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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 31st, 2023

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  • I agree with that. My buddy is a BMW mechanic at the largest BMW dealer in the United States and he is the only mechanic at the dealership who is officially trained on how to work on a EV high voltage battery. This applies to opening it up and fixing coolant lines etc. He said half the techs there can’t even do half the maintenance and trouble shooting for ordinary repairs because they frequently hire techs that haven’t even been to any BMW training classes. Car repairs get backed up at the dealer because of this. He said Penske is bunch of cheapskates that continually cut back on flag hours on a repair. So, he makes 35% less than he did 10 years ago. Pretty sad. Mercedes is in the same boat with their techs.








  • It’s not Toyota, it’s the dealerships. Running a dealership is like running a circus. They are always trying to maximize profit without pissing off existing customers. They tend not to bend over backwards for new customers unless you are a willing to overpay for a new or used car. Covid hurt a lot of dealers and they are still reeling from that period. They only add markup if people will pay it. So, hopefully the market full of suckers will lean out after they overpay for existing vehicles on sale. Then we can go back to paying fair prices.


  • My Acura RDX is 10 years old, only gets 19 mpg the way I drive it, and has 90K miles. It’s still worth $9K from Car Max. I would turn it in for a $12K credit. The OP might fail to realize that most people who are considering electric probably have decent cars already. So, they probably wouldn’t qualify for a paid turn in offer. The people that qualify for a turn in offer probably couldn’t afford most of the electric cars currently on the market. The most critical piece of speeding up the move to electric is the charging infrastructure. I was test driving an ID.4 off of Turo and had to wait in line at an Electrify America station to charge. There were 10 working chargers there as well. Then I had to wait another 20 minute to get the battery from 50% to 80%. That was a big turn off for me even though I would mostly be charging at home. Near me, there are only 4 individual chargers within a 15 square mile radius. There are 30k people in that same area. That isn’t going to give people much comfort. In fact, my buddy who has had a Tesla for 5 years decided to go back to a plug in Electric Volvo because they don’t like the available infrastructure either even though they mostly charge at home. So, whether or not charging infrastructure is a legitimate issue doesn’t matter if the public perceives it as an issue. I had an VW ID.4 deal setup and was going to pick it up this weekend but my wife said no because even though she wouldn’t drive it that much, she doesn’t want to deal with any charging planning if we take the car on trip. So, due to the fact that I prefer to stay married, I am going with a Lexus NX350 Hybrid. It has a 35 mile electric range and you never have to worry about charging. It has also a total range of about 500 miles. It’s tough to beat that.