Car Buying

Sitting In An ND II

ND <= NB

Now having had to spend big bucks twice to get the Emperor running in the last month, we thought maybe we should go check out the new Miata once more to see if this could be an option for the next time we have to pony up half the Kelly Blue Book of the car to get it running right again. Eight months ago we sat in a new one, with mixed feelings, but didn’t drive it because it was an automatic transmission. I understand why a lot of folks choose one, but for Donna and I a Miata has to be a row your own.

We arrived at the Gerald Jones Megaplex1 and made our way through the lot to the Mazda area. Parked near the street end of the lot somewhat close to a couple of Miatas they had near the entrance to lure in buyers. And because we didn’t get there until 11:00 AM or so there lots of potential customers wandering the lot with salesmen cruising around in golf carts trying to herd them into a cubicle in the showrooms. No one zeroed in on us so we walked over to the dark gray and the white/gray and I looked inside, both were automatics. We then made our way towards the buildings to find somebody to get a car to drive. During the 50 yard walk still no on approached.

Close to the showroom was a Miata in a shade of blue (called Reflex Blue that is really a medium gray with blue undertones.) I looked inside it and it was a stick. Donna said, “This is a pretty blue.” And comparing it to the two grays we saw already and the black Miata right across from this one, she was right, it was the nicest looking Miata we’d seen so far, but sort of in the way of it being the most attractive of Cinderella’s ugly step-sisters.

It was unlocked, so I opened the door and got in the driver’s seat, Donna got in the passenger seat and we tried it on for size. I pointed out the awkwardly placed cup holders. Explained the no glove box thing and opened the cubby between the seats to show the spot that is supposed to replace it. I unlatched the top and threw it back. Nice. We got out, walked around the car and changed seats. After another minute or two with still no salesman approaching, we headed into the showroom.

The gatekeeper asked us what we were looking for and I said a Miata to test drive. He send somebody off to find somebody else. Soon Wade appeared, after handshakes all around, I said I’d like to drive a Miata with a manual transmission. He started walking out towards the two Miatas near the lot entrance and after a few steps I stopped him, telling him they were autos. Wade turned back towards the showroom, so I pointed towards the blueish one we had sat in before, “Oh, that one is sold already.”2 Then he turned towards the black across the way, I had peeked inside that one too and it was another automatic, so I let him know.

He said wait here, and went inside to check their inventory. The only stick they had on the lot was the Club on the showroom floor and told him I wasn’t interested.3 “Well, we have two sport models coming that have manual transmissions, I’m not sure exactly when, but would you like me to let you know when they get here?” I said, “Sure,” so we traded business cards. After rereading our experience from last August again, this is the exact same thing the salesman told me then and I never heard from him.

We have now sat in the new ND Miata twice, but still have not driven one.

Absolutely No Overnight Parking

One of the local car dealers is having a HUGE TENT SALE tomorrow between the hours of 10 AM and 3 PM ONLY! They make sure to tell us twice in a loud voice that there is absolutely no overnight parking. <sarcasm>So I’m guessing they must have limited parking. Or maybe they don’t want you to drive in, park and wait for them to open their doors because that just wouldn’t be fair to the folks who want to show up in the morning, there wouldn’t be any parking spots left for them.</sarcasm>

[—— Stop reading here Sandy. ——]
Big match up this week for the Purple Whales, we are playing the Swamp Rats SR who are much better than their 3-3 record indicates. To add to my troubles I have my two main running backs on bye week, so I am going to be missing their combined average of 38.5 points. Still, I have cobbled together a team of subs and right now, according to ESPN predictions, I am an 8 point favorite. We’ll see…

The Purple Whales are in the West Division which consists of 6 of us from the Fabrication Department. The East Division consists of mostly QC with a couple of Assembly Dept folks. For the first 5 weeks we were just playing amongst ourselves in the division, but last week we started playing the teams from the East. As a whole we dominated them, winning 5 out of the 6 matches. Our only loss was because of our manager, his team is now 0-6. And it doesn’t look good for Team Argyle Pilgrims this week either, right now he is a 50 point underdog. Poor guy, I feel so bad for him I decided to make up a team logo for him. This is what I have so far:

The Sound of a Car Deal Crashing

This one’s for you Tom. I never did finish the story on our failed attempt at buying that Accord Coupe back in April, so here it is. If you are unfamiliar with the story, first go back and read April 17th & April 18th posts. Go ahead, I’ll wait right here.

