Out With The Old…

And in with the new! After spending $1,800.00 to fix our 96 Galant, it still came back from the mechanic with some serious problems and a list of things that still needed to be done. The car sounded more like a motorcycle, and when sitting at a stop light you felt like you just might crack the street with all of the vibrating going on. (In our community, the lights are annoyingly long anyway and this only made it worse!) The only solution was to put the car in neutral when it was idling.

Then on Halloween night, Rob called me from his parking structure at work and said, “Amy, we need a new car. I think we have hit the ground.” He was referring to the philosophy we have always had to drive our cars “into the ground” before we get a new one. So the last straw was that now, on top of everything else the mechanic suggested we fix, the battery had just died and Rob was stranded in the parking structure. Luckily a friend from work came along and gave him a jump, but the Galant has been parked in our driveway ever since. So it’s time to say farewell to a good car. It was a faithful, reliable car from the time we bought it eight years ago until that fateful night returning home from the hockey game. We are considering donating it for a tax write-off since the trade in and resale value isn’t much for a car that won’t start! Right now our charity will likely be Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. At least it’s nice to know we can help out a good cause.

We did our research through Consumer Reports and decided that the Honda Civic seemed like the best fit for us. And by us, I guess I mean mostly Rob since he will drive it the most. It has great gas mileage, crash test ratings, and reliability ratings so the only test left was to drive it and see if we liked it. Rob called around to several dealerships getting quotes and we settled on the place with the best deal. We went in on Saturday afternoon, and the process seemed to drag on forever. In fact, it did take up the whole day. We didn’t leave the dealer until 6:15 pm. The kids behaved well overall especially since I wasn’t prepared with snacks or anything to be there for almost 6 hours! We have heard that 6 hours is the national average for buying a car from start to finish. Can that really be true? Even looking back I can’t figure out exactly why it took so long, but by the end it was excruciating and we were all so exhausted that it was hard to be excited at all. Most of the people we dealt with were pleasant and nice, but the one dark cloud was their “closer.” Luckily, Rob had a copy of the e-mail we received with the quoted price because this guy wanted us to pay $1,500.00 more. Even after seeing the quote he immediately threw their internet sales guy under the bus explaining why he should never have given us this price and now he would agree to do that deal only if we financed through them. I was proud as Rob held firm and I even made a few comments myself about how ridiculous that was. So in the end, we came out with the deal promised us with our own lender, but unfortunately this hard-nose salesman sort of ruined the experience for us. Never go to a dealer cold! Do your research and get quotes in writing first!

So now our silver Civic is part of the family and we are having fun trying out all of the buttons and features. We plan to drive this car for at least twenty years, so it’s a good thing we like it so much!