I needed a family car. The wife's Jeep is too tight for two car seats for me, SWMBO doesn't mind it, but it's not for me. Car seats barely fit in the ECSB GMT400, and towing capacity is a little lower than I'd like, fuel economy is also a little lower than I'd like. AC In the 400 blows cold (under 40 at cruise) but not hard.
I wanted something that corrected all those and was cheap, because I'm cheap.
GMT800 Suburban to the rescue. It does everything I want perfectly. So I started the hunt. It was very hard to find the options I wanted, 4x4, efans, rear buckets, DVD player, and sunroof. I looked at probably 20, standard marketplace problems. I got sick of looking so I spread my search to 200 miles and decided I was buying something Saturday.
Lo and behold a very high mileage 05 Escalade ESV Platinum popped up about 4 and a half hours away, in the one place I didn't want to drive. So at 9.24pm we arranged a meet, and I hit the road at about 7 am the next day.
Got there and it was considerably rougher than expected but after a 2 minute test drive to verify all for gears still reside inside the transmission, and a half assed bend down to make sure everything wasn't rusty (one thing I won't deal with), we agreed on a price, which was only about half of what I was wanting to spend, so I'll put up with a lot.
I filled it up, very slowly (more on that later) checked trans fluid and oil and drove it 4 hours non stop back home fueled purely by blind faith.
It made it. Seems to run decent, so I parked it and went to have dinner with SWMBO and her friends since it's her Bday, and she just spent 8 hours of it sitting in a car so I could drag home another pile of E36 M3.
Here she is in all her glory
So the pros are she made it, and it's a 6.0 and maybe you could call a 4l65e a pro compared to a 60e. Being a platinum it has some weird features like heated and vented front and rear seats, so even my rear passengers can have cool air blown lightly between their cheeks, heated and cooled cup holders, a DVD player for the 2nd and one for the 3rd row, and a bunch of trims pieces that are platinum only and somewhat valuable.it came with stock wheels and most importantly it was cheap and has frigid AC
Cons. Its beat. Looks like someone E36 M3 on the carpet. Everything is filthy. The suspension or something makes it pretty unhappy when you hit a bump. Got a couple whiskey dents. 280k miles. It will only take .5 gallons of fuel at a time, and I'm told it has a new canister which means there is probably charcoal all through the evap and vent lines which is a PITA to deal with. I'm sure there are many things wrong with it, I haven't discovered and its another project that I didn't need.
Next up is cleaning, then shake down, stay tuned and join me in my misery
