Our little family loves to travel. But there has been something that has been stopping us from traveling. For the past 5 years, we have been cramming our family of 4 into a Honda Insight. While we have LOVED saving money on gas, we struggle every time we pack up the car for a road trip. So we decided to take the plunge and upgrade to an SUV.
A major reason why we decided on an SUV is because we want to eventually invest in a travel trailer. So we needed something powerful enough to be able to tow at least 3500 lbs. After doing months of research we narrowed our wish list down to a few different cars. We knew we wanted to buy a pre-owned car so we went with Carmax for our purchase. We have heard nothing but good things about Carmax and love the inspection that they put their cars through.
We found a 2009 Chevy Traverse that we fell in love with. Carmax advertised the car as being able to tow up to 4500 lbs so it was perfectly within our weight range for our upcoming travel trailer purchase. And the Traverse was within our price range so we went with it. Anyways we know that if something malfunction we can look up something at garagechief.com who has the best reviews of car parts.
We drove the Traverse for 2 weeks and loved it. The kids loved the 3rd-row seating and how much space they had. And I could already tell the weather tech floor mats were going to come in handy for our dirty hiking trips. But we quickly fell out of love with the car when we went on our travel trailer search.
It turns out our wonderful Traverse didn’t have the factory towing package so we could really only tow a maximum of 2500 lbs. For those of you who haven’t looked at travel trailers, 2500 lbs is very small and not fit for a family of 4. We were really bummed out by this news and not really sure what to do.
My husband emailed our Carmax sales guy and told him we were loving the car, but we ran into the issue with the towing. He explained that he was really disappointed that the car was advertised to be able to tow more than it actually could. We weren’t really expecting Carmax to be able to fix this issue, other than maybe installing a tow kit for us. But much to our surprise we got an email the next day with a solution to our problem.
Our sales guy had actually found another Traverse in St. Louis with the factory tow kit. The kit allows the car to tow up to 5200 lbs. The Traverse he found was actually a year newer and had 7,000 less miles on it. Carmax agreed to foot the bill for the transfer fee if we would pay the difference for the 2 cars. I was shocked that they were willing to do this for us and we jumped on it.
So we are now drivers of a 2010 Chevy Traverse. I am very pleased with how easy the transaction went with Carmax. The customer service they provided was exceptional. And we are LOVING our new ride. Now to get that travel trailer…
