Greetings, everybody.
Long story, but it goes somewhere. Important bit of context is that I'm one of those people who has to optimize everything.
I had always wanted to live in a cottage in the mountains, so about a year and a half ago, I bought one. I have a very pleasant commute down historic Route 66 in New Mexico, before only the last couple of miles turn to ok-to-absolutely-horrible city congestion in Albuquerque, depending on the time of day. Not bad at all, as drives to work go. The tradeoff is I drive between 300 and 400 miles a week, more if I drive to see family, go camping, etc. My only vehicle until a couple of months ago was my 2015 Chevrolet Silverado crew cab, which by no means gets bad fuel economy, but I was unhappy with how fast I was wearing out my beautiful (and expensive) truck for no other reason than to carry me, my laptop and my fancy purse from my front door to my office. After I spent $580 on the first major service interval, the one when it's time to change All The Fluids, I decided to get serious about buying a cheap, reliable, used subcompact.
My search parameters were: it had to be an extremely cheap car. Like really really cheap. The cheapest car possible once all factors were added up - not using a lot of fuel, not breaking in expensive ways, not costing $580 dollars in a single regular maintenance event, and not having a big price tag. Being an optimizer, I carry a lot of insurance and am happy to pay for it, so I excluded insurance cost from my criteria. I had this fantasy that maybe, just maybe, I would find a car with a manual transmission, because I love driving more than almost anything, but knew that was very unlikely given everything else I was looking for.
My Chevy dealer, for whatever reason, had taken on trade a 2014 Mirage with a CVT and 73,000 miles on the odometer. After reading the many, many reviews by happy owners and the many hilariously clueless reviews by auto journalists, I had to try it. I walked up to the car about 95% sure I was wasting my lunch hour: it was weird-looking, tiny, overpriced, and blue. I have a thing against blue cars. On the test drive, it was still weird-looking, still tiny, painfully slow, and astonishingly good to drive.
Here's where I should also explain how important cars, and driving, are to me. I spend a couple of hours a day behind the wheel. I'm originally from rural New Mexico, and it was normal to have to drive 2 hours to buy basic necessities when I was growing up. My father made me learn to drive in an 1954 US Air Force crash truck, with no gear synchronizers and no power anything, and then operate his construction company's heavy equipment, before I was allowed to drive a passenger car. Dinner conversation was car talk, and serious mechanical stuff like compression ratios, no amateur BS topics allowed. Almost every male forebear I have was a CDL driver at some point in his working life, if not his entire career, and many of my relatives on my mom's side worked in the various Michigan automotive plants. I bought myself a 1970 Dodge Dart when I was 20 years old and barely made enough money to buy food. I married my dreadful ex-husband solely because he was the first man I'd met who wasn't related to me and could properly operate a clutch. After him, the next awful man I got engaged to was a brilliant hot rod builder. I still have pictures of that guy's cars.
I really, obsessively, unhealthily love cars.
I fell completely in love with that stupid used blue Mirage. It was almost like driving the little economy cars of the 80's and 90's again, before drive-by-wire and accessories no one wants ruined everything. I had never driven a CVT before. It was cool. You people who own them know exactly what I mean. I haggled on the price until the dealer came down to Earth, and they said they'd have it ready for me the next morning.
I took possession of the car the next day. Something just didn't feel right as I drove away, not a specific performance issue I could identify; I was just suddenly feeling awful about buying this car that I had loved so much the day before. About 5 miles from the dealership, an ungodly howling noise I've never heard before and hope to never hear again began coming from somewhere down low, in front of the gear selector. My bad feeling got worse. Put the gear selector in neutral and coasted in traffic. The howling dwindled into silence. Dropped the selector back into drive. Sound rose again to a demonic howl. Neutral... quiet. Drive... give it a few seconds... howl. Fantastic.
In New Mexico, we have a 15-day used car lemon law. In situations like this, the dealer is required to repair the car, put you in a different car or refund your money altogether. Given that it was closing time on Friday and I had a 30ish-mile drive home, I had the dealer put me in a loaner so I could "figure out what I wanted to do and we would work it out Monday."
I drove the loaner down the street to the Mitsubishi dealership, which stays open late, and asked to drive the cheapest brand new Mirage they had. The guy pleasantly asked me if, by any chance, I could drive a stick.
The 2019, besides being 4 horsepower better than the 2015, had the stock touchscreen radio. And a manual transmission. And a 100,000 mile warranty. And it wasn't blue. The salesman and I made friends. He was an old CDL driver and I don't think he'd ever met someone who really loved cars and yet still wanted to buy a base model Mirage.
Things got weird when I started trying to negotiate price. They were asking an okay price, but come on, you never pay the asking price. My new friend got cagey. He stood up and got the sales manager, who came out carrying a big stack of papers. The sales manager flatly informed me that they could not negotiate the price down any lower on this particular car, because it had been stolen off their lot, gone on a 6-week adventure, been located by Albuquerque Police Department, been cosmetically and mechanically reconditioned, and now they were selling it to me for substantially below their invoice cost. The pile of papers was the documentation trail on the Mirage's journey through near-death. Nearly every body panel, all the lenses, and most of the glass on the car had been bashed in. I still don't understand why they didn't total the car.
Well, that explained why there were already 2,100 miles on the odometer.
In case you somehow haven't heard, Albuquerque has been the worst city in the USA for auto thefts for quite some time now. Our property crime overall is appalling, our violent crime isn't too great, but the auto theft was so bad for a while that they were literally stealing new cars from dealerships. This has a lot to do with why I decided to buy a mountain cottage far, far away from my office instead of a pleasant little house in a tidy-looking subdivision across the street from my office.
So naturally, now I really had to have this car. I fully understood the risk, or rather the likelihood, that this car was going to have premature problems. But it had a story. It had been stolen by Albuquerque car thieves who tried to kill it, but it had survived. And at asking price, it was still the cheapest new car in town.
I told them I wasn't too sure about the clutch, with that kind of history. They countered that I was still buying a 100,000 mile warranty.
At 2,900 miles, they had to replace the clutch. I told them so. Broken glass still comes out of somewhere I can't see and gathers around the gear shift. I also had an argument with my friend the salesman, about how I thought the EPA fuel economy estimates are dumb and I could beat them. He said the EPA estimate is a little high, but he agreed I could get about 45 mpg. I told him I would beat 60 mpg on my regular commute. He bet me that I couldn't get over 52.
He still owes me coffee.