Lug_Nut said:
Nine months ago $15k for a wagon with leather was a very good price, so I bought.
Seven months ago $15k for that same car was high, considering what I think to be a better car (the B4 wagons) could be had for less than half that, even though I personally prefer an automatic which the B4 TDI doesn't offer.
Then one month ago I dropped the $3k for the balancer drive upgrade in it. Now I'm in it for $18k. I could have another B4 wagon and two more B4 sedans for that.
I doubt there's anyone that thinks these are $18k cars, yet I bought well, had the upgrade performed competently and nearly at cost, and still don't think I could sell for much over $12k. That's a big chunk of depreciation in 9 months on a car that had already depreciated for nearly 48 months before I bought.
I'm stuck with it financially for quite some time, but there are many, much worse cars to own under those circumstances.
But for that first 48 months, it didn't depreciate almost at all, especially considering the miles yours has. I think what has happened is the depreciation curve just caught up with itself in the last year. All the slow depreciation that was supposed to have happened over the last 4-5 years on these cars was postponed by a combination of lucky factors (high fuel prices, interest in biofuels, lack of availability of new TDIs). Then, when those reasons all faded in recent months, the price of this and other late-model diesel cars collapsed, and all that postponed depreciation came down in one big lump.
The question was just whether you bought and sold at the right time, and some of us on here surely have our regrets about that... if my folks had sold their car 6 months earlier, last summer, in the Seattle market, when fuel prices were high and none of the big issues about the B5 TDI had come out yet, they would probably have gotten over $23k for it, or practically what they had paid for it new, since that was the going rate for a pristine B5 TDI wagon in the area at that time. Selling it in December, we took a $4k hit even though the car was in identical condition, and it could have been a lot worse if things hadn't worked out like they did. Lug Nut, same story, if you had bought now instead of then, with the market pushing prices down and the BS and ceramic plugs issue giving extra bargaining power, you could have laid out thousands less. Sorry.
Oh well.
If I remember right, your B4 is a complete DIY TDI, a GLX swap. While you were at it, why didn't you just build an automatic B4? Compared to the rest of the swap, that part probably would have been easy.