When Donna and I step into the Honda Cars of Aiken showroom we are greeted immediately buy a pleasant enough fellow. I ask for Brian and he says, “That’s me.” I told him who I was and he then proceeds to tell me he hasn’t done anything on my paperwork because they have just been slammed all afternoon. Donna and I look around the showroom, look at each other and roll our eyes. There are 5 people in the whole space, the two of us, Brian the sales guy, another sales guy wandering through and the girl behind the circular reception desk. The only non Honda on the lot out front is our Miata. I guess we just missed the typical Monday afternoon rush.

Donna headed off to the restroom and sales guy says, “Let’s go look at your car.” “I don’t need to see it,” I say. I think to myself, I just drove it 2 days ago, how much could it have changed. I can only imagine this was to get me to see the car and bond with it, and the move was right out of some car salesman training manual. But he is not deterred, “Come on, it is right out back.” So I shrug and follow. We have to pass through the service area and Brian is blathering about how they have won awards for service, yadda, yadda, yadda, while I am dodging the oil on the floor and ducking under a car on a lift. We get out behind the building and there sits the red coupe, probably exactly where salesman Brad left it last Saturday evening. It obviously still needs to be cleaned up and I sense a half hour picking up this car stretching into 2-1/2 to 3 hours of wasted time.

We get back into the showroom and Donna is standing there wondering where I have been. I tell her and she rolls her eyes again, but I can tell she is running out patience already. Brian points us to another one of those alcove areas where business is done and tells us he will be right back with someone to get the paperwork going. We wait. We discuss amongst ourselves on how hard it seems to be to give away our money to a business. We talk about our day at work. We discuss where I’m taking her for dinner because this is taking so long. I then notice Brian making his way across the showroom floor towards us, but he get waylaid by another salesman and pulled aside. They talk for a few seconds, step outside the doors where this other guy lights a cigarette. We agree that if Brian lit one up we were gone. He didn’t and shortly he is moving our way again, but only to ask us “This is not a lease right, you are buying the car?” and tell us that they’ll be right back with us. I’m thinking now that they hadn’t done anything at all since Saturday and wondered how we got the price we got. Donna is ready to bolt; we have been here for 35 minutes already. I look at the time and it is five minutes until 5. I tell her if they don’t get to us by the top of the hour we’ll go.

At 4:59 some person we have never seen before sits across the table from us. He doesn’t introduce himself nor offer to shake my or Donna’s hand, he just starts spreading out his paperwork (for our purposes we’ll call him Fred because he looks a little like a grown up Fred Savage from the TV show Wonder Years with a bad haircut.) I notice John Candy out of the corner of my eye, one desk away, trying to stealth fully observe the process.

Fred looks at me and asks, “Was dinner OK?” I think to myself, I haven’t had dinner yet…so I go, “Huh?” He says,” You know, the other night.” Then something clicks, that was how I left it with these guys on Saturday, saying I needed to get home before dinner was ruined. So I replied, “Yeah, fine.” Donna didn’t say anything then, but told me afterwards that she felt insulted by them asking me. What they should have done was turn to her and ask, “Did we get him home on time for dinner on Saturday?” She a good point to because even though we shopped the car together, her income was taken into account when checking the credit scores and the title was going to be in both our names, they fell into the typical sexist attitude on car buying and were basically talking only at me.

The next thing out of Fred’s mouth was, “How long are you planning on keeping the car?” Not sure where this is going I give him another, “Huh?” Bless her little heart, Donna has been as patient as she can be during this whole car buying process, but this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. She says with emphasis, “What kind of question is that? What do you care how long we keep the car for? What difference does it make to you whether we keep it 2 day, 2 years or 2 decades?” There may have been a cuss word or two in there, if not, the way she said it certainly implied there were.

