Car And Driver's First Five Months With the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio Have Been a Maintenance Nightmare

Mine was a 1985 CJ-7. Last of the model. It had a straight 6 with a 5 speed manual, but I never regeared with 33s so 4th gear is as high I can go. Just off the top of my head, things that broke from wheeling were broken shackles, broken shock mounts, tie rods, u-joints on pretty much every axle. Maintenance wise - u-joints, starter, alternator, hoses, radiator, water pump, carb, and bunch of electrical issues. Be quite honest, they were all probably related to me wheeling it - premature wear from wheeling it hard.

Your statement that a Lemon Law buyback or replacement car is worth nothing doesn’t make sense, like I said. Maybe you’ll get stranded on the road or maybe a few problems that don’t involve that can result in a partial or full refund of payments or replacement car. In CA (and I suspect most other states), if the car spends 30 days or more in the dealership (including waiting for parts), you’ll qualify. If the trouble started early (for a good pro-rate), you’ll get most of your lease payments refunded, and you were probably driving a loaner car. So some hassle, drive another car, and get most of your money back for the time you had the car is worthwhile. Let’s say you lease a 2018 and two years later you get a 2020 or 2021 replacement substituted into your old lease. To assume it’ll be as unreliable as the first one is an unlikely assumption. How about selling the 2020-2021 with (probably) low miles and paying the lender the residual on the original car sound? Worth a little of your time?

For sure. I’m definitely the one here making no sense.

Just because you don’t understand what I’m saying doesn’t mean I’m not making sense.

Dunning-kruger

Interesting. Your contention that a buyback can’t be a good thing (unless one’s time is worth zero) makes sense in a really troublesome experience with a car. Most cases don’t work out that way. As an interesting counterpoint to your expectation of an unworthwhile experience here’s this. A former boss of mine leased a BMW 745i when they first came out- a notoriously troublesome car as they proved to be. There was a little icon that looked like the outline of a car, sort of like how a check engine light looks like the outline of an engine. His icon was yellow, but it was supposed to be green. When mentioned to the dealer, they kept the car and worked on it a few times. They wound up keeping the car and ordering a new computer from Germany. Overall, the car spent over 30 days at the dealership waiting for parts. He had to drive a 3-series for about 35 days out of his 2 year lease with $1,100/mo payments. He wound up getting about 90% of his money back, so he basically enjoyed a 745i for about $100/mo and had it 23 out of 24 months.

I thought about it and came to the conclusion that a lease of an unreliable luxury car can turn out pretty good. Obviously the polar opposite of what you’re expecting from a Guilia, but I think most experiences will be somewhere in between, and probably a relatively small percentage will wind up in a buy back. One option in a buyback (at least in CA) is substitution of collateral. The lessee gets a very similar new car (a Guilia in this case) perhaps a year or two newer to replace the original one in the original contract. So, you finish out the original contract with a potentially much more valuable car. Say for argument’s sake you sell the replacement car for $40K with a payoff of $30K. Worth one’s time? How about getting a large percentage of the original lease payments refunded?

Psychological projection

We are talking FCA here. Neither Fiat or Chrysler have been trendsetters in reliability over their history. :grin:

Just noticed one of the local dealers had zero Stelvios and Giulias in their inventory, which happened before when there was a stop sale. Looks like another issue is identified although it might not be a stop sale this time:

I forgot about those 2002 7-series, BMW bought back a ton of those and I believe they extended the warranty 10 years. That was one of the biggest fails BMW ever had, lets take the old people 7-series and put this complicated wheel thing that controls everything through this screen.

At some point the truly dreadful reliability will have to start biting sales, surely!? When you can’t even lease a brand spanking new $75k car without having to worry that you might have to reject it, or it’ll spend more time in the shop than on the road….

I would love to meet the kind of person who is willing to handover $64k for a (very nice!) 4 year old Range Rover with no warranty. ( Ebony Edition! )

They must either be into serious punishment, live with a car wizard or have very, very deep pockets! This thing will give you nothing but headaches until you can finally take no more and limp your way into a Lexus dealer and throw the keys at them.

The fact that the 4 year old LR only has 17k miles on the clock shows you the ratio of time spent in service bay vs time on road lol

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lots of those $70,000 7 series can be had for half that after 3 years.