About five years ago we and my husband's older brother got together and purchased a Mercedes C-class for my father-in-law.
He loved the car, but being retired and all didn't drive it very much. The car is still very new and has very few miles on it. For various unexpected reasons, my in-laws are now considering moving from Canada back to their native Taiwan in the very near future. They obviously won't be taking the car with them.
My brother-in-law lives in Canada, but he has two pretty new cars and does not want the Mercedes. We also have two cars, but one of them is a VW New Beetle that my husband has had since college, and is slowly breaking down. However, we don't use it very much, and it has sputtered on, so we weren't really planning to replace it unless it suddenly died and the costs to repair are exorbitant. When we do have to replace it, we were considering maybe a small electric car.
My father-in-law wants to give the Mercedes to us, to replace the Beetle. Very generous of him, but.... let's just say owning a luxury car has never been in my aspirations, and I'm starting to fear the possible costs involved.
My husband roughly estimated the moving costs and import duties to be about $2000. Can anyone knowledgeable about cars give me some idea of the ongoing costs of keeping a Mercedes? Is this going to make a significant impact on our finances? On the other hand the initial costs are definitely less than buying another car, so it's hard for me to gauge which is more costly. This is further complicated by the fact that I'm not even sure when in the future we would've bought another car anyway........
I really just need someone to talk this over with, since ultimately I don't think I'm going to have much say on whether or not we do this >_<. I know nothing about luxury cars. Is this going to be a nice reliable new car that we can enjoy or a possible money drain?