Pointless Appointment

We have a 2022 Subaru Outback.  We leased it this past July when the lease for our 2019 Nissan Murano was up.  Due to the pandemic, there has been a decided lack of new vehicles to lease (or purchase), and even used vehicles were hard to come by for a time.  We were able to overstay the lease on the Nissan for an extra month while we were searching for its replacement.  If push came to shove, we wanted to keep the Murano, as it had done us well for three years and had all the bells and whistles we liked.  But Nissan, like all car manufacturers, was also aware that vehicles were at a premium, and they could get an excellent resale value off one that had been lightly used over the three years we had it.  So, we needed a replacement.

Along with a new vehicle come the required maintenance appointments.  Even though we don’t drive all that much, we’re still required to do things like oil changes, tire rotations, and the like.  The fact that we drive our vehicles far less than the expected 10-12,000 miles a year (on average, we probably only go on one vacation trip a year, I work within a mile or two of where I live, and that adds up to somewhere between 5 and 7,000 miles a year driven.  So at the end of our lease, the vehicle has had two oil changes, and 2 tire rotations, and it’s not quite ready to have anything significant go wrong with it that would require a Herculean effort (let alone an Ioleusian effort, points if you get the reference) generally means the dealership gets a sweet deal when we turn it in before getting another car.  Any vehicle we’ve had has easily retained its value, which alone is a good thing.

Since we leased it more than six months ago, Subaru requires it to have an ad hoc inspection, perhaps an oil change, or even a tire rotation if enough miles have been put on it.  We get periodic reminders from the dealership, they’re sent out on a schedule and I’ve been a bit lax in getting the car to them.  I finally managed to get an appointment for Thursday, and made sure that I had the day off to get to it.  Once I was there however, they were a bit curious as to -why- I was there, since the vehicle only had about 2600 miles on the odometer.  I explained about the mailings, the ‘understanding’ that it was required to be seen at 6 months, and the guy I spoke to (very nice guy, couldn’t stop apologizing for supposedly wasting my time) agreed with me that it didn’t yet require any maintenance.  As a matter of fact, he said that his service bays were heavily backed up and I was probably going to be waiting a long time for what would amount to being a quick look under the hood.  So why bother?  I asked him if he could put it into the system that indeed I was there, so I wouldn’t continue to get the reminders.  He said he couldn’t do anything about that, they were sent out according to the manufacturer’s recommendation, and that was that.  I thanked him and left.

At least I didn’t have to pay any money for the experience.  That’s always a plus in my book.

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