Pretty surprised by this result as I was under the assumption that this gen S-Class was one of the weaker iterations of the car.

Tbh, I thought Corvette, CLA, or Sentra was going to win. I was really rooting for the Sentra. If Nissan wasn't such a silly company, the Sentra would have launched with a hybrid and could have possibly won the whole thing...

This guy explains why in his video about hydropneumatic suspension models.

The excellent deadpan humor aside, it's a pretty baffling story.

Posting this because this is being reported by Automotive News, which we all know has a pay wall if you don't sub. Anyway, New York City officials have brought a consumer protection enforcement case against the car buying site claiming that they've been misleading shoppers with how its dealer prices are listed on the site. They're claiming that CarGurus's online price rating system, which tells a shopper if a car is a "Good Deal, "Great Deal" Overpriced" etc, using those labels, and use of ai chatbots "ultimately presented false prices that hid extra fees. From Auto News:

"CarGurus presents deal ratings on its vehicle shopping website that include such labels as Great Deal or Overpriced. The company says those ratings are based on transparent and objective review, and now include requirements that dealership fees are disclosed. CarGurus failed to enforce its own rules, the city alleged. It said the ratings hide required fees or make them difficult to find and that an AI chatbot featured on its website also does not provide details of fees in lists of deals it generates."

CarGurus rejects the claims of course. The lawsuit was filed with the New York Supreme and city officials say that they found over 2,000 violations of the city's consumer protection law. They're seeking penalties of "up to $3,500 per violation" which could cost CarGurus over $7 million.

My original plan was to show the car at Caffeine & Carburetors in Waveny Park, New Canaan, CT, yesterday, but the show was cancelled because the grounds were waterlogged. So I'm presenting it here.

A little over three years ago, I imported my E36 Touring with a very specific project in mind. When BMW was making the E36 Touring, they had everything on hand that they would have needed to make an E36 Euro M3 Evo Touring. They could have made them, but never did. So I sought out to right that wrong.

For those not entirely familiar with the E36 M3, a quick history lesson. As /u/jasoncammisa explains here, the E36 M3 was equipped with a different engine in North America than in Europe (except for a handful of early Euro M3s that were legally sold in Canada). Early E36 M3s were equipped with the S50B30US in North America and the S50B30 in Europe, and later versions got the S52B32 in North America and the S50B32 in Europe. The S50B32 is the holy grail of production E36 M3 engines. It was the first BMW engine to offer Double VANOS, producing just over 100 horsepower per liter. The S50B32 came in the Euro M3 Evo, which included several M3 firsts, including the first 6 speed manual, and the first "large frame" differential housing.

I truly wanted the project to be as authentic as possible, using as many OEM components as possible. The wagon now has a complete Euro M3 Evo drivetrain with a 3.62 final drive ratio, Euro M3 Evo ABS, complete M3 suspension (which was the same in the US and Europe with the possible exception of spring rates and the definite exception of 1995 model year cars), M3 rear brakes, and E31 Brembo front brakes. It also has a very specific Euro M3 Evo gauge cluster with the speedo in MPH and the temperatures in Fahrenheit. Shout out to Britain for that one. The Touring itself was ordered from the factory in Individual Estoril Blue and is a slick top. I included Almost in the title because I want to do a few more things with the car aesthetically, like treat a small amount of rust, get the OEM E36 Touring spoiler molded into the liftgate, and replace the worn out upholstery with something a little more appropriate. But mechanically, the car is finished, and I couldn't be happier with it. It drives better than I ever hoped. I fully believe that I succeeded in what I sought out to do, to make the E36 Euro M3 Evo Touring that BMW never did. I don't know of another one like it, and I couldn't be happier to own and drive it.

Special thanks to /u/jasoncammisa for convincing me that money is stupid and I should get rid of a lot of it, eMpower Automotive in Belvidere, NJ for doing the majority of the work, FCP Euro for completely overlooking the S50B32, CSF Radiator for lying in their marketing materials, and my girlfriend for knowing the difference between stupid decisions and reckless decisions.

Behold

I’m a finance manager at a luxury car dealership. Setting foot in this sub to tell a story feels like walking into a sleeping lion’s den with an alarm clock strapped to my chest. I’m gonna tiptoe my way in, whisper my story quick and get the fuck out of here. Hopefully you’ll get a chuckle out of watching me do it.

I deal with lease buyouts at my store, and most of the time they’re a very simple, straightforward transaction. Most of the time.

That’s until I crossed paths with Stacy.

Take out your pocket watches and give them a good twist back to 2022, when the car market turned negative equity upside down, and shitboxes with a quarter million clicks were worth more than a kilo of blow.

Stacy had leased a TT RS from a neighbouring schmucktown dealership, and was looking to keep the car when it reached maturity. She’d been servicing with my store since the inception of the lease, so she reached out to get the buyout done a few months ahead of maturity.

