Bye Bye Vt Commodore
After we purchased the VE Commodore, the VT became surplus to our needs. I washed it up, cleaned all the insides out, and finally got around to listing it for sale on Facebook (about the only use for that shitheap site, IMHO). Had a few folks interested in it, but no serious bites until about a week later when someone messaged me about it. They were pretty keen, but would be coming across from near Shepparton (several hours’ drive!) and asked would I hold it… sure, for a non-refundable deposit!
We organized things out, I took more pics and a video of it cold-starting, he low-balled which ironically came in over the minimum amount I wanted for it (but not by much), but since he was the only person serious about it I decided to let it go. He paid the deposit, and he showed up on Friday to look at it in person. Took it for a test drive and the water pump was a bit noisy (which is unfortunate, it did not do that on the day I took the cold-start video!), but otherwise he was fairly happy. He paid the remainder of the balance and went on his way. I genuinely hope he’s happy with it, it’ll want a fair bit of work to bring it up to snuff, but it’s still quite a clean example of a VT and it has pretty much all the bells and whistles you could want.
Anyway, selling it brings the TCO to right around $14,000AUD all up… around $3261/year or $8.74/day. That’s everything, except insurance… registration, fuel, services, repairs, the works. That seems exceptionally low to me? In fact, it’s about half what I would expect the TCO of a car to be… if the VE ends up being anywhere near that good of a buy I will be very happy, though I think most of the savings come from the fact we bought the VT at the very end of it’s depreciation curve (if there wasn’t so much wrong with it I likely would have gotten almost what I paid for it). I’m figuring if we can keep the VE for 10 years, and nothing major goes wrong with it, we might be able to manage it.
It’s still not the best car I’ve ever bought (that crown belongs to the Oldsmobile Ciera I bought for $250USD, threw a $40 harmonic balancer and a $50 exhaust on, and drove for several years with only a handful of issues) but I really can’t complain at all given how much more expensive operating a car is in Australia.
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