Or it's a '72 Chevelle with no motor or transmission. The photos show one thing, the ad copy says another. From the photos, it looks like a decent car in good condition at a reasonable price. The rear fender extensions are intact. The interior looks clean and undamaged. You're already ahead of the game here. https://modesto.craigslist.org/ctd/d/great-falls-1977-oldsmobile-toronado/7532067350.html
$5500 for a niche market car with no engine or trans (and a FWD one at that) makes a hard sell. It does look to be in decent if not a little faded shape though.
I'm sure the car HAS an engine. One of the photos shows it. My point was that the car pictured is not the one described in the verbiage section, where he talks about a '72 Chevelle with no motor or transmission. Either that or its the most heavily modified Chevelle I've ever seen!
Which also makes perfect sense that you would list a car that is in Montana, on a Craigslist page in Modesto. I totally get it! Although he does say Great Falls as well. I have a headache.
He's dropped the asking price to $4550, an almost 20% decrease from his initial $5500. The ad has been up for only four days. He must be anxious to see it gone. It does look like a decent car, but he would help himself tremendously, in my opinion, if he would move the car out of the weeds and onto some pavement, and THEN take photos. By having it sit in the grass with weeds growing up around it, it gives the impression that it hasn't moved in a while, which is not a selling point. His ad is very terse, and he never mentions if the car actually runs and drives. He should.
Well his ad says basically nothing. Glad he revised it. He says under the picture of this car no motor or trans, but is that in reference to the ‘72 Chevelle “roller”? He apparently dropped that out his new add and shows a picture of the motor. Yeah would be nice to know if this can move on its own steam.
He corrected the ad wording a few days ago. But it's still just as terse and uninformative as it was when it was describing the Chevelle. In the information block on the side, he says the mileage is 68,000, which he also says in the ad, but then it also says the odometer is broken. I doubt that it is, given the condition of the car, and that's probably a leftover from the Chevelle days. I'm guessing the Chevelle's odometer is broken. I've gotten down to the odometer on both of my Toros when I was replacing speedometer cables, and the odometer is very easy to get to. The only way it could be broken is either something actually broke inside of it, which seems unlikely, or one of the speedo cables (there are two if the car has cruise control, which this one appears to have) is broken or damaged, which can happen because the internal lubricant dries out. In the case of my cars, the speedometers worked, but they were noisy due to the dried up lubricant. Replacing both cables is not difficult, and both are readily available at parts stores or online. If the problem is a broken cable, it's easily fixed.
Price now down to $4,000. Two price drops in the first seven days the ad has been up. He definitely wants it gone.
I made a plot of price versus day number for this car so we can predict when the price will drop to zero. We have three data points: Day 1 $5500 Day 4 $4500 Day 6 $4000. We plot day number on the x-axis and price on the y-axis. We get the result below. The equation of the line is shown as is the R-squared value. The closer to 1 is R-squared, the better the fit of the line, so the equation shown is a very good fit. y is the price, and x is the day number. We could rewrite the equation using more useful variable names. price = -301.32 x (day number) + 5788.2 We set price equal to zero and solve for day number. Doing so yields day number = 19.2. September 11 was the first day this ad was posted, so our equation predicts that the price will fall to zero on about the 19th day after that, which is September 20. We shall check the ad on September 20 and see how well our prediction does. On that day the ad should say "free to good home."
While he's not exactly following the predictions above, he continues to drop the price. It is now down to $3500. He also now actually mentions that the car runs and drives. He should have done that from the beginning.
They used to say the best time to buy a car was towards the last day of the month. You should drive up there with a Detroit wad (2 hundred bills wrapped around 50 single’s) and just offer him the whole “bundle” in your pocket. He seems like he needs to move some of that Montana iron.
They still do. But they're talking about buying a NEW car from a new car dealer, not a used car from a private seller. The reason is that new car salesman often have monthly goals, and/or the entire dealership has a monthly goal, and if the end of the month is approaching and whatever goal has not been met, they might start doing things like being more flexible on price or financing or perhaps throwing in some dealer freebees to move the inventory. Back in 2005, we were looking to get a smaller second car, and we were settling on a Nissan Sentra. The dealer sold several brands (small town), and the salesman tried to interest us in a new PT Cruiser. He told us that the dealership had several they were trying to move, and he would have gotten a nice bonus if he could sell one. He was being very flexible on price, but we just didn't want one (my wife thought they looked weird). He was very glad to sell us the Sentra, which we did buy, but he would have been much happier selling us the Chrysler.
