We stopped in at the Mazda dealer over in Augusta this morn­ing. Our worst fears were that the same joker who tried to show us a Miata a cou­ple moths ago would greet us. He didn’t and we were wel­comed to the lot by a pleas­ant enough fel­low who saw my $25 test drive cer­tifi­cate and asked if we were just here for that or did we have any inten­tion to buy. So we gave him the same story we did to all those other sales­man back in the spring — instead of replac­ing the Miata with a new one that we didn’t like, we were going to buy a sec­ond car.

I told him that I wanted to drive a 6i Tour­ing and he said they didn’t have any on the lot, all they had were the sport mod­els (AKA the base car.) He said that they usu­ally kept more on the lot but they were hav­ing trou­ble get­ting them because of the earth­quake in Japan. The first thing I though was, “Are all car sales­man patho­log­i­cal liars?”, the 6 is assem­bled in Flat Rock, MI. (David, I apol­o­gize if they can’t make them because sup­ply short­ages from Japan.) He had a key for a 6i Sport in Kona Blue in his pocket, which would have been our color choice. He started it up, cranked the A/C and then showed us the trunk and the exte­rior of the car while the inte­rior cooled.

We went for a drive. Instantly I liked the way it drove, the road feel of the base model was leaps and bounds bet­ter than the base Sonata, more on par with the Optima and our Sonata SE. The 176 horse­power felt as quick as the 200 of the Sonata. The car was quiet, roomy and very com­fort­able, for me. Donna didn’t like the way the seats hit her in the back and couldn’t get set­tled. The sales guy chimed in that the Tour­ing seats were dif­fer­ent, still cloth, but they might be more com­fort­able. We had the per­fect out of any sales pres­sure because we were inter­ested in a model they didn’t have, so he filled out the form for us, gave us a brochure, his card and took down my work phone num­ber so he could give us a call when they got a Tour­ing model.

The day after I was dis­ap­pointed in the base Sonata we vis­ited the Mazda dealer. Had the Miata test drive gone smoothly I think we might have tried dri­ving a 6. They might have had a Tour­ing model in Kona Blue. If those things hap­pened dif­fer­ently back on our first try at this dealer back in March we might have ended up own­ing one of these. But I have zero regrets on miss­ing out on the Mazda.

And we really didn’t lie to the fel­low, every­thing we said was sim­ply mis­placed in time, and when we said we were going to buy a sec­ond car, we were using the word were in its sim­ple past indica­tive form.

Four to six weeks later we’ll get a $25 gift card in the mail. It’ll make a nice down pay­ment on a Carstashe for the Sonata.

In our last install­ment we left our heroes with a dif­fi­cult choice, but as any­one who has suc­cess­fully nav­i­gated the tricky waters of mat­ri­mony knows, the key is com­pro­mise. Brian com­pro­mised by not going for the sports car and Donna com­pro­mised by not going for the small car.

At 5PM on Sat­ur­day after­noon I called Brad, the Honda sales­man, and asked what we needed to do to get the ball rolling on buy­ing an Accord Coupe. I told him that it turns out we didn’t really want a blue one after all, “We’d take one in red. Did they have an LX-S in that color?” He thought they did, but he needed to check. I said I’d call him back in a few min­utes. When he answered my call he said yes they did. I told him I’d be there in 15 min­utes to fill out a credit check appli­ca­tion. Our com­pro­mis­ing was fine, but what really drove the choice was we could get the car now, because Honda was offer­ing a .9% deal on 60 month loans.

