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Let me tell you about my crazy day... (cool story bro of the day)

Bronn

By Bronn,
in Huddle Lounge

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Bronn

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This morning, my 18 month old had tubes put in his ears because both of them have been infected since January. Antibiotics never helped. We had to be at the hospital at 6:30 AM, but at least everything went well and we were on the way home by 8:50 AM...

My mom came over to the house to see him when we got home, and offered to stay with him for a while if we had any errands or anything to do, since we had already taken the day off work. We took her up on the offer because my wife wanted to go look at some vehicles, since she's been considering getting rid of her 14 MPG Tahoe.

We head to a dealership and spend about an hour doing the whole dealer thing. They make a lowball trade-in offer for her Tahoe (which we expected) but had us an offer for a 2012 32 MPG Equinox for the trade-in and around $4,800 cash. We told them we still had to visit a couple other places and would decide and maybe come back.

Personally, I'd been wanting to try and sell her Tahoe via private-party, but hadn't really put much thought into it. After we left the dealership and before heading to another, I told her to head over to CarMax first, since we'd had good experience selling them cars in the past.

The weather in Raleigh wasn't that great today... It was misty/rainy all day...

We get to CarMax, and they take our info and keys and tell us it'll be about a 30 minute wait. We head to the lobby and chill for a bit, keeping an eye on her Tahoe to see when they take it for a spin. After it is gone for a bit, we see it about to pull back into the lot.

Then we notice it stops at the entrance. The person driving it gets out, walks around the front and driver's side. Another person goes up to it. We're thinking "maybe they're just checking out a few last details before they pull back in and into a spot."

The people that were looking at it start walking back towards the building, leaving it at the lot entrance. I jokingly say something to my wife about "haha what if they were driving and had an accident."

We get up and see the guy that took our info coming by, and he tells us it should be 5 more minutes or so, and we inform him that we just saw it come back, but they had parked it way up near the road. He goes to check what was going on. He comes back through and gets us with a manager, and takes us into one of the offices.

The woman taking it for the test drive was waiting behind a car carrier truck to pull back in. The car carrier was backing in and didn't see her behind him, and backed into the front driver's side of my wife's Tahoe. So we were informed that our vehicle that we had there to get it appraised was now damaged. However, they told us that they would proceed with their estimate based on pre-damage information.

We had to wait for the cops to show up (about 30 mins) to do the accident report. My wife had to cancel a doctor's appointment she had this afternoon because we wouldn't have made it. They were talking alternatives to getting us either home or to the appointment if the Tahoe wasn't drivable, but it was too late at that point. At this point wifey and I were having swimming thoughts of what a nightmare situation it was going to be for repair, depreciation because of an accident on the vehicle's record, etc. etc. etc. We were even wondering if we were going to have to hire a lawyer because it was such a strange situation.

The manager came back, and told us that with all that had happened, that they felt they needed to give us an exceptionally good offer for the vehicle, and that once we had that offer we would have to decide what we wanted to do about the whole situation.

If we would have listed it somewhere for private party sale, we'd have probably asked around $36,000 starting based on KBB and NADA... It has been in 2 accidents prior (only one of them being when we were owners), but never had any major damage. It is basically the best model you can get, and is a 2008 with 51K miles. I was figuring that CarMax would offer us about $29,000 for it, considering the first dealer offered us $25,000 trade-in value.

The offer they gave us was $33,000. Needless to say, with the pending hassles we faced otherwise, we accepted pretty fast. Now they have to worry about fixing it and then selling it again, and retail is basically about $900 more than what they gave us. Not a bad deal at all for us. Also, we now can buy a comparable, more fuel efficient, vehicle to what we looked at before (the Equinox) and still have money in our pocket. Not bad at all for such a bad situation.

We had to drive the Tahoe back home to clean it out and get the title, and then go back to Raleigh (about 35 mins from my house) on it, but we got our check. Now we have to go get her something else to drive in the coming days, but we just saved a lot on monthly gas and insurance!

Moral of the story is that even the seemingly worst situations can have a good outcome. Props to the folks at CarMax for doing the right thing by us, and for making sure we walked away happy from a bad situation. I've always suggested them for folks looking to sell their vehicle without the hassle of listing it themselves or trading-in, and I will continue to do so.

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tarheelblue89 Newbie

tarheelblue89

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i read an article somewhere where dealers are like super desperate for used cars. i didn't realize this desperate. lol

glad it worked out.

My mom got a letter from the Dodge dealership we bought her '08 Avenger at saying they wanted her car. She wasn't interested in that but they offered her a free oil change. So she took them up on that.

When she went in, they again tried like crazy to get her to agree to sell the car. So she said, fine, give me a brand new 2012 Avenger for the price I'm paying this one for and you got a deal.

Brand new 2012 Avenger is sitting in our driveway.

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