What absolutely kills me about Wu's Audi TT is that it was a colossal fuckup from the beginning.
There's a time in the life cycle of any sports/enthusiast car when it is too old to be considered a "late-model" car, and too new to be a "classic." This is squarely where that car lies.
At that point, it's at the bottom of its depreciation cycle, so the difference between a rough one and a pampered, well-maintained one is only a couple grand. That's far less than she's spent making this one worse!
This is how I tend to buy cars - that way, in a couple years, when I'm ready to move on, I break even, or even make a little bit on it so that I can "move up."
However, this early in the game (15-20 years from when the car is new), it's only the nicest stuff that will be worth anything. The cheap, ratty, clapped-out "buy here pay here" specials will almost always remain utterly worthless.
It's almost like Wu is bad with money or something. They basically spent ten grand turning a $5,000 car into a $2500 car. I was going to post eBay "buy it now" listings for nice first generation TTs, but there's so many and it took but five seconds to find several nice ones under ten grand.