[A4] Certified Pre-Owned or not

[Tom Christiansen]

Phil (et al):

With the leases and factory warranties there's no incentive to skimp on the
maintenance. It's all covered. So why not do it... Obviously, the
"maintained by a car fanatic" is always desirable. But I would prefer to be
without the "driven hard" part.

Anyway... I have found a good dealership with a sales philosophy and service
level I like. It's a VW dealership and they get cars from the same source as
Audi but offers the CPO certification along with other warranty options as
options. So for a car with factory warranty only, I'd end up paying the
usual $1-2k dealer mark-up over private party trade, but I can get the CPO
if need be. This dealership takes the cars in to Audi for service as part of
the prep for sale (or so they say anyway). I'll ask for the details, but
judging from the prices of cars elsewhere, it seems the cost riser of the
CPO is on the order of $4-6k. That buys quite a few timing belts and clutch
replacements...

With the amount of money involved, I would honestly prefer to deal with a
dealership. I've had some bad experiences with private party trades in the
past.

I'll keep you posted.

Tom

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 8:40 AM, Phil Yee <philter at myway.com> wrote:

>  It sounds like most people like CPOs.  With that warranty and inspection,
> it certainly looks inviting.  But I've always thought that CPO is sort of
> like buying a lease return car - that is, it's a car that the previous owner
> was probably not planning to keep for the long term, and likely that it has
> been maintained per user manual specification, which in my mind is not a
> high level of maintience.  (Of course, the maintience could have been worse,
> but I don't count those as candidates.)  Do I really want a 1.8T car which
> had the oil changed per user manual, which has been known to cause sludge?
>  For me, that's a little scary.  If given the choice, I've always picked a
> car that was driven hard and maintained by a car fanatic, over a
> questionable car (maybe because driven hard/car fanatic is more like myself
> in line with my values). Happy trails to which ever car you end up
> buying.-Phil Message: 9Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 05:29:59 -0700 (PDT)From: Nick
> Thompson
> &lt;sfdaytona at yahoo.com <lt%3Bsfdaytona at yahoo.com>&gt;Subject: Re: [A4]
> Certified Pre-Owned or notTo: A4 Mailing List &lt;a4 at audifans.com<lt%3Ba4 at audifans.com>&gt;Message-ID:
> &lt;138106.45439.qm at web54202.mail.re2.yahoo.com<lt%3B138106.45439.qm at web54202.mail.re2.yahoo.com>&gt;Content-Type:
> text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1I agree that a CPO car is a good way to
> reassure yourself, but like Nick suggested, it has to be from a good
> dealer.? I worked for two Audi dealers, and one was a SNAFU.? They were
> certifying cars that had bent wheels and god knows what else.?Where I live,
> there are not many good dealers period.? It seems to me that the gene pool
> for good technicians is starting to dry up.? The have kids wrenching on high
> end cars who have 1 year experience at Jiffy Lube...it just doesn't seem
> right to me.Nick
>
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