How hard could this be?

We’ve begun our search for a Suburban or Yukon XL. There are lots of them out there and I regularly see them for sale at the local dealers. How hard can this be to find one that we like with the 9 seat configuration? It turns out, really hard.

I decided to start on Kijiji with a search for all of Saskatchewan. This is my favourite place to start looking for used cars and I often peruse the used car ads in my spare time. I had decided to start with looking for a Suburban, since they’re more common than the Yukon XL. After entering some basic search criteria I was feeling pretty good about my ability to find a vehicle for us. But then I saw the search results.

None. I was gutted. How could I not find a Suburban? I’ve never not found at least one vehicle I was looking for!

Ok, what about within 1000km? Only 3 came back in my search results.

Nationally? I could convince myself to fly somewhere to pick up a good used one or have it shipped in. Kijiji informed me that there were 6. In all of Canada! And most had more than 200,000 km on them.

This isn’t how I thought the search would go. I knew they were pretty rare, but this was ridiculous.

I decided to try Autotempest, a US vehicle search engine that I had been hearing about a lot over the past couple of years that is able to search across several websites at the same time. I looked into whether they could search Canadian addresses as well, and they can! I put in a search for any distance from my postal code for a Suburban and keyword “9 passenger” and I got 8 results! Except it wasn’t actually 8 because 6 were posted on both Cars.com AND ebay Motors, so it was actually only 5 unique ones

All of the results were in the US and when I started looking, most were only 8 seaters.

Then I searched for the Yukon XL. I knew that the Yukon XL offered the features we wanted, such as a power liftgate and upgraded sound system, that were not offered on the Suburban. Knowing that I had decent luck searching for 9 passenger Suburbans I was feeling pretty positive about this. Then I saw the search results. In the ENTIRE USA there was only 1 for sale that could be found on AutoTempest.

Seriously? 1?

We talked and decided that this just wasn’t working for us. In all of Canada and the USA there were only about 13 for sale. And of those 13 we wouldn’t even entertain most of them because they had too high of mileage or were too old for what we were looking for.

Then we started to think “maybe we should buy brand new”, even though both of us had just recently said that we would never buy brand new again. Even so, I decided to pull up the GMC configurator and spec a new Yukon XL with the features we wanted. After trying a few different configurations with the features I wanted then started trying to figure out how to choose the 9 seat option. After trying a a number of different things I figured out that the 9 seat option is only available on the base model. I chose ALL of the options and packages available on the base model with 9 seats, chose a grey metallic paint colour and voila.

Then I looked at the price. I knew that SUVs were expensive, large SUVs especially, but I did not expect the price to start with a 7! Over $70,000 plus taxes and other fees for brand new. I feel like that might be over our budget by a little bit… Take a look and let me know what you’d change!

This is going to be a lot harder than I expected to find a new family vehicle for us. If you’ve got ideas for how to find a 9 seat vehicle for us let me know in the comments below!

If you like what you see, check out the whole series here!