I know I will get flak from some on this, but I have been thinking about trading in my RA.....I need/want a 4-Door truck with 4WD.....well, when i bought my RA, i added on some negative which i financed for an obscene amount...now, in talking with dealers and finance managers, the most they are offering me is only $12 for our RA's....so now i'm asking myself how did we get stuck with the worthless car??....and due to Mitsubishi's financial troubles dealerships are VERY hesitant to take a Mitsu on trade-in....has anyone else experienced this or doing research on trading in??

 

It's a new car, and corporate mitsu's situation isn't helping much w/ their troubles. Basically, vultures are circling.

 

That's typical for a trade value on a vehicle like that when you buy it new. You could always buy gap insurance and.......hmmmm....... all of a sudden your car is totalled or stolen. But that would be your legal issues. Otherwise face the reality all new car buyers face, love being buried in your car.

 

well i know you get burried when you drive off the lot with a new car but that is ridiculous...when i bought my Honda Element I financed for about the same amount and when i traded it in, I got about $15,000 for it....which was a loss but not as dramatic...

 

well its a honda... you can basically drive a civic off the lot and put it on autotrader the next day and get like the same thing you paid for it... hondas barely depreciate when you drive off with them

i think RA's will hold their value if mitsu is bought or if they dont make it next year (see the other thread)

 

yeah, but don't you think if they don't make the Ralliart next year, the other companies will see something wrong with that??...example....the car may not have performed as expected, or sales sucked....it wouldn't be for the rarity of them...

 

That's why I got gap insurance. So If It's "stolen or totaled" I get full $ for it. I took my car to CAR MAX one month after buying it because at the time I was having issues paying for it and they told me they'd give me only 13 grand for it and resell it for somewhere around 15-16 grand. And I only had 2,000 miles on the car at that time. They also said that you can get a RA from Cars Direct for 16 grand when I bought mine for 20.

 

Bring it back to honda and the trade in value is not as high as you would like to think. It is true that you can sell it to autotrader for retail, but returning it to the dealer, even if it is a honda, you take a big hit because of the trade in value/depreciation. If they give you $12K for your RA, that's just about right.

 

First, the RA is going to be made in 05 so put that little rumor to rest. I am bitter cuz the 05 Ralliart is going to have a option for leather seats. As far as trade in for your Element goes, they were able to give you such a high trade in number for it because they had room in their new car to still make money in the deal. But honestly, they lost some of the profit margin by taking in that car for that much money. They didnt lose money, just didnt make as much as they COULD have. And as previously stated, if you take the Element back to Honda you would get piped pretty damn hard. As far as resale goes, if youdont think your car is worth anything, try and sell it private party. You might be surprised by what your car brings on the street. That $15-$17K number isnt out of the question if you have the right packaged car with still having good clean miles on it. But to be totally honest, you have been in here over and over about getting a new car every 4-6 months and basically that shows you have no business buying new cars anyways. You need to make up your mind.

 

How much are the ralliarts to begin with. I just sold my 97 eclipse and that went for 10k (blue books for 9300) with 80k miles on it, and yours is a 04??? Strange how that works.....

 

I like change in cars, obviously...and of the 6 cars I have owned, only 2 have been brand new...what I didn't realize is that Mitsu has such a terrible trade-in/resale value...I thought they were worth a little something

 

what you arent paying attention to is the fact that your "terrible trade-in/resale value" isnt just in the mitsubishi line of cars. It is anything new. If you take your Mitsu RA to a different dealer that wants to sell you a car new, they will give you numbers similar to that Honda Element you traded in at the Mitsu dealer. Mitsu doesnt have great resale value, but not many cars can be bought and sold in 3-6 months and not have you eat crap on the deal. The type of car you bought has nothing to do with it, its the typpe of deals you are trying to accomplish that is the problem.

 

If I was a car salesman, and this guy bought a car off me a few months ago and wanted to trade it in for something else, damn rights I would hose him, that guy has more money than brains if you ask me.

 

Yep...

 

They don't give you what they say they are when you trade-n...reason #1 that I'm NOT driving my new RA right now is b/c they said they were gonna give us $9500 for trade-in on our Saturn, but when I did the math of the payments I knew something was up, and when the salesgirl phoned a couple days later to say we were approved we asked about it and she said we were getting the agreed upon $3500 for our trade...that's another 6000 they were trying to hit us on it, not to mention an extra 6000 they would've made by selling it...so basically I told them to go ___ themselves and after that, plus what I faced before at the other mitsu dealer in town I won't ever be buying the RA I wanted for the last 4 months...yeah it's a nice car, but nothing is worth being raped up the *** and treated like **** IMO...