It has been a long time since I talked about buying a pickup truck, but the big news around here is that yesterday I used check from our insurance and some money from the sale of our house and bought a 2021 Chevy Colorado.
My “free” rental provided by the insurance company expired some weeks ago. I didn’t worry about it over the holidays, but we are already running into situation where having a truck would be useful. I’ve driven a pickup truck for 24 years and it became one of those things where we didn’t appreciate its utility until it was no longer there.
Low Inventory
When we lived outside a major suburb, the local dealers, with the exception of Toyota, had many trucks to pick from. Out here, no such luck. The most Chevy Colorado’s I could find on the ground was a dealer with six, two of which were used.
But why buy a 2018 with 48,000 miles when a 2021 is only $3,500 more when you add in the incentives? And we took full advantage of the “Employee Pricing” discount, cash from the dealer, and $1,000 from being a Costco member. We “saved” about $5,000.
The dealer was more than an hour and half away, and an hour of that was just getting to the Interstate. But as my neighbor says, “That’s mountain living.” Every time we go somewhere, we have to make a day of it.
The most important things to me were: Four wheel drive, limited slip differential, tow package, and a spray-on bed liner. I didn’t care about things like lane change warning systems, navigation, and parking assist. I don’t need my car to be a WiFi hot spot. Things like heater seats are convenient, but I’ve never had them before so I probably won’t miss them. I’ll admit the rear view camera is convenient, and I love Apple Car Play, but I could have lived without them. Any way you look at it, it’s an upgrade over my totaled 2003 Dodge Dakota.
I just hope I keep this one for another 18 years.
Articles Worth Reading
An interesting article ran on ZeroHedge.com about the disappearance of the flu as COVID-19 cases soar. It raises the question: Is this second wave of COVID actually the normal, seasonal flu? Why does a county that normally has more than 17,000 cases of flu by this time of year have only 39?
I’ve written previously about flight from cities, about the problems large cities face with COVID-19 and lack of tax revenue. I recently stumbled across this article, from earlier in 2020, summarizing why cities fail. It lays out the historical reasons cities failed and concludes, “We are doing a fairly good job of repeating their commonest, and most serious, mistakes.”
Bloomberg ran an article entitled, “Ten Ways Covid-19 Has Changed the World Economy Forever.” It left out the impact to cities, but highlights some interesting and less obvious changes.
