Busted car - sell, donate, or what?

My wife's 2011 Nissan Rogue's tranny blew up. 220k miles or so. From what I've read, these CVT trannys cannot be rebuilt or repaired, which totally blows my mind. The car is in fine shape and the engine runs great. There's plenty of life left in this thing.

New tranny: approx $4k before labor install. Not happening.

I hate to junk a car like this but I have limited options, especially up here in Gilpin.

I can sell it as is for whatever I can get or donate it to one of the places that takes them for Blue Book value for tax purposes.

How do I determine if it makes for us to donate it vs. selling for cash?

For example, say I get $1,000 cash for it. Great. But if the Blue Book is $2,500, would that be better? The new tax laws with standard deduction changes and shit has me jacked up. I'm not a genius with this.

I could be way off on this, but... With the new standard deduction levels of $24000 for married/filing jointly you'll need a shitload of itemized deductions to beat that. If you don't have in excess of $24k in deductions I don't think donating it will help on taxes. Unless there's a way to donate it that takes it right off the top of the tax bill...and I don't think there is. Shouldn't be a difficult question for someone who actually knows about this stuff.

I don?t know exactly what ?blew up? in the transmission but when my wife?s 2010 Rogue transmission was acting up they replaced the valve body and installed an external cooler and we were good to go. So some things can be repaired on the CVT.

On really hot days her Rogue would pretty much lay down and not go anywhere because the transmission temperature was getting too hot and it was going into some sort of limp mode to protect itself.

40K+ miles since the repairs and no issues since.

As far as sell or donate, even if you do itemize your deductions I doubt an extra $2500 off your gross income is going to save you more than a few hundred dollars on your taxes. I?d look at selling it or trading it in.

Make sure you can donate a non-running vehicle. I tried a few years ago on an old Xterra (first gen) my younger son had and blew the engine in, he couldn't afford to replace the motor at that time. No organization would take it. I ended up selling it for $500 to a guy in an off road group that wanted it for the parts, came and picked it up. I was glad just to get rid of if from sitting at the house.

IRS Publication 561, Determining the Value of Donated Property, https://www.irs.gov/publications/p561 describes some of the methods of determining Fair Market Value.
A rule of thumb in the recent past has been whatever the charity can get from the sale of the donated vehicle is the Fair Market Value for your deduction.
So, is the charity a better sales person than you?

With the new standard deductions, I'm in agreement with most here in that you likely won't benefit by donating it.

I would try and get code from the OBDII plug. See what code it is throwing and if that code specifies a particular malfunction. See if it signifies a fairly minor repair and can be easily fixed.

I'm very impressed by the mileage tbh. I was under the impression that most CVT's begin to fail sometime between mile 60,000 and mile 120,000 on an Altima. Maybe I'm off on that? I was planning on selling mine somewhere around 60-70,000 mark because of that transmission expense.... and I've heard it's often above $6k.

I've heard many of them suffer greatly immediately after the fluid service and end up failing. Damned if you don't, damned if you do. Awesome low HP transmissions while they work, though.

If you had time or a teenage boy you could probably part it out on ebay.

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Originally Posted by FoxtArt

I'm very impressed by the mileage tbh. I was under the impression that most CVT's begin to fail sometime between mile 60,000 and mile 120,000 on an Altima. Maybe I'm off on that? I was planning on selling mine somewhere around 60-70,000 mark because of that transmission expense.... and I've heard it's often above $6k.

I've heard many of them suffer greatly immediately after the fluid service and end up failing. Damned if you don't, damned if you do. Awesome low HP transmissions while they work, though.

If you had time or a teenage boy you could probably part it out on ebay.

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You are absolutely on the mark.
We did CVT transmission fluid change with Idemitsu fluid (forum people said oem). It was very simple. If she still kept the vehicle, I would have done 36k fluid change.

Most rural fire departments will take donations like this. They need the vehicles for extraction training.