My mother goes by “Bama” to my kids, and she’s been driving a literal brown wagon for years now, a 2006 Volvo to be specific. It met an untimely demise at the hands, er, branches, of a big ol’ maple tree the other day. Six months ago, they’d be looking at a whole summer of having my father’s old truck to drive, and they’d have the Jetta too, if that hadn’t been crushed by the same vengeful tree. So they need a car, like, now.
(not the actual car)
A local independent shop has a 2006 “E61" BMW 530xi wagon for sale, at a reasonable price. They also said if this is a temporary car, they’ll buy it back from them in a few months assuming they don’t ruin it. It spent most of its life in Arizona, so it’s not riddled with rust, and looks really clean overall with just about 88,000 miles on it. It’s an automatic, but again, it’s likely temporary.
I know these cars pretty well from having an X3 with a lot of the same mechanicals, and from browsing BMW forums pretty regularly during our last 11 years of BMW ownership. I don’t recommend that they keep this car into the high mileage range as we did, but they should get a good winter out of it at least. We’ll see. Ironically, I just sold my manual BMW wagon 4 months ago. But you can’t keep ‘em all.
Replacements for the Jetta and the Volvo are probably a Honda Clarity and a Golf Sportwagen - a manual! - respectively. But neither of those are cars you can just walk into a nearby dealer and buy off the showroom floor, apparently. Hence the need for a car, like, now. They could do worse.