I got to the deal­er­ship and Brad and I took a San Marino Red Coupe for a short test drive. When we got back we sat in a lit­tle open cube and talked money. I had done my online research by pric­ing the car on Honda’s web site. Then I headed to Edmond’s and got the invoice fig­ure and what they call a fair mar­ket value price, which for this car was about a grand less than invoice (which itself is $2,000 less than list.) I offered sev­eral hun­dred under the list, telling them I had X dol­lars for a down pay­ment and would finance the remain­der at their .9% result­ing in a monthly pay­ment of X dol­lars. That offer also had to include in it the $300 (capped) SC sales tax and any doc­u­ment fees asso­ci­at­ing with titling and reg­is­ter­ing the car. I felt this was fair because I knew that they would still be get­ting more than the invoice price of the car, which is not what they really pay for the car, plus they get to keep any man­u­fac­tur­ers hold back money. Brad takes my offer and dis­ap­pears to the other side of the sales floor to show the fig­ures to the Sales Man­ager Sam (I didn’t catch his name, but he looks a lit­tle like Sam Elliot with white hair and no mus­tache.) Brad comes back about 5 min­utes later (there’s that wait time again) with the famous 4 square box.

One of the squares says $27,000. This is what their sticker on the win­dow reads for the price of the car. They have added wheel locks, mud flaps, a Trunk Con­dom (a big rub­ber mat with sides that will catch a whole gal­lon of spilled milk) and my favorite, the $2500 First Class Fin­ish Pack­age. In the upper right is the fig­ure that really catches my eye, $448 for 60 months. I stand up and offer Brad my hand and say if that’s the best you can do, I’ll be going. He says, “Wait, I’ll see what I can do.”

Now the danc­ing com­mences in earnest. He is gone less than a minute, Sam would like to know where I got my fig­ures. I out­line for Brad what I did above for you and off he goes again. Brad returns in a skinny minute and says, “They’re work­ing on a bet­ter deal.” While we wait Brad fires up a browser and goes to the Honda web site and builds my Accord and sees where I got the list price from.

We are joined by player num­ber three, could be the finance man­ager or the assis­tant sales man­ager. Not only didn’t I pay atten­tion to his title, but I don’t catch the name either. I am too dis­tracted by the fact that he could pass for the John Candy char­ac­ter in the movie Splash and won­der­ing if it would be impo­lite to wipe my palm on my pants to dry off the sweat he left behind dur­ing the hand­shake. John Candy has a com­puter print­out that shows the list price (just what I said it was) and then their cost that they have in the car with the options and all. John points to a hand sketch of a scale marked in lit­tle incre­ments going from 2% to 9% and tells me that deal­ers need to make some­where in that profit range to stay in busi­ness. He asks if I felt they weren’t enti­tled to make a lit­tle money, so could I please add $5 more to my monthly pay­ment. I look at him like he is speak­ing Swahili and men­tion that he can go ahead and take off the wheel locks, mud flaps and remove the trunk tray as I don’t want them. But to show them I was a sport I offered him the $300 up front. John tells me that it would cost money to remove the mud flaps and wheel locks but they would remove the trunk tray. Nei­ther of us men­tion the $2500 First Class Fin­ish because I think they know I know that this is noth­ing more than an updated ver­sion of the 70’s and 80’s Rust Proof­ing Pure Dealer Profit Scam. To quote Cap­tain Jack Spar­row to Will Turner, I say to John Candy, “Do we have an accord?” (a nice play on words, if I don’t say so myself.)

I tell Brad my wife is going to have din­ner on the table in a few min­utes, I bet­ter get home and I’ll be back on Mon­day after work to final­ize the paper­work. They don’t want me to leave (maybe fig­ur­ing I regret that $300 and not come back) so Sam Elliot is back and says let’s fin­ish up the offer sheet and run your credit before you go, it’ll only take 10 min­utes. I tell Sam that I’ll do that, but I’ll be com­ing in on Mon­day with $50 less if the din­ner gets ruined and I have to take my wife out to eat. They don’t have a real fig­ure to work with because I’ve got them rush­ing, so I am asked to sign some­thing that says I will pur­chase this car if the fol­low­ing con­di­tions can be met, my new X dol­lars down and my X dol­lar a month pay­ment for 60 months. Every­body seems happy and I leave telling Brad I would see him at about 4:30 on Mon­day to pick up the car.

This is get­ting kind of long winded, so come back tomor­row night for the tale of today’s stop on the Brian & Donna Buy A New Car Tour.