Some people aren't big fans of SUVs I know, but we're really happy with it.
I don't like SUV's one bit - but I've owned one for about 4 or 5 months now. It will be gone in favor of what I think is a much better car (for us at least) and I can honestly say there were things about it that I liked very much. There were also things about it that I despised.
It was convenient for us because we were basically given the car and only had to assume the payments - and the payments are very reasonable the way it was financed.
As for the reasons to get rid of it... first there's the $36.00 per tank to fill it up - 4x what I used to pay in highschool for a tank of gas...
. The way I see it, Gas prices are only going to keep going up. I honestly wouldn't be suprised to see $3.00 by this time next year, and $4.00 per gallon by 2007. In the meantime, the resell value of SUV's is dropping like a rock - down something like 12% from a year ago. The car we are trading in next week is a 2003, with about 8 years worth of warranty on it, and 35,000 miles. The Mazda dealership wanted to give us $11,000 for it - it was something like $25,000 new.
It's a 2 year old car with reasonably low miles, a lot of warranty, and is in immaculate condition, but we're getting around 40% of what it originally cost. As it ended up, we are getting $12,500 in trade (we owe $14,000 on it), so we're taking a $1,500 hit on it - but I expect that it would be worse the farther down the road we got as the miles pile up and the gas gets more expensive.
I'll happily go from this:
To This:
Even with the higher payment, we are saving money each month when you factor in the better gas milage and lower costs on insurance. Not to mention that it handles about a billion times better, has better pick up, has very decent cargo space, and is a crap of a lot more stylish and fun to drive.
