We've got a 15 Edge as the family hauler and its been an absolute mess for maintenance its whole life. I'd intended to keep it to 200k, but Im thinking about offloading it early (at 145k now) just so I don't get stuck repalcing anything extremely expensive. Also being a Cleveland plant engine, the cylinder cracking issue always worries me (although there are no signs of it currently, I hate to see more and more people posting on the Edge forums that its happened to them - kinda like the LS4 4T65 thing).

Honestly we'd have replaced it earlier if not for the major supply chain issues the last 2 years. Ive got no interest in paying over sticker (with dealers adding a bunch of trash I don't want) or buying a car sight unseen (with dealers not having a single version of a given model to test drive). However lately it seems like inventory is starting to pick up across the board (perhaps due to rising interest rates driving some people away). So I'm going to start heading out to dealers to see whats out there. Im ok holding off for another year or two if needed, but I'd really like to get out of this thing once car buying gets back to something that resembles normal.

Our #1 pick from specs alone is a Traverse as we want something a little bigger than our Edge (but not way more expensive like a Tahoe). This Ford was also our first ever venture outside of GM and I wasnt happy across the board (with reliability, safety, or DIY serviceability).

So my main questions are - does anyone here have a 2G Traverse? How about a LFY or 9t65 vehicle? I'll admit that I'm a bit confused in researching the engine as there seem to be so many variants of the 3.6 and I'm not sure how similar they are. The 9t65 also worries me a tad as I did see a NHTSA report about GM starting to replace transmissions as a whole if there are any internal defects rather than letting cars sit for months waiting on unobtainable parts. It worries me a bit that it may be a problematic transmission if there's already letters of that level out there.


How about any other similar vehicles in that size / price class? Our #2 is an Atlas to check out, but Im admittedly a bit picky. No Ford (ever again), no CVT, no hybrid, no I4 turbo.

 

I hear you on the Ford thing, I ventured away from GM back in the late 80's bought a Mercury Cougar that my wife liked it replaced a Camaro, next up were some Aero Stars and Pickups that were company vehicles. Each one seem to have something go bad on it with less than 75K, head gaskets just miserable to take care of. My next door neighbor was the Ford dealer so that is how I got into them.
So he was good about stuff and was a traditional Salesman WWII veteran and all that. Then he passed away and his son was difficult to deal with.
I got out of Fords when my wife was driving the Aero Star and on this icy day in 1997 she slid off the street at a RR crossing the front wheel dropped in between the rails and they couldn't get it out. East bound Coal train went in the sliding door and took it up the tracks a 1/4 mile, a once 7 passenger van was now 3 inline.
No dealing with the ford guys and the GM dealer let us use with he option to purchase a Pontiac Montana, I bought that and it was a great vehicle. One day some friends of mine were giving me same static and asked ( how do you get away with that living next door to the Ford dealer and driving a GM now? ) my reply was ( Well those Fords just don't hold up) after a few seconds they got it!?!?
But seriously when you look like the real driver number # you shouldn't be in a fFord.
Now about the Traverse both my son and my Daughter have them ( my daughter treats her cars like a Tool and it now has 100K on it and no issues to speak of. new tires about it. This is a 2013. My son had a 2015 Traverse pretty car Pearl White with a visible roof top that was a great vehicle for him until a drunk driver hit him and he took the insurance buy out.
I have a 2013 Equinox and we love it, no issues 104k on it. new tires and regular maintenance, and now we purchased a 2020 Blazer in 2020 it now has 25k on it and we love it. it has the 4 with a Turbo and has plenty of power and fantastic gas mileage.


Looks like this the Color is Red hot Red.

 

Thanks for the reply! I bet that post train wreck was a real sight to see - how scary!


Its been an interesting few days. A local dealer had a Traverse in transit almost exactly like we would've optioned it if given free reign. I emailed them a week+ ago asking when it would arrive. When he mentioned they didn't know, I asked to be notified as soon as they did so we could come see it. In the meantime, we set up an appt for 1st thing Saturday morning to test drive the others in stock (bare bones models we'd never consider, but at least wanted to try the platform as the engine + transmission is the same across all).

Thursday night after work I refreshed my browser window to take a look at the one in transit again. To my surprise- it is and theyve got a bunch of pictures in the day time. It was too late to drive over, so I went to bed. No clue how many days it had been up for. Next morning I wake up and before the sales people roll in, I refresh it again and the car is gone (clearly its sold). I email the sales guy to ask what happened and he said it "came in and sold already". WTF. He made some garbage excuse about it not even coming to their dealer as there's another across town with the same name + shared website (how was i supposed to know they sent me to the wrong branch when I clicked on the info link on the car I wanted).

