My 335xi has been throwing boost leak codes when I floor it. I’ve suspected it’s had a boost leak for a while now, but when I asked the shop I’ve been going to since I moved to DC to check it out, they took it for a spin, decided it pulls well enough, and didn’t really inspect the charge piping etc any farther.
The stock turbo diverter valve took a shit, so I had the shop replace it with a GFB DV+ and I also replaced the crappy stock plastic turbo outlet pipe with a metal one from VRSF. I have an upgraded VRSF intercooler and metal charge piping, but when I did my mods, this turbo outlet pipe wasn’t yet available. I’d been meaning to get one since they came out so the diverter valve was a good occasion to also do the turbo outlet.
I already have another shop in mind to investigate the boost leak. The shop I’ve been going to also gouges on oil changes because they do a bunch of inspections and write it as a “minor service” kinda deal which is way more than an oil change should cost so I was planning to ditch them for that reason as well.
BUT, yet another 335xi problem has me irked, and my wife has been frustrated that we’re barely using 2 cars since the DC area is still in “safer at home” mode and both of us are working from home for a good long while. Whenever I have to eventually go back to work in an office, the most I’ll have to do that is 3 days a week. She’s been itching to go down to 1 car so we can spend less money and save more for buying a house.
She has a leased Mazda CX-5, and the incentive lease we used when we got it over-inflated the residual value to keep the payments down, so if we were to try trading it in we’d be upside down. I knew this going into it but we didn’t foresee any situation where we’d want/need to get out of the lease early. Whoops.
So.
I floated the idea of finding a dealer with a used Kia Stinger GT2 rwd, that would take both our cars as a trade. My 335xi is paid off, so even if we get a crappy trade value on it, we could cover the upside-down amount of the CX-5 lease with the proceeds from the 335xi, and use the remaining 335xi equity towards a down payment on the Stinger. The Stinger is the perfect compromise between my and her priorities. It’s got the performance, styling, reliability and non-snobby brand for me, and the safety nannies, passenger and cargo room for her. It’s even got a power tailgate like her CX-5.
She was actually very excited by this idea, but I’m not sure the math will quite work out where we’re saving money. The lease payment on her CX-5 is $321. The only costs on my 335xi are insuring and fixing it. We’re paying $238.95/month on insurance for both cars (thanks, DC area) and I’m not sure how much we’d pay on insurance for both of us on just one Stinger. But let’s say we did a $25k loan on the Stinger at 3% for 60 months, that’s $449/month. So our insurance would need to go down by $128/month just to break even, and then we’d have 1 car instead of 2.
Yes, this would be a car we own instead of leasing hers, and it would most likely break less frequently than my 335xi, but the monthly costs don’t seem to look much different. Obviously if we borrow less than $25k, the monthly cost would go down, but I’m really not excited at the prospect of ending up in some kind of compromise-mobile just to lower the car spending by $100/month or something like that.
I dunno, we haven’t decided how actively if at all we’ll pursue this idea, but we’re thinking about it.
Hmmmm.