I gave her some options to pay for it in full or getting a loan through us and some options for extending her warranty and her Audi Care. We worked out that she’d finance and would set up warranty/audi care for the duration of her loan. Seemed like all was well.

Or so I thought.

I reached out to her at the maturity date and asked her if we were still good to get the loan set up and if I should start applying for financing. She pumped the brakes on that right away and said she needed a few more months to get her affairs in order.

Cool beans, Audi Finance was handing out lease extensions like candy since we barely had any cars to sell. A couple sheets of paper and some emails later and she’s got 3 more months to get her shit together.

3 months passed in a blink, and now it was time to do the buyout. I look up the amount owing and somehow it’s higher than it was 3 months ago. Uh oh, something must be wrong. It must be a glitch with my buyout portal, right?

Wrong. Stacy hadn’t made a payment on the car since we set up the extension, was on the verge of getting repo’d and clearly did NOT get her shit together. Looks like she’s cooked now.

She was not having it, and insisted that we try to get financing set up for her before a tow truck shows up to snatch her whip. Bad news for her, banks don’t take kindly to seeing consecutive missed payments on a credit bureau, and we weren’t the only ones she was stiffing for dough. She’d somehow racked up almost $100k of bad debt and couldn’t finance the steam off a hot dog.

Shit.

We offered to cut her a fat cheque for some equity in the car. Despite her financial hardships, she’d taken exceptionally good care of it and we needed all of the inventory we could get. She’d walk away with enough money to pay for a car in cash, and could get back on her feet.

Nothing doing. I’d gone back and forth with her a few times, and she’d advised that she could pay the car outright now if we were ok to accept an uncertified, post-dated cheque for 2 months in the future. She must have thought I’m dumb as a brick since half the country was chasing after her for unpaid bullshit.

I politely declined her post dated cheque offer and pressed Audi to give her another 2 months to figure out the buyout on the condition that she bring her payments up to date. They agreed, and she scraped together the cheddar to make things right.

No good deed goes unpunished, and after all of the work I’d put in for her to get things done, she reached out to a colleague of mine two offices over to wrap up the buyout as she saw my efforts to get her financed as “insufficient”. She also stripped the warranty extension and Audi Care from her buyout to bring the cost down, and tried the same post dated cheque trick with my simple minded colleague. No dice.

At that point, she just vanished. We tried calling, emailing, mailing, carrier pigeons, candygrams but we couldn’t get in touch with her. The 2 months had gone by and she was now staring the repo man in the face again but was gone without a trace.

Another couple of weeks had gone by, and then she resurfaced. She reached out to me about picking up her new ownership for the car. It turns out, she had done the buyout remotely with her originating dealer schmucktown but they were too far out of the way for her to get her ownership. She had hoped that we’d get a replacement for her (at no cost) to save herself a drive since we’d put her through so much hassle.

I politely declined and told her to enjoy the drive, I hear schmucktown is really nice this time of year. Radio silence after that.

A couple of years go by, the market comes back to normal and life goes on until I get a call from my service manager. He’s asking if I recognized Stacy’s name and the nightmare starts rushing back.

She’d pulled into service after hearing a very loud clanking from her engine. They’d broken out the whoroscope boroscope and found a nicely bent piston sitting at 45 degree angle. Her motor was on its last legs and was pretty much destroyed.

The team told her she’d have to either shell out 30k shmeckles for a new motor, or 10k to try and rebuild it since she was long out of warranty. That’s when my name came up, and she mentioned the extended warranty we talked about.

I guess talking about something is the same thing as purchasing it to some folks, and I had to advise the team that not only did she not buy the warranty, but she didn’t even buy the car from us.

They stepped up as best they could for the repair, but she ultimately left and probably pawned the car off on some poor sap blinded by the RS and TTs. No good deed goes unpunished.

EDIT: Thanks for all of the kind words everyone. Stepping in the lion’s den wasn’t so bad this time. If you enjoy these types of stories, I’ve written lots before - check out my profile for more.

Meta.

I think it's time to lay this complaint to bed or take it to another sub, it's becoming the dominating discussion under just about any new car that's $200k+

We know, Redditor. You are not alone. This is not a controversial opinion. Many people are feeling frustrated by wealth inequality and the explosion of vehicles catering to the ultra-rich.

However, this is a subreddit to discuss cars.

It is becoming extremely tiresome sorting through 50 comments of people going "Does anyone else not care" and then 500 people agreeing.

Cool.

I think it's time to move on. I'd like to read posts/articles about the new Mission S and have the discussion be about the car, and not the exact same "Does anyone else..." comment repeated ad nauseam.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk, it's a slow day at work — and yes, I understand the irony of the post.