Car Buying Process
Since we bought our fabulous Fit many of our friends are asking us how we even began looking for a car. The process has such a negative stigma that it’s understandable for people to be afraid to jump right in. Peter and I started by really evaluating our priorities. He and I have two Pomeranians who take up a lot of space. Since Peter and I are constantly driving them to and from my mother’s (she has a larger yard and watches them every time we have to leave town without them) we needed a car large enough to fit their giant cage. We looked into various types of SUVs but inevitably wanted something with better gas mileage. He and I spent a few hours on a Sunday walking around the closed car dealerships and reading the statistics posted on the window of each car. It was so nice to be there on a Sunday because since the state law requires all car dealerships to close for the day, we weren’t hassled by a million sales people.
The next day after collecting some information we headed back to the dealerships and spent some time sitting in the cars. Peter is pretty tall and quickly realized that he didn’t fit well in most of our top choices. The whole thing was unbelievably discouraging because we were afraid that his long legs would cause us to spend an extra 10K on a more spacious car. We returned to the drawing board and spent hours pouring over various types of consumer reports—some of which are free and available to anyone online and others we had access to through our local library.
Once we had some other leads we visited the dealerships and fell in love with the Fit. The first dealership was no longer doing the Cash for Clunkers and told us that no one else was either (don’t believe anything sales people tell you). The second told us that we could only get a purple one or an orange one because everything else was sold out everywhere and a dealer transfer was impossible unless we wanted to upgrade to the top of the line model—shady. I never thought that I was picky about car colors but when faced with the two equally unappealing choices, I suddenly found myself praying for a normal color.
Somewhat discouraged, I made a list of every Honda dealership that we could visit in our state. My mother and Peter split them up between the two of them and began to look for any dealership that had the model that we wanted in any normal color. The first dealership we called had the car and matched the price that we were offered at the other dealerships. When we arrived at the dealership they told us that the promotion had ended the night before and tried to convince us to just trade in our car. In the end we found a dealership that had the right color and honored the cash for clunkers but it took a lot of walking away. When I began the process a friend told me that no matter what the entire time I was going to feel like I was getting scammed. He said no matter what you do just buy exactly what you want otherwise you’ll hate the car every time you pay a payment. His advice didn’t really sink in until I was considering the purple Fit. I didn’t want it so why would I pay thousands of dollars for it? We just got our first payment today and we still love the car. I guess my best advice is if you’re in the market for a new car do a lot of research just be prepared to walk away.
