@iced wrote:
@dfwxjer wrote:I'm even more glad I bought the 6 oil change package from BMW a few months back. My warranty and original maintenance plans were expiring so they offered 6 oil changes for $250. The BMW dealership is awesome so this was an absolute steal. I schedule the service, pull in the bay at the scheduled time, they have my loaner car pulled up in the service bay, I hop out of my car and in to the loaner, and head out until they text me that it's done. They do a full service video highlighting anything that needs attention and then I pick it up with no bill.
No dealing with DIY nonsense or Costco oil restrictions.
That is a steal. The rate from the dealership service center for my BMW is just over $300 per change, though I don't qualify for the service packages (car is too new) so I'm stuck with a la carte.
When I was a younger man in 2003 or so I was driving a small Chevy Corsica. Oil was 79 cents a quart, a new oil filter was just a hair over $1.
That's a <$5 (even with tax) oil change in your parking spot or $11 at Walmart. That was a very easy car to do an oil change on.
The cars now need much more advanced oils, but the cars also don't last very long. You wonder if there's even a point changing oil very often on a car that's only designed to last 3-4 years before major problems that exceed the value of the car begin.
When you might be driving the car for 15-20 years if you're lucky, you want peace of mind knowing you're doing the upkeep, but when they sandwich together vital parts of the powertrain using cheap plastic and the very cheapest possible metals where plastic won't even last the term of the lease they want you to get, it's like oil changed become a "compliance" issue. You have to show you had one often enough to not get hit with another fine when you turn it in, but that's the only reason.
These dealerships will happily take a lease turn in after 3 years on a car they know is only designed to last 3 years without problems, call it "certified" and try to pawn it off on someone else, because they know it works. They know there's always "another one born every minute".
Eventually what's going to happen is all the older cars that were designed well and maintained will die because even those will die. The only thing left in the system will be the garbage they make now, there won't be any chance of finding a good car, and they'll have everyone on a "car subscription".
I can't justify playing the "am I going to get a good beater or someone else's problems" game.
The car was always sucking up all of my savings. I'd save a bit of money and something else would happen to the car. Or Progressive would have their hand out again. In some states you can just drive it forever if the catalytic converter goes out. You just delete the converter and run a straight pipe out and there's no emissions station and nobody cares.
But this isn't Indiana. They actually check the god cursed thing here to see if it's working or not, so then you have another $1600 repair and pray to God that the one you get in the aftermarket makes the car shut up and pass, which is not guaranteed. Ouch.
Illinois is so worried about air quality that they make everyone in Chicago with a car get in the car and emit emissions to drive two hours to an emissions station, to check the emissions. 
Meanwhile, we're letting AI data centers that use the amount of fossil fuel power of an entire country plug into a grid that's not built for this kind of abuse, and that's fine.
This is the government that said we had a very serious climate emergency and we had to worry about what kind of light bulbs we use.
For the record, I am concerned about CO2 emissions but it turns out the people who said they are, aren't. There's a lot of pay to look the other way going on here.
It's always one standard for them and another standard for everyone else, like the leadership in France calling personal air conditioning a scourge while air conditioning a taxpayer-funded government palace.
When something starts giving you problems like that every 5-8 months it's unpredictable extortion with wheels. It's not even transportation anymore.
I have a free bus pass. I never got rid of it when I moved out of Chicago the first time even though PACE didn't run very many lines where I lived.
I'm glad I always kept it current because the decision to sign up for it 10 years ago when I had a car that was reliable and cost $20 a month to insure just "because I qualified" is the reason I can get around so easily now and why I don't have a disaster on wheels competing with rent and grocery money.