And if VW was cutting prices, maybe I should run over and test drive one on Saturday?
Then I realized the cars on the lot are all 2023s, while the ones that had hit YouTube are all 2024 model years. It looked like VW was marking down the ’23s at dealers to clear them out for the ’24s which should start rolling out of the Chattanooga plant soon. Some of the software updates might hit the existing models, but VW generally gets poor grades on their software strategy and there has been no clear guidance on how much, if any, of the improvements will be available for the pre–24 models.
Still, a seed was planted and I spent several hours Friday night and Saturday morning reading up on the ID.4, making lists, and comparing specs.
In the end it came down to the ’23 ID.4 having too many quirks and software issues to match the Model Y, especially when priced the same. Had VW cut prices further, so they were cheaper than the Model Y, then I would have been more interested.
My Saturday research then pivoted and landed on a car I really like but had also cut from my list because of price and charging network, the Polestar 2.
I think these look incredible. They get positive reviews. Like the VW, they also support Apple CarPlay and SiriusXM. They are more car than SUV but I just love their looks.
The hook for me was that the used Polestar market, as with so many EVs, has crashed over the past year. I found several that were under 20,000 miles and could he had for half their original price. I smelled blood in the water.
Again, I dove into videos and spec comparison lists.
Then S pointed out something very important that I had not thought of: since there is no Polestar dealer in Indy, what would I do if I needed service? I can have the tires rotated anywhere. But if it won’t start one day or I get a display full of warning lights, who would I call?
The nearest Polestar dealer and service center is in Columbus, OH. Polestar will pay to have your vehicle transported up to 150 miles if needed for service. Columbus is 180 miles away.
Plus it uses the wrong charging network (for now).
Fortunately I only spent about an hour diving into Polestar info.
That wasn’t the end of my hemming-and-hawing, though.
Tesla recently refreshed their Model 3s, the sports car sibling of the Model Y. The new ones look incredible! I’m not usually a red car guy, but I love the new red available on the Model 3.
The newest Model 3 also comes with several other interesting upgrades and improvements, ones that the Model Y will likely receive in 2025. Even better, the low-end Model 3 is the cheapest car in the Tesla lineup, checking in below forty-grand.
Alas, there is almost no backseat space in the Model 3, that low-end model is rear wheel drive, and I recalled from when I drove the Audi A5 for a week last year that I did not like being low to the ground, or at least the getting in-and-out of the low car.
So it’s back to the Model Y. Which isn’t a bad place to be. I’m just making sure.
One other thing about non-Teslas I’ve considered. There was a series of videos about the Kia EV6 I watched at the beginning of this process that got me really juiced about that car. The guy who made them just released a podcast discussing his two year experience with the car. He had the dreaded 12 volt battery issue that scared me away, although he said a simple jump start brought his car back to life. He said other EV6 owners he knows have almost all had a separate, major electrical issue right around 30,000 miles, a milestone he is about to hit. He assumes his car will have the same issue. He confirmed what I had read, that Kia corporate doesn’t seem nimble enough to deal with these issues and the dealerships in his area are clueless when it comes to fixing them.
He loves his EV6 and has been mostly happy with it. He and his wife own three cars between then, so one going out of commission is more of a bummer than a life-altering incident. He confirmed most of my fears about Kia, though. I felt validated.
That’s your update for this week. There’s still plenty in my notebook, so look for more posts about 1) why I’m ditching Audi, 2) my on-going sales experience with Kia, 3) how New Car 2024 fits into my long-term plans, and more.