She reaches down and grabs her purse, looks at me and stands up. I follow suit and we head towards the door. Fred is stunned; I think he mumbles, “It is just a question we ask.”, but I can’t be sure. As we exit the building I sense a rustling behind us. We get in the Miata and as we are backing out of the spot, John Candy is exiting the building and calling out, “Mr. Bogardus! Mr. Bogardus!” Neither of us look up as we drive off.

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.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1041

Maybe Not Worth The $25

I received a card in the mail yesterday from Mazda touting 0% APR financing for 60 months plus up to $1000 APR Cash and Owner Loyalty Cash. To zero interest is on any Mazda, but the cash is only applicable to certain models. It is about 2 months too late for any of that nonsense.

There was also an offer for a $25 gift card for test driving any Mazda. It came from the dealer in Columbia which is 65 miles away, so a round trip divided by the 27 MPG of the Miata (can’t expect me to drive a brand new Hyundai onto the lot) times $3.50 a gallon of gas comes to $17. We can go to any dealer, so we could drive to the Augusta store which is only 39 miles away that way we are spending less than half of the card value on gas, but we were entirely displeased with the test drive process the last time (and that was when we were actually buying a car.)

We are probably headed over Augusta way this Saturday anyway, so if the process turns out to be as painless as it was at the Kia dealer we just might take a Mazda 6 for a spin. After building one online and optioning it out as close to the Sonata SE we now own, the list price of a Mazda 6i Touring was right in the ballpark price-wise and the dealer’s online inventory shows they have one in stock.

Sure hope I don’t like it.

Done Deal

This was a much more pleasant experience today than Monday evening. The only two negatives were a) something that I knew would happen and b) something I should have expected.

a) You know how they say that for every year a human ages, a dog ages seven, well car dealer time is just the inverse. When they tell you it will be just a minute, that maybe what it feels like for them, but in car buyer time it is seven minutes. When they tell you it will just take a few minutes, you think that means 5 to 10 minutes, it will actually take 35 minutes to a little more than an hour.

b) When the deal was made I said I will give you X dollars down and I want the payment to be X dollars a month. After you have signed on the dotted line of nearly as many pieces of paper as you do at a house closing, the last one is the actual loan agreement. And just like you agreed upon the payment is X dollars a month, but there are some numbers to the right of the decimal point. The digits are carefully calculated to be not too big to make it seem like they are trying to add a whole extra buck to the payment, but big enough to amount to something for the dealer. They took the page right out of Walmart’s playbook, the payment is $XXX.88

Started up, went down, back up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1004

A Composition For One Or Two Instruments

Typically in three or four movements in contrasted forms and keys.

The Brian & Donna Buy A New Car Tour headed west to Augusta tonight and for the second time in three days I have left a car dealership with an agreement on a deal for a car. And again all that needs doing to make it happen is the detailing of the vehicle and the final financial paperwork.

29 HOURS AGO: At 2:30 on Monday afternoon I call the Honda dealership to make sure everything is on track. I’m told salesman Brad is at lunch, so I leave a message to be called back. At 3:30, having heard nothing, I call back. This time I’m told Brad isn’t in, he had called in sick. I tell the clueless receptionist that I am supposed to pick up my new car at 4:30. “Who do I need to talk to?”, I ask. She transfers me to someone named John (really) an he tells me he will have some one call me right back and takes my work number.

Twenty minutes later, literally 5 minutes before I get off work, I get a call from Brian (this name I’ll remember) and I tell him I’m twenty minutes away. He says, “Come on down, I’ll get paperwork started, so it should be almost done by the time you get here.” When we arrive, Brian is waiting in the showroom near the door, but he has not done anything on my paperwork. Our experience goes downhill from there, culminating in Donna and I driving off with the John Candy character chasing us down shouting my name.

Maybe later in the weekend I’ll have time to post about the rest of our fun with the Keystone Kar Salesmen of Honda Cars of Aiken.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1001