items wanted

[Lee Levitt]

My son has picked up my enthusiasm for cars. 10 days into having 
his learners permit, he took a defensive driver training course 
with the local chapter of the Audi Club!

(Other organizations, including Bridgestone, IIRC, put on these 
defensive driver training courses. Highly recommended).

WRT the Volvo - subscribe to the mailing list at 
www.swedishbricks.net and ask a bunch of questions...

And Carfax -- you'll never know what an owner will (or won't) tell 
you. Before I ran a carfax on a car we looked at last night, the 
owner told me that the car had been recalled as a lemon, and that 
it had overheated fairly dramatically last fall. While the first 
would show up on Carfax, the second wouldn't. The car spooked me, 
tho. It was missing its engine cover, one of the valve cover 
covers was cracked and the tb cover was cracked and patched with 
duct tape.

Oh, and it had gotten hit in the rear, the RR door didn't *quite* 
close like it should, and the subwoofer was missing (prolly 
forgotten by the body shop).

Oy.

I don't think we're buying *that* car. How does one crack those 
covers anyway?

I expect maintenance to be fairly low...after all, my son has 
almost nowhere to drive, so how many miles can he put on over the 
course of the year?

Lee


On Mon Jan 08 08:46:08 PST 2007, Dan DiBiase <d_dibiase at yahoo.com> 
wrote:

> Interesting discussion, and I am doing the same thing as Lee - 
> looking for a first car for my new-driver son. He can drive my A4 
> with 6-speed but prefers an automatic. At this point in his life, 
> he's viewing a car as a point A to point B type of thing. So 
> we've been looking at Accords, Camrys, etc., although we drove a 
> very nice Volvo S70 GLT on Saturday that will merit strong 
> consideration. Thought we had an Accord found until I ran the VIN 
> through Carfax and found it had a salvage title, which the owner 
> neglected to mention to me. I've been avoiding Audis mainly 
> because he will paying for all the maintenance and I don't really 
> have time to do any work on my OWN cars, let alone his.
> 
> Dan D
> '04 A4 1.8Tq MT-6
> Central NJ USA
> 
> 
>