In April 2018, I test drove a couple of Scat Pack Challengers...a Go Mango manual transmission, and this Octane are automatic. As much as I wanted to prefer the manual, in this car, I really preferred the automatic.
After the test drive, I left the dealer with a handshake lease deal. Terms were impressive, through a third party lease (I believe it was GE capital), $3k down, $188/mo for 24 months, 12k annual mileage and a residual value of $28k. Sticker on the car was just a shade north of $41k. The residual is what stuck out to me. At the time, l looked at 2015/16 Scat Pack Challengers, and they were still going for mid $30k prices. I figured two years would be a good amount of time with the car, and if I still liked it, it was a good purchase price, and if not, I could make a little money by selling it instead of turning it in. Win/win for me.
My wife balked at the thought of a lease. In fact, she was downright mad, she didn’t like the car, didn’t like leasing, etc, etc. Of course, at this time, I also had the Cougar, and to her, the combination of Cougar and Challenger didn’t make any sense. I decided the home hassle wasn’t worth it, and passed on the lease deal.
Here I am, two years after that day, and some 15 months after buying the 4Runner, and the unnecessary car shopping activity has increased. I’m not going to buy anything new, I like the 4Runner, even if it is redundant for our day to day activities (two blue 4 door SUVs of roughly the same size). I just know that my garage is missing “something” of the four wheeled variety, I just can’t figure out what it is (that’s in my budget).