Keep or sell/trade?

[429CJ-3X2]

My 23 yr old son drives a 2WD '97 Mountaineer V8. His vehicle, but I own it. He's free to do with it as he wants, keep it, trade it, or sell it and use the $$ toward another car, but the next car is completely his responsibility. Yesterday it spun around on a slick road, and he tapped another car. Damage to the other car was minimal, and even he can't tell where the contact was made on his Mountaineer. Today he again complained about having "the only SUV that doesn't have 4WD". I told him he could trade it, or sell it, and get something that has 4WD. Apparently he hadn't thought of that.

I could do just fine without 4WD/AWD doing the driving he does, but he learned to drive at 18 in my '94 4WD Explorer. Got his license at 19 (4 yrs ago). He drives very few miles, mostly the 1 mile each way to church several times a week and the 4 miles to work every day. He's a careful driver, but he doesn't have a lot of driving experience mileage-wise. His 1st vehicle was a nice, fully optioned '97 Mountaineer AWD. He drove that for 9 months, including one winter, then someone pulled out in front of him as he was going 55 mph. That Mounty was totaled. Since he liked that one so much, I rushed out and bought his current Mountaineer, mistakenly thinking all Mountaineers were V8 AWD. I didn't realize until I got this one home that some were in fact 2WD, and after '97 some had V6s. Every winter since he has complained about not having 4WD/AWD.

His Mountaineer has 132,000 miles on it. Virtually no options. Has 1st Gen Explorer style (manual) seats and console. The light gray carpet needs a really good cleaning. The only rust anywhere is on the chrome bumpers.
Edmunds.com says trade-in value is $1046, private sale is $1635, and dealer retail is $2617.

My question is if he decides to get something else, should I give him a reasonable amount, probably between the private sale and dealer retail, to use toward something else and hang onto this myself, or let it go? I clearly don't need it, but it's a V8 Mountaineer in very good condition with only 132,000 miles!

 

[koda2000]

Personally I'd want to lean toward keeping it for my "Ex collection" but I already have 3 Ex's I claim as mine and currently only drive 2 of them with any regularity. I only drive my '01 EB 5.0 when my '01 ST is broken down (which is pretty much a monthly occurrence). I'm not doing my XLT 5.0L any favors by letting it sit. I'd offered the XLT to my idiot son-in-law for $1500 to replace his '97 Sport (which now has 275,000 miles on it) but he's pissed me off lately and hasn't shown any interest in taking the XLT. I guess he'll just keep driving his Sport into the ground, w/out so much as even checking the oil, or replacing his nearly bald tires. When it dies I'll be kicking him out of my house, because the deal four years ago was "you can't live here unless you have a job and pay rent".

If you'll use the Mountaineer, keep it. It's probably only worth around $2K. If you wont use it sell it and give him the money toward whatever he wants to get. My eldest daughter never learned to take care of her vehicle until I made her buy her own car and make the payments on it when she was 23.