Thoughts on Selling Cars

I have some emails stacked up with good stuff, but I wanted to send out a quick post. I’ve been writing a little less lately because we’re switching rigs, so I’ve been busy selling our van and getting the new one ready.

This may strike some of you as odd, but some of the nicest random experiences my wife and I have had have been selling our cars. When we sold our place in Rochester, we had two cars to sell. I have zero interest in cars other than a way to get around, so we have owned Subarus and Hondas. But, I probably over-maintain them (too frequent oil changes, tires before they’re absolutely needed, etc.). When I sold them, I just picked a fair price, put the car on Craiglist, and each was gone in a week or so.

Both of the cars we sold in Rochester went to nice young people starting out. One was a teacher/physical therapist in training couple, the other was a young man working construction who needed it to get to work. The van is going to go to one of two sweet, young couples who are going to take it on adventures.

No bullshit, no scams, no haggling and pleasant human interactions. So, just the opposite of most automobile buying and selling experiences.

As I’ve mentioned before, the van we have is built in Saltillo, Mexico by Stellantis. The engine on the new ones is made in Mexico, too. I priced out a new one and it would be $58K list, but you never pay list for a US auto, so call it $55K after rebates and a little haggling. So now it’s a $68,750 van, post-Trump tariffs.

I’m merely OK with money, I think. I invest conservatively, don’t really care a whole lot if I got a couple extra thousand bucks for those cars if I could, etc. I also really wanted to get rid of that van, since we’re traveling soon. So I’m not really wondering if I should have waited a couple of weeks for the tariffs to hit.

Still, anyone who wanted to get every buck out of a used vehicle would probably park the thing somewhere for a week or two. The new car market isn’t the only one that’s going to be hit by tariffs. The two couples that saw the van today (and made offers) both had been looking for a while and they had their money lined up. But they don’t have their money plus 25% lined up. We also had one person back out from seeing the vehicle because of economic uncertainty.

So the used car market is going to freeze on both sides: sellers might be thinking they’re sitting on a gold mine, buyers might not want to finance 1.25 times the price of what a car was a week ago. Just another example of how both the uncertainty surrounding the tariffs, and the tariffs themselves, will damage the economy.