VW GLI, Acura ILX... what else am I forgetting?

In reply to bobzilla :

Oh, yeah, there's plenty of used ones on the market, but he wants to go new in this case. He'll have the car for a good while and a warranty is a nice thing, and also he'll have to buy a car on short notice and that makes things hard, it might be different if we had time to go all over the place looking at used examples, to wait for just the right car to come up on the market, etc. but in this case it's a lot more practical just to get a brand new one from a dealer and get exactly what he wants with no worries about what the previous owner may have done to it. 

Also, fwiw I'm always scared when I see a performance car on the used market after only a year or two, as often as not that means there was either something wrong with it or that it was repo'd from an irresponsible owner who may have abused it in other ways. 

In reply to Max_Archer :

Well with the warranty about to get cut down a bunch. It's the right time to buy a 2019 GLI

Max_Archer said:

In reply to bobzilla :

Oh, yeah, there's plenty of used ones on the market, but he wants to go new in this case. He'll have the car for a good while and a warranty is a nice thing, and also he'll have to buy a car on short notice and that makes things hard, it might be different if we had time to go all over the place looking at used examples, to wait for just the right car to come up on the market, etc. but in this case it's a lot more practical just to get a brand new one from a dealer and get exactly what he wants with no worries about what the previous owner may have done to it. 

Also, fwiw I'm always scared when I see a performance car on the used market after only a year or two, as often as not that means there was either something wrong with it or that it was repo'd from an irresponsible owner who may have abused it in other ways. 

Keep in mind they have a 5/60 b2b warranty that transfers. I wouldn’t hesitate to buy used. 

In reply to bobzilla :

Yeah, were it me buying for myself I'd definitely at least consider it, but my dad really wants to just go new and get it over with. He's also pretty set on the GLI at this point anyway, the more I talk to him about it the less interested he seems in anything else.

I replaced our F150 Supercrew with a GTI.  It's got as much, if not more interior space inside with the seats down than the Ford.  To be fair, if he regularly has four people in the GTI, the space is tighter.  Less than four, though, and Bob's your uncle.

At any rate, he's coming from an S2000?  He's obviously been managing Costco runs just fine :).

I have been blown away by how good the GTI is.  I am sure the GLI is almost as good -- does it come with the LSD like the GTIs?

So things have kinda changed. Turns out the insurance is giving my dad more than he thought, and that pushes the budget up to something like 35k before TTL. A Giulia suddenly seems like a pretty viable option, especially because it turns out that you can get pretty insane deals on unsold '18 models, I just went and looked at a well-specced Ti Lusso in exactly the color combo he'd want and it was listed at under 35k despite having had a sticker price of like 47k. 

In reply to ZOO :

I think the look of the GTI is also a factor for him, a small hatch just isn't really his style. 

It's kind of a long story but he was doing Costco etc. with another car he no longer has access to. It's the lack of that other car that's why we'd already been looking into trading the S2K in before this all happened.

Yeah, the GLI gets LSD as well, at least on the top-spec Autobahn trim, which is the one he'd get.

In reply to Max_Archer :

All the GLI's for 2019(post refresh) get the diff. 

I'd highly recommended that over the Alfa.

Genesis G70 2.0T?  This is probably the same car as the Stinger, but as far as I know its one of the only RWD Sedans one can buy with any sort of performance in its bones new for $35k.  LSD is available, but I'm not sure if its an option on the base trim.

Solid warranty.

Still a Guilia for that price seems awesome. 

In reply to spacecadet :

The GLI's definitely the "safe bet" choice here, it's just tough to look at it and then look at the Alfa and want to go with the VW. 

In reply to ProDarwin :

I think I'd take the Stinger over the Genesis. Seems like you can actually get a base Stinger GT for 35k as well. I actually quite like them, they remind me a lot of a modern Jensen Interceptor, and I also feel like they're the first truly successful Korean car design that isn't just a mix and match carbon copy of various foreign car bits. The Genesis is a lot more generic and I really don't like the front end, too. 

But yeah, that Giulia is gonna be hard to pass up if it's still available when he's ready to buy. 

Max_Archer said:

In reply to spacecadet :

The GLI's definitely the "safe bet" choice here, it's just tough to look at it and then look at the Alfa and want to go with the VW. 

That's why I didn't even drive a Giulia.  If I didn't drive it, I'd never know how much I really wanted it, right?  And for a car I plan to keep a minimum of 10 years, my brain was seriously arguing with my heart over that one.

In reply to Duke :

Yeah, and it ended up proving too hard to resist, he bought it today. Aside from just how cool it was, though, it was just so much more car for the money than anything else, thanks to the massive discount on this new '18 model. We'll see how it holds up, reports so far seem pretty good as long as you steer clear of the Quadrofoglio. The cool factor certainly didn't hurt either, especially the red and black interior with full leather dash and contrast stitching and everything, blows my mind that it's standard on a sub-50k Alfa when it's a massively expensive option on 75k+ M3s and Porsches.