I love shopping for cars. Even when I’m not in the market for a car I am constantly doing research and pricing out options. Over the years I have driven a lot of different vehicles and have refined what it is that I like to a near science.
Unfortunately, for our next family vehicle, my preferences are being thrown out the window. You see, in order to win the choice of our last car, a 2008 BMW X3 which we leased for 39 months, I had to give up future draft considerations. I told my wife that she could choose anything she liked for our next vehicle. Almost four years ago I never imagined that she would remember that conversation and, even worse, remember to take me up on it.
As our lease return date approached I began pairing down my own short list, but was stopped short with Susie’s list of must-have options for her choice. There weren’t many things that I needed to consider, but the one factor that stood out immediately was that our new car had to have a built-in navigation unit. I had never really looked at what was required to get navigation into a vehicle but I now know that most auto manufacturers make you purchase their most expensive options just to get the privilege of adding navigation to your vehicle.
Considering that anyone can purchase a GPS enabled handheld or other dedicated GPS unit for well under $500, it is ridiculous to me that most auto manufacturers seem to think that it’s reasonable to spend $700 to $3,500 to their most expensive trim level just for this one feature. For our purposes, we don’t care if the car has cloth or leather seats and we don’t care about any of the other features that differentiate trim levels aside from the presence or absence of navigation.
I decided to do a preliminary price comparison across a set of vehicles that I thought would work for our family using the manufacturers own lease estimation tools. The only qualifications were that the finance structure would be a lease, that the term would be 36 months, and that there would be $0 down to ensure consistency. The trim and options would be the absolutely most inexpensive vehicle available with the built-in navigation. I went through this same exercise twice within a span of 6 months and used the lower of the two prices for each vehicle in our consideration list. Unfortunately, there was no way to normalize the number of kilometers that we would drive across all of our options. Since we would be driving fewer than 20,000 km per year, I chose the lowest mileage option possible for each tool. Here is what we ended up with:
I should note that I also had a number of Subaru vehicles on the list, but their “built-in” navigation solution is a removable Pioneer unit that disqualified them from our list.
The real standout for me was the Ford Edge. First of all, Ford was the only manufacturer that didn’t force me to choose the most expensive trim level in order to get navigation. Second, I was really impressed with the MyFord Touch technology and the overall style of the car.
Susie took one look at the list and went for the cheapest option possible; the Nissan Rogue. I didn’t like that the Rogue only had a 5″ navigation option and I resented having to pay for leather seats that I wasn’t interested in choosing in the first place.
At this point, a new competitor entered the market. The Nissan Leaf. When plugging in the same leasing details and considering the $8,500 government rebate, the Leaf came out in the #2 slot, right behind the Rogue.
I hadn’t considered the idea of moving to an all electric vehicle before, but a quick napkin calculation showed that we could be saving a significant amount of money with the switch from gasoline to electric. We monitored our driving over a few weeks and realized that we never drove more than 50km on any particular day. The Leaf, with it’s 165km round trip range, would work out just fine for our day-to-day driving. The only problem would be that we wouldn’t be able to go on longer road trips.
The good news is that we really don’t go on road trips and, when we do, we usually rent a larger car anyway. We are very excited to be picking up our new Leaf next week!