Then he says he didn't keep a close eye on it because he didn't think we were serious about buying or he would've had us on the front burner. I told him to forget the whole thing, we'll find another salesman and dealer because he apparently had too many front burner deals going to waste time with us.


Interesting turn of events. We started the test drive hunt Friday night. A storm rolled through in the afternoon, but quickly dried up after dropping temps from the 100s to the 80s. Opened the sunroof on the Edge (one of those monster edge to edge glass panels), and as soon as the shade retracts, I instantly notice it - the sliding pane is completely shattered. Luckily its 2 laminated panes and the inner one is intact, but now I'm stuck as there's no way I can trade this in in this shape (and take a beating for dealer rates on replacement).

Inspected it closely and there's no damage at all - no chips, craters, etc- just a bunch of wavy edge to edge cracks. Also never heard it break while driving. Do some searching online and apparently spontaneous destruction is somewhat common - especially on the 1st year cars like mine. Awesome- one last kick in the groin, huh Ford? Looks like the part is $1k, and I'll throw it in myself, but it delays us trading in for awhile as the part supposedly takes 15 business days to arrive.

Breaking this up into 3 posts as its getting long. This post was the backstory, next one is the dealers.

 

So we stopped at a different Chevy first as that was our #1 pick. No new Traverses at all, only 1 used that was way different than what we wanted. Test drove it and were pretty happy, but wanted to find one closer to the options we wanted.

VW was next as our 2nd choice. Their selection was enormous - they had probably 25 Atlas or Atlas Cross Sport on the lot, which was a welcome change. Drove a 4 cyl and v6 model and liked them quite a bit. The only turnoff is that apparently due to the chip shortage, they completely delete options off (including safety features we really wanted). Its discounted on the tag quite a bit, but TBH I'd rather have the features than the money.

Stopped by Carmax after that to sit in a whole bunch of stuff back to back. They ended up not having much with reasonably low mileage (the only thing we'd consider - but preferred new), but it gave us a chance to try half a dozen OEMs in one spot.

Did end up liking the Palisade (being a 90s kid, I've got a natural opposition to Kia / Hyundai thinking of the absolute garbage they used to sell back then - so I'd never even considered them), so we decided to swing by their main local dealer. That didn't go well. Not a single person ever came out to talk to us (they weren't busy either) and every single Palisade had a +$5k market adjustment right off the bat - all dozen or so of them. Put it way too far out of our range.

Hit a few other dealers but they just didn't click at all for us.

Woke up the next morning with 2 stops left - yet another Chevy dealer to actually see the right year of car / new, and inquire about time line to order. Salesman said 8 weeks (ok, let's do it), then the manager came over and said that's wrong- its likely 6 months +. I don't know why the delta, but I dont have any interest in waiting indefinitely for a car.

The last stop of the day was Nissan to check out a Pathfinder (as they finally stopped the CVT which was my main reason for not buying a Nissan last time when we came down to Murano vs Edge). We really liked it a lot, especially the seats. It fit the bill perfectly, but was more expensive as you had to get a higher trim line to get the options we wanted (whereas Chevy you can get the lower trim with the options we want in add on packages). They also didn't have any inventory for lower trim models.

Went to talk it over during brunch. While there, I built our ideal car on Chevy's website again and did a search for local inventory. Ended up finding one as a near exact match 6 hours away in another state. Called them immediately, they still had it and they sent over a price quickly (which thankfully had no market markup as we've seen several dealers do by now). Ended up being $4500 cheaper than the Nissan + I had $1500 of GM card earnings - so a $6k delta. Even with the drive + overnight hotel, it was a no brainer to go with the Chevy - especially since it was almost exactly what I wanted.

So we ended up with a 2023 Traverse LT - almost exactly what we started off to get from the beginning (oh and this broken Ford that I now have to fix and sell...)

 

Last post is just the oddities of car shopping this time:

-Its interesting how severely inventory levels fluctuate from dealer to dealer. Some brands had packed lots - some dealers (like the last Chevy one we visited) - barely had 10 vehicles in total to sell. They'd spaced their used cars out to try to fill in their main lot (they probably had 25 or so of them) and then filled the back of the main sales lot with all employee cars.

-I see some brands shipping cars without parts for later retrofit (like ours) and others that just delete the items out of a package completely.

-The market adjustment was the worst to see. I get dealers are making less now due to lower volumes, but I think its disgusting to overcharge customers for 10%+ market adjustments. I really think some of these places with fairly empty lots but that are still getting a steady stream of cars to replenish sales would like to see the market stay this way forever.

