We Get Paid To Lie To A Car Salesman

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.