I went to another dealership to see what they'd give me. $18.5K. They said they checked to see what '05 HAHs were auctioned for in the previous week. One went for $12K and the other went for $22K. But with gas prices starting to creep up, both dealers told me to expect the value of my HAH to start to rise. They both said
www.kbb.com is a pretty accurate source to see what to expect from a trade-in. But not for hybrids. Their values tend to fluctuate from month to month, dependent on the cost of gasoline. One dealer said if gas goes above $3/gal, I'll probably get really close to $27K for it. Maybe not all the way up to $27K, but really close.
After thinking aboout it, I've decided to keep the car. After all, I originally planned to keep this car 10-15 years. Might as well stick to the plan. And speaking of longevity, I just did my 30K maintenance today. Everything but the checks underneath the car. I'll do those tomorrow when I get the car up on a rack to rotate the tires. Everything looks really good in the car so far. The service manual recommends an engine air filter change every 30K miles. But since I live in dusty AZ, I decided to change them out every 15K. At 15K, it didn't look that dirty. And now at 30K, it doesn't look dirty again. I still changed them out, but I was expecting a mess in there. On the other hand, both times, the cabin air filter was filthy! So much crap stuck to it! I change that one out every 15K, as well. I've been doing my oil changes at every 5K, but for the past six oil changes, the oil seems to always come out fairly clean. Since I'm using Mobil 1 oil and oil filters, I might start doing oil changes every 7,500 instead. I keep reading how well synthetics perform and see quite a few people reporting 10K oil change intervals with no ill effects. Not only is it nice to be using less fuel by driving a hybrid, but it would be nice to use less oil, too. Thinking back, I should have taken pictures of those air filters for you guys to see. I'll have to do that at my 45K mile servicing.
So even though I decided not to trade in the HAH, I'm still going to move forward to buy the Odyssey. I started looking at a '99 which was really cheap. But I wasn't comfortable with a 134K mile vehicle that I didn't know the maintenance history on. So I looked at an '03 with 68K miles. Nice vehicle, almost bought it, but when I drove the '05 with 19K miles on it, I changed my mind! It's amazing how much nicer the '05 was compared to the '03. Don't get me wrong, the '03 was nice, but the '05 was better. So now I'm working on gathering up the money and should have my wife's new Ody by the middle of next week. Unfortunately, they didn't have any Odys with VCM on the lot. That would have been nice. But, at least it gets better mileage than the Escape my wife is currently driving.