We sold my wife's 2018 Mercedes C300 sedan on Thursday. Note that the car only had a little over 21,000 miles on it, but it was starting to nickel & dime us. Actually, if was just nickel and dimes, it wouldn't have been so bad, but last month I took it into the dealer for an oil and filter change and overall inspection. They charged $350. But then they said that the two rear tires needed to be replaced for $850 (this was already the second set of tires). Also it needed an alignment which would be another $800. Also they recommended a transmission service which they quoted at $1,100. Oh, and the engine air filter needed to be replaced, for only $200 (I went home and ordered a new OEM equivalent air filter for $12 from Amazon and only had to remove two-screws to install it). Needless to say, I said "thanks, but no thanks".
Since we weren't ready to buy a replacement car right away, I decided to sell it outright. Our son sold his 10-year old Audi A6 a few months ago on Carvana and said it was easy.
So I went online, created a login and requested a quote to sell the car (this was about a week or so ago). It took about five-minutes to check-off of all of the details, mileage, condition, accident history, etc. Within minutes I had a email from them with a quote for $20,000 good until the end of January.
On Wednesday, we finally decided to go ahead and sell the car. I logged back in and accepted their offer. Then it took about 30-minutes, answering some more questions about the car, uploading scans of the title, our ID's, and setting up how we wanted the proceeds distributed to us. We made an appointment for the next day to drop off the car at one of their local Carvana locations (about 18 miles away).
We got there about 3:00pm on Thursday and it took them maybe 20-minutes to inspect the car, including plugging into the onboard diagnostic system, taking a bunch of pictures from all angles, etc. The only 'test drive' was moving it from where we parked to the other side of their parking lot. We then had to sign a few papers. They said that the car was going to be sold out-of-state (I suspect that a low-mileage, rust free, Mercedes could be sold for a premium back East, even if it were seven-years old), so the plates needed to be removed, which took me a couple of minutes, and that was that. They confirmed the bank account that the money was going to deposited in and told us that it would be 24-48 hours before it would show up.
When I got up the next morning, Friday, the first thing I did was login to my bank's app and the money was already there, the full $20,000.
Now as to what we might replace this car with, we're still thinking about it. We're pretty sure that it'll be an EV. Our son want's my wife to get a Mustang Mach E, but she thinks that's a bit too sporty for a 78-year old women. She's thinking more along the lines like a Honda SUV or something. She had a Honda Accord before she moved-up to the Mercedes, and she really liked it. So at the moment I think the Honda Prologue might be what we're going to opt for. We're probably going for a low-mileage lease this time, maybe for only two-years. We could do an all cash deal, covering the full term of the lease, and still have more than enough money left over to buy some new family room furniture that my wife's been wanting for some time.
Anyway, that's my 'good news' story of the week...
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