In the past couple years I've been badly scarred by Michigan rust and will never buy another Michigan car again. So when it came time to get our family hauler three years ago, I flew back to Missouri to pick up a car in the less-rust belt. Good.
But.
Last week my parents in Missouri bought a car in Missouri that they've now noted from Carfax was from a two year lease in... Michigan.
They are slow to act in the first place and more likely to just fret than seek a replacement now, but how big of a deal is it for a '20 Equinox to have had its first two years in the Lansing area? I mostly pay attention to the trucks that bubble after maybe 5 years.
My mom bought a 2015 Equinox here in Missouri new, and last time I looked underneath it, I was less than impressed. The majority of the exhaust was pretty rusty, and alot of the fuel / brake lines were starting to have pits. Alot of the under car body seams were starting to surface rust at the edges.
We only use salt maybe 3 - 4 weeks of the year at most.
In reply to P3PPY :
It depends. How many miles were on it? I drove a MINI for 16 years here in Michigan and it was already four years old when I got it. I put about 5-6,000 miles on each of my vehicles annually and keep them until they're old. They don't rust that fast if you're not commuting on salted roads a lot. My wife's Scion xB is 18 years old this month and it's still going strong.
See there's a weird ...issue with bringing southern cars to the salt belt. They've already been beaten up underneath leaving a lot of exposed raw metal and paint chips. Bringing them into salt hell let's all the salt get into all those nooks and crannies from the beginning and they wind up rotting out faster.
The further north you are in Michigan the less things rust. I have purchased or helped purchase four cars from that state and they were all amazingly clean.
I wouldn't worry about 2 winters. You could get under there with a few cans of fluid film if youre really concerned.
