We got a letter from our VW dealership today, letting us know that if we wanted to, we could bring our TDI Jetta in early, provided we'd gone through the website registration process, and they'd give us the full value of whatever Volkswagen was going to pay us, as credit, weeks or months early, keep our car on their lot, and then deliver it to VW when the time came.
The downside to the proposal was that we had to buy something from the VW dealership, but since we were looking at slightly used non-VW AWD stuff, that wasn't a deal breaker.
The upside: I didn't have to drive the equivalent of forty cars to work every day.
So I drove down to the dealership today, found a low mileage 2013 Rav4 that met our eclectic criteria, and made the trade. The payback from VW was high enough (pre-dieselgate bluebook, plus $5000) we were able to make up the difference ourselves and buy the car outright, as is our preference.
Everything wasn't roses and champagne: the used vehicle has only one key fob, so I'll need get a second fairly quickly, and for some reason they couldn't pull up the VW estimate for what we'd get paid for the car, so they had to go by the manual, using the lowest estimate for our make and model, and then write us a check for the difference once VW finally does the buyback. The troubles caused a few twinges of buyer's remorse, but I'll get over it.
But… that said, we've got an AWD vehicle again (useful for those rare Denver blizzards and not-at-all-rare trips up to Loveland for family skiing), and big enough to carry the whole family (dogs included) without being so big Kate wouldn't be comfortable driving it (she took the kids for a spin this afternoon).
I wrapped up the day by building a second above-garage-door storage platform for our paddleboards, so all in all, a pretty busy day and YES I BELIEVE I'LL HAVE THAT ICE CREAM NOW THANK YOU.
U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer, who has been presiding over the diesel settlement proceedings between VW, several federal agencies and a class of almost 500,000 plaintiffs, indicated that …
Basically, this thing.
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