[Sliver]

Originally Posted by I-Hate-Hulse

Really reaching here but there's also the Mini Cooper S 5 door available with a 6 speed.

Unfortunately the AWD and Countryman variants are 8 speed Steptronics.

Too bad the Genesis G70 dropped the manual option for 2022 - could have been a strong contender....

Yeah, I did like the thought of the manual G70, although apparently it wasn't that great of a gearbox. I could have lived with it, I'm sure. Talk about a great car to lease, too, with questionable resale value.

I had a 6-speed Mini Cooper S that I sold last summer. It was funnish, but ultimately just not good enough. Would plow a corner prematurely so I couldn't push it like I felt like I should be able to. A little slower than I wanted. Lazy throttle (I did end up fixing that with some gizmo I installed between the gas pedal and the ECU). I don't know, it was fun for a bit, but I got tired of it really fast.

Originally Posted by 81MC

Legit question- what type of tax write off can you actually get out of a family sedan? I know people do it, but how do they get away with it? Or am I misunderstanding, and your business actually has consumer leasing contracts?

Not an accountant, but this is my understanding.

I have a main corporation that pays my holding company that, in turn, pays me personally.

Everything is taxed as it moves down the line.

So say I make $100 in the main corp. Then to get it out, I have to pay my holding company, where say I'm taxed like 15% or something. Then I have to get it from the holding corp to me personally, where I pay, say, 22%. So that $100 goes to $85, then down to $66.30 before I can spend it personally. Now I'm buying a car with 35% less buying power to do it personally versus through the corp.

Same goes for registration, insurance, maintenance, winter tires, etc. It's a big savings to do it through the corp.

The other thing is you don't want your main corp really turning a profit (or much of one). You have to get the money out of the corp before year end, or that is taxed, too, in addition to your holding company and then you personally.

Can my company justify a vehicle lease or is it a grey area? This wouldn't be grey. I have offsite meetings pretty much daily and would use the company vehicle. It's not one of those gaming-the-systems things. It's a totally legitimate-by-any-measure write-off that would raise no red flags.

Another bonus for me is I would sell my CLS. That I do own personally and outright, so then it frees up the cash I have in that for other things and I no longer pay for insurance, maintenance, etc. with after-tax dollars on that vehicle.

Anyway, I probably fataed up some of how that works and maybe Locke or somebody will chime in, but that's the logic I'm going off of here.

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

This is one of the big reasons I let my E550 go. With its power, it was ungodly quick, quicker than any 4,200 lb. car had any business being. But for all that power and noise, there was part of it that left me woefully unsatisfied. It all came too easily, carpet the accelerator pedal coming out of the apex of a ramp, “oh look, I’m doing 160 again, best slow it down, -yawn-”.

I’m looking into a new winter vehicle and the CLS would be really well suited for that with the AWD. But if you want one car to pull year-round fun car duty, that’s a tough one, I’d sooner stick with the CLS and start looking for a dedicated summer car instead, probably used.

I'm happy somebody can relate because it sounds like a stupid complaint. I know your E550 was tuned to about the same power as mine. And you're right, it's a bit of a yawn once you get used to the gobs of power. Off the line never gets old, mind you, but one time I was merging from Anderson onto Deerfoot North and booted it around the curve. The car started getting kind of squirrely so I let off and was thinking maybe I had a low tire or a suspension issue...nope. It just went from a reasonable speed to a wholly unreasonable speed so insanely quickly that it was just going too fast for the curve. But doing all that numbly without a lot of feedback until it hit uncomfortable feedback. IDK, perfect car for the autobahn, but not necessarily for Calgary.

I'm hoping for a year-round fun car. I usually have a summer car, but I'm just kind of getting tired of fataing around with vehicles all the time. Would be nice just to have one killer all-purpose vehicle that has all my #### in it and I'm not screwing around twice a year storing and un-storing. I also don't like a mess of vehicles at my house because I think it looks a bit trashy to have too many parked all over the place.

What would be the best is a B9 S4 Avant manual. Now that's a year-round fun car.