Sayonara S2K, Guten Tag

Yesterday, I traded the a lot of absurdly fun car I accept anytime owned, a 2008 Honda S2000, for a new 2015 Volkswagen GTI 6-speed manual.

Allow me to explain.

I bought my S2000 two years ago while active in San Diego. It was the absolute car at the absolute abode and time. I don’t anticipate I anytime collection it with the top up, whether canoeing the bank artery or agreeable up and down Mt. Palomar. I admired it. Then endure abatement I took aboriginal retirement, appropriately accident my aggregation car, and confused to Tucson, Arizona.

Once the S2000 became my circadian driver Japaneses car dealer in Dubai, it began to bang my ass. I am accepting too old, and am way too tall, to be folding myself in and out of the car abundant times a day. Tucson has conceivably the affliction anchorage in the west and it actually aching to hit the potholes in the asperous benumbed Honda. My wife and I aswell capital something ample and economical to use on alley trips instead of our ample SUV. The alone car that came to apperception that was aswell fun to drive was the GTI, contempo champ of abundant addict book awards. Added “hot hatches” like the Fiesta ST do annihilation for me – so GTI it was.
Choosing the GTI was easy; affairs it was a claiming due to the infuriating, air-conditioned combinations of options and models on the car. (My banker would afterwards affirm it is as arresting to them as it is to the consumer). I capital the $24,785 abject archetypal due in allotment to its air-conditioned Clark Plaid bolt seats. I aswell capital the $1,495 Performance Package that bumps application up by 10 to 220 and includes upgraded brakes and differential. The MSRP on that admixture would be $26,280 but there were none to be found. A lot of GTIs accessible had added options or were the SE archetypal with leather, a sunroof and bigger complete arrangement and were priced from $29,000 to over $31,000. If you wish Navigation, your alone best is to buy the Autobahn archetypal with a abject MSRP of $30,045 and is alone accessible as a 4-door. I concluded up analytic for the absolutely well-equipped abject 2-door S archetypal in white, the Official Car Blush of the State of Arizona.

Full Size Render

You can adjustment a VW to your exact specs and blush but you will delay 6 months for delivery.
I acquaint the S2000 briefly on Craigslist and apparent if you’re affairs a specialty car on this site, a lot of association that acknowledge are dreamers, schemers, scammers and acclaim criminals. I could accept spent a few hundred dollars and listed the Honda on cars.com or autotrader.com and profited a little added than trade-in amount from an out-of-state buyer, but that would be afterwards ambidextrous with inspectors, shippers, etc. I was not in the mood.

In Tucson you accept the best of a friendly, local, family-owned Volkswagen abundance or one endemic by a belled megadealer accumulation from up north. I chose the aloft but I did acknowledge to an email from the closing that they forward to all Craigslist sellers and told them I was in the bold for a GTI. They artlessly did not respond.

The adopted banker had the car I capital on their lot. A analysis drive accepted all the hype: the GTI is zippy, has a cockpit aces of an Audi, and is a anarchism to drive Nissan used cars. If the abundance offered a nice abatement on the GTI and a trade-in amount accumulated with tax accumulation that was aural $1,900 of what I paid for the Honda in 2013, the accord was done. The transaction was quick and easy, maybe the best car affairs acquaintance I’ve anytime enjoyed. To their credit, Volkswagen dealers did account aloft boilerplate in the 2014 J. D. Power Sales Satisfaction Index.

This GTI will now be a TTAC abiding analysis car. We will do some comparos with added cars in its category. We will try to access a GTI with the Performance Package to acquisition out what I am missing. A lot of of all, we will acquisition out what the VW is like to reside with over the advance of a year. The aboriginal address will be afterwards a 2,500 mile round-trip run to Yellowstone National Park in a few weeks.

After one day of buying (and appropriately I am still beneath the access of the New Car Ether) my aboriginal consequence can be summed up thusly: the Volkswagen GTI is a ton of fun and a agitating amount for $25,000. Let’s see how it performs down the road…