CarShield Hopes You Never Learn The Math Behind Warranties

 

"Have you ever stopped to think why the average new car warranty is only three years or 36,000 miles?"  Um, no- not really.  But I'm willing to take this as something more than a rhetorical question and just answer it:  The reason why new car warranties generally run three years or 36,000 miles is because that's the time and distance in which a new car can reasonably be categorized as "new."

Coincidentally, it's also a perfectly reasonable length of a car warranty.  In three years a new car loses more than half it's value, but at 36,000 miles most cars are still fairly "new" in terms of wear and tear.  The warranty is a nice shiny but basically worthless trinket that in the vast majority of cases will never be used.  It's a Peace of Mind thing but if you get the oil changed and the other fluids topped off and the tires rotated once a year or so there's no reason why you should EVER need to use it, and I bet more than 90 percent of new car buyers never do. 

Now, if you've got a car you bought new which is now out of warranty, you can do one of two things:  You can put $99 per month into a special savings account as an emergency fund to deal with maintenance and keep your insurance up to date to deal with accidents.  Or you can hand $99 a month (for the base-level warranty) to CarShield and kiss that money goodbye forever, because even if you do have a claim your chances of getting this scammy, regularly-sued company to pay out is next to Zero.

One ad has a guy tell us that he's "saved $2700" due to CarShield replacing his water pump and engine or something, but I bet that $2700 doesn't include the years of $99 payments.  Because when you look at how much this "warranty" costs and how little it actually pays out, well, the Math doesn't Math.

The warranty that comes with the new car is fine.  But buying a new warranty when it expires is just stupid, even if it's NOT CarShield (but it's especially stupid if it is.)  Just take care of the damn car and save your money and stop handing it to a company that seems determined to hire every washed-up B-lister to pitch it's crap to the gullible and math-deficient.  Times are tough.  We have to do better.