The Pain of Buying a Car
I received my offer from Day 1 on the 12th -- that was a week and a half ago, on Wednesday. I decided to accept later that night. The next step from there was buying a car, which I finally did on Tuesday. The interim period was a rather painful one, since I had a whole bunch of problems to look at:
1) What car do I get?
2) New or used?
3) If new, lease or buy?
Selecting a car was quite difficult. I'm saving a large amount of my paycheck for going back to school eventually, so there were some serious limitations in how much I could afford to pay per month for my car. On top of that, I'm only 20 and my insurance is shockingly expensive as a result. I basically needed the following things from the car of choice:
1) Fast. Now I'm not racing or even going to track days, but I want a car that is responsive and lively. It needs to be ready to pick up the pace at a moment's notice.
2) Lots of cargo space. I'm a rather mobile person at the moment and I'm moving stuff around constantly. I need space to put stuff. This is where the 300ZX got invalidated as a choice, sadly.
3) Reliable. I can't be fixing my car all the time, especially since that's not a budgetable expense. Anything except new and certified used got invalidated here. I also rejected every American car brand here, which left the Japanese manufacturers.
4) Rims, not hubcaps. This is a dumb one, but seriously, I hate hubcaps.
5) Stylish. I had to be able to look at the car and not feel disgusted or embarassed. Scion got rejected with extreme prejudice. Volvo was disqualified as well.
I eventually decided that leasing a new car was the best way to go. I also figured that a compact sport hatchback was the best compromise. The remaining choices in that arena were:
1) Mazda3 and Mazdaspeed3
2) VW Rabbit/Golf/GTI
3) Audi A3
4) BMW 3 series wagon
5) Toyota Matrix
6) Honda Fit
The Honda Fit is boxy looking and woefully underpowered. The Matrix is strange looking, and underpowered as well -- Toyota discontinued the performance XRS model and the other two trims have no spine. The Audi and BMW are both way too expensive, not to mention boring looking and generally not worth the money. The Rabbit/Golf/GTI is also pretty boring, and far too small (two door instead of four). That leaves the Mazdas. I really wanted the Mazdaspeed 3, which is a performance tuned version of the regular 3. It was too expensive though, and demand is high enough that you can't even get a discount off sticker price. That's how I ended up settling on the Mazda3 hatchback.
That's only half the story. After having decided what car to buy, I needed to actually find and buy it. I can be pretty picky about colors; I originally wanted the red one and would settle for the blue, and that was it. I backed off later, especially upon discovering that the silver looks quite good in person. Both 2007 and 2008 models are out on dealer lots right now, and bizarrely the 2007s aren't any cheaper. (The 07 and 08 are identical, but an 07 is obviously worth less.) Then there's the huge headache of actually negotiating a price. Reading various articles, mainly on Edmunds, I realized that the trick here was to use the internet. The internet always wins, you see.
When salesmen sell a car, they get a commission off that sale. There's considerable incentive to jack up the price however they can. The internet sales departments, however, are more interested in sheer volume, and so they will happily give you the car at only a slight charge over invoice. The practical upshot of all this is as long as you're not too picky about things like the color of the car, or factory-only options like a sunroof, you can simply fire off requests for price quotes to half a dozen dealerships and cherry pick the one who makes you the happiest. Better yet, you can attempt to use the quoets to play dealers off each other. (We tried this, but it didn't work. Mazda3s are popular, so they don't really need to play that game.) You can completely skip the whole haggling and dueling process like this, and not only that, you're practically guaranteed a better price than you could get just by walking in.
So when it came time to actually buying the car, there was no fighting over price. We took some time to look at the three different actual cars that were available, in three different colors and with varying trim levels and options. There was some more time spent hacking out the details of the lease, and a whole bunch of waiting while insurance and credit were straightened out. It could have been much worse, though. I was really glad that the price had been set (and set at quite a favorable value) right from the start.
Anyway, maybe some of you will find that helpful. I especially suggest reading everything at Edmunds about buying cars, as they have a lot of useful information.
Enjoy!