Saturday, September 14, 2013

Old Xterras Never Die They Just...

just get sold for $1100 to a new owner and then spray painted, sold to a used car dealer and sold for $6000...

Or at least that's what has happened to mine.  I sold my 2000 Xterra about one year ago for $1100 to a private buyer who said he wanted a winter vehicle for his girlfriend.  At the time it did not drive though it did run.  I estimated at the time that it needed about $3000 worth of work to really get it on the road and inspected again.  The work required would be new brakes, rotors and drums all around, new tires all around and some serious alignment work.

A year later (I have grown to believe in some kind of purpose driven fate as I've seen too many instances of random happenstance result in a seemingly predestined outcome) I am picking up Chinese food for dinner and the order is delayed so I sit down and randomly begin perusing one of the free auto flyers listing local dealership inventory.  Flipping through, on the third page (I would never have seen it if the ad was on the 10th page as my order was ready fairly quickly) I spot a black 2000 Xterra for sale for $5995.  Hmmm...it has big tires...Huh...it has a winch bumper....Wow...it has fiberglass front fenders....Hey!!  That's my old truck!!

Looking it up online at the given dealership it appears to have received a small amount of work to get it inspected and up for sale and it "looks" really good--shiny with good paint and great offroad setup.

I assume the brakes have been repaired as the rotors where broken and the pads shot and truck undrivable at the time I sold it.  But outside of that, little has changed.  The tires on it are still the old ones that I had on there that are COMPLETELY shot and exhibiting massively uneven wear.  It does look like someone has spraypainted the wheels and rear bumper to hide the rust on the steel, have added blacked out corner lights on the fenders, put in a new passenger side front seat (as I had removed mine and tossed it) and removed waterproof seat covers as well as adding a high lift mount on the hood.  So I'd estimate that they've put some $1500 worth of work into it and are now trying to sell it for some $6000.  With some 146,000 miles and a TOUGH life having gone to Labrador, Kentucky, the beaches of North Carolina and numerous HARD offroading trips (as well as some significantly "custom" suspension work, I would have a very hard time paying more than say $1500 for it as you are going to near immediately have to dump another $1000+ into it for new tires.

Good luck to whoever buys it (if someone buys it) and I'm glad to see it still out there and running...but this just shows me the ridiculous nature of typical used car dealership pricing and  reinforces my decided lack of sellers remorse.

My Old Xterra For Sale...

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