Just bought my 2011 Yaris which I adore but I'm having second thoughts..

[CTScott]

Originally Posted by AlyCat

Hi everyone! I'm new to the site and excited about my new shiny.. been poking around the forums all night :)

I just bought a 2011 auto 5-Door Liftback a couple days ago which I think was for a good deal.. I bargained the dealer down to 11k and the car only has 14k miles on it with one owner, power, cruise control, but one minor accident. It was either that or a new 2012 for 16k (though I didn't try bargaining with them) from a Toyota dealer with all the included two year maint. etc. The Toyota dealer offered me more for my trade-in and also had the 1k new graduate incentive, but I really liked the style of the 2011 better and I still get unlimited car washes and oil changes for life (except that dealer is a little far away) even though the included warranty is a little shorter.

I think I might've gotten swindled on an additional protection plan they offered me though. It comes with a lifetime warranty at least because they use something different? I really don't remember everything she told me, but it includes undercoating protection, rust protection, environmental paint sealant, interior sealant, and they're also throwing in a lojack and this car care kit (with five bottles of cleaners and conditioners and free refills of the exterior renewer stuff) for $1694. I had all kinds of rust and paint issues with my old 2002 Corolla so this seemed appealing. She also told me that lojack automatically adds $1k to your car, so that whenever I decide to trade in my car again they'd tack on another $1k to the trade-in value just because of lojack and the lojack is good for ten years.

Don't get me wrong, I love the car but I'm not sure about the protection plan. I don't even know if it's too late to back out of or not, but I haven't had any of the work done yet so maybe it's not too late. Or is it worth it? I couldn't find a lot of info online about the $1k value for lojack thing that she told me. I'm not particularly car savvy so I don't know how to take care of any of the sealants myself, but they did say it has a lifetime warranty. Thanks everyone!

I personally don't think that those protection plans are anything other than a money maker on modern cars. The sales manager at the dealership that I bought my 09 Yaris and 11 Tacoma from is a friend of a friend, and when we were going over the numbers on both cars, he purposefully threw that brochure in the trash.