Piston Slap: The S5's Life Saving Mercury?
Chris writes:

Hi Sajeev,
I have a 2010 Audi S5 with about 45k miles. My local mechanic recommended Mercury Warranty for mechanical breakdown coverage… is $4,700 a good deal for 5 years, or an additional 52k mileage in coverage?

I’m worried that it would be easy to add up to that $ in repairs.

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Question Of The Day: When Financing A Car, What Information Should Be Fair Game?

Your personal information is valuable.

When I liquidated vehicles for Capital One, we typically examined over 14,000 variables before lending out our money to a customer.

Any customer. A credit card. An automobile. A commercial loan. It didn’t matter. We needed to get to know the economics of you first.

All of the low rates and big profits were dependent on buying your personal information, and then crafting decision models and metrics to determine your personal risk.

Our success in auto finance generated low rates for our customers and low delinquencies for our investors. But they both could have been far lower.

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  • Alan As the established auto manufacturers become better at producing EVs I think Tesla will lay off more workers.In 2019 Tesla held 81% of the US EV market. 2023 it has dwindled to 54% of the US market. If this trend continues Tesla will definitely downsize more.There is one thing that the established auto manufacturers do better than Tesla. That is generate new models. Tesla seems unable to refresh its lineup quick enough against competition. Sort of like why did Sears go broke? Sears was the mail order king, one would think it would of been easier to transition to online sales. Sears couldn't adapt to on line shopping competitively, so Amazon killed it.
  • Alan I wonder if China has Great Wall condos?
  • Alan This is one Toyota that I thought was attractive and stylish since I was a teenager. I don't like how the muffler is positioned.
  • ToolGuy The only way this makes sense to me (still looking) is if it is tied to the realization that they have a capital issue (cash crunch) which is getting in the way of their plans.
  • Jeff I do think this is a good thing. Teaching salespeople how to interact with the customer and teaching them some of the features and technical stuff of the vehicles is important.