-I was much more disappointed in car salesman this time than I ever have been. With the exception of one person, every single salesman we talked to either had severel knowledge gaps or provided blatantly wrong info. I get I've probably done more research on the Traverse than a typical salesman would- but we're getting into brands ive never even been on a lot of before and they're still struggling to answer the basics. A few highlights:

-One salesman told me they have 0 visibility into what has been ordered / what is coming next to their dealer. Thats 100% false as I can literally pull it off their website (as seems to be true with most dealers as they now try to bolster their new inventory search list with in transit / on order vehicles).

-That last Chevy salesman was particularly a mess. Had no idea what trim levels existed on the Traverse. After telling us 8 weeks to order, he tried building what we wanted on the Chevy site so we could get a quote on an out the door price. He told us certain options weren't available on the low trim we wanted (even though I could clearly see them on the screen), and when I pushed back - he just slid the mouse to me to build it. It was worse than autozone...

-The level of complete inaccuracy on key details (hp, mpg, liters, towing capacity, etc) was surprising. It drives me nuts when people state something as a confident fact only to see it doesnt at all match up with what the sticker says a few minutes later. I can see rounding something like 290 hp off to an even 300, but one guy was off on nearly 25% on both cars we were looking at on his lot.


To be fair, I've never sold cars before so I've got no idea what it's like. I imagine the vast majority of people are relatively ignorant about car details and are just shopping for a specific size or to hit a specific price. But I did work in car audio for a few years in college and while on the selling side, I took pride in knowing the features + specs by heart of several different models and several different brands to help the customer make an informed choice based on fact, not guesses.

It seems like they're all fairly slow with customers, so you'd think you'd take your first week or so on the job and soak in as many details as you could off the product manuals.

 

Wow that is quite the experience for sure.
I visited 3 dealers for the Blazer my local guy who only likes to sell white cars or grey cars, has little or no inventory and you don't know if they are open or closing the doors.

So we visited another about 30 miles away, they had a red one that sold us on the Red Blazer but it was all wheel drive and we didn't want that.

A week later the wife said lets go to Lincoln and check out cars. In the mean time I had found a few online that match the package we wanted.
I called one dealer that everyone said go see this guy. Told them what I wanted and was ready to buy.

So We went to the 1st one in Lincoln told the guy what we wanted Chevy had a promo of 12% off or 15% off and I thought that was all they would do.
He came back said there were 5 of them he could possibly get and gave me a price that beat the Chevy discounted offers. $500.00 dollars down and it was refundable if we didn't get the one we wanted.
The wife wanted to go to another dealer in that same town and she had bought our Equinox from but they were the pressure guys. I said no we are getting this one and the Salesguy was like Wow.

It did come with the Factory floor liners Weather Tech with Chevy labels When it came in we went to get it and he talked us through all the features and then set up the wifes I phone which I don't have one of those anymore so I don't have that feature.

It has about 25k on it now gets good mileage on trips took it to Texas last winter.
One thing that you need to keep in mind if you ever use the WiFi on my Chevrolet and then not keep it. if you want to use you maps feature on the phone it will try to keep connecting and it will lock up.
So I always shut off the wifi on the phone when we drive to avoid that snafu.

Any way we just love the thing.

 

Funny you mention that- I'm surprised how predominant white was. Id bet 50% of the various SUVs we saw were white. Next most common was black, followed by gray. Virtually nothing for any other colors. How boring...

To make things worse, my wife is 100% against black or white (I agree on black - wrapped my first and only black car ever in orange). She was ok with gray, but wasn't excited with it. I hate to spend that kind of money when one of the main things you see everyday is just OK.

The one we got is blue.

I do think its interesting that we didn't come across any high pressure sales. Closest we got was Nissan where they brought over the manager as we were ready to walk out the door, but we told him it wasn't worth his time to make us a better offer. At that point we still had 3 contenders for the lead spot and needed to get a price for the Chevy.

I just figured we'd argue price later if we picked that model. It is true we didn't go back due to price (even though this ended up on our top 2 list), but they never would've been able to make up the huge gap in price - especially not with only 2 on the whole lot.

Interesting thanks for the tip! Our dealer didn't really show us much. He did try, but I had my fill at that point.

We started the car search that day about 8AM. After the long drive, we got there at 6PM and were there until 830 PM (an hour and a half after they closed). They only had 2 people for doing paperwork and we had 4 or 5 people already in queue when we arrived.

So by the time we got done with that, I was beyond done with dealing with cars.

One interesting note, they'd converted about half of their paperwork (including the main sales sheet) to digital. They had a desk top sized monitor for signing documents and we received them on USB instead of paper. Thought that was kinda neat.