3 weeks.
I had a VW 05 Touareg V8, fully loaded, bought it with 20K mi. Drove it for many years. In Jan. 2014, it need a lot of maintenance: Timing belt, water pump, tires, wheel bearing and full brake job. To top it off, I had not driven it for a week as it was nice out. It snowed about 10" over night, decided to drive the truck and leave the Audi in the garage...well it was dead as a door nail. We I plowed most of our street as the Audi was very very low. put truck on trickle charger. Got home, still dead. bought new battery. This truck toss every fault code it possible could, took it to ASW for diagnosis. short story, needed lots more work, ABS/Airbag/Diff Loc modules all showing faults. Decision was made to walk away from the truck.
Initially I wanted to replace it a brand new Touareg. Very, very nice trucks, but could not swallow a $65K entry fee for the one we wanted. We also were in process of buying vacation property so we decided to look at used.......and there she was...a 02 LC white on grey w/ 160K mi. very very clean.. Test drove it, loved it, was hard not to walk away with it that day, but knew I needed to do some homework before jumping both feet in. We set off the a local brewery, Big Choice Brewery in Broomfield....to my surprise there was a Rising Sun 4x4 holiday party going on. The owner of the brewery Nathanial, I knew was a cruiser guy, he told me to talk to Tim, owner of Gamiviti, told him about the one we just drove, talked shop for a bit and I was convinced to look for a 03 or newer for the 5spd. The search was on.
Over the course of 3 week I test drove (4) LC's and (2) LX's, one was a neglected POS, others good to clean trucks and one was a creampuff, low mi, garage queen (05, gree, tan, 48K mi. ACH. So that Sat. we set off with the family to trade in the truck on the cream puff and see if we could make a deal. When we arrived and spoke to the sales guy we did the initial test drive, he said the truck was out on a drive. We waited, but all for none, it was in process of being purchased. Told him to call once it was finalized or available. We head to next stealerhip for option 2, sold, dammit. called dealership of 3rd we considered and it has been sold. We were bummed, starving and thirsty. We head out for an early dinner. I search Cl, autotrader etc.... and I found one, seemingly clean etc. Call the stealership, its there and available. Asked for it to be set aside and we were enroute to see it. Sales guy did just that. We arrived, drove it, loved it, made a deal and took her home. She's a Black 04, loaded, non-ACH, LC with 155K mi, all service records etc. from AZ. Shortly after purchase the mod bug nite hard and well, it's been a fun build over the last 11mos.
to a CPO Toyota lot to look at a cherry 2002 4Runner Limited with TRD supercharger and locker...she saw a 2005 Cruiser 2 cars over and decided she wanted a 100-series instead. Took me about 4 months to find one in our price range with low-ish miles. Saw one get posted up on a CPO Toyota lot 90 miles away and bought it that evening. 2002 with 116k for $14.5 back in 2009.
