Shopping for and buying a new car is huge pain. I’ve bought three cars in my adult life: Hank the Golf, over which I hemmed and hawed for about 9 months before suddenly pulling the trigger one Saturday morning; my darling, adorable wife’s Volvo, which was also a total spur-of-the-moment Saturday thing; and this new one, which was a considerably different, deliberate, long and drawn out affair.
I really wish it had been more similar to previous car-buying events, and I hope to never experience something like this again.
What made it so bad? Well…[READ MORE]
First off, instead of trading in an old car whose time had come (like I did in 2011, from the 1998 Forester to Hank) or buying a new car where there was no car before (like getting the Volvo to replace a car the Hanabibti gave to her son in 2014), with this one, things were very different. VW had to carry on some nefarious silly stuff and get caught at it, then they had to agree to buy back (or fix) the cars, and then I had to decide to sell back Hank, then had to brainstorm, research, and shop for new cars, go through the sell back process, and only then buy a new one. This whole process took almost eight months, largely due to some false starts with the VW return process, and partly due to my own reluctance to say goodbye.
Second, this car buying process itself was significantly different than what I went through when I bought Hank in 2011, from the same dealership (Metro VW in Irving, Texas): both took 4 hours, but with Hank, I test drove two cars, and drove 25 miles one way to get to an open branch of the credit union and fetch a cashier’s check, but with the new car, there was no test drive, and I had a cashier’s check in my pocket already.
If I’m being honest, after about a month with the new car, I’d say I’m still not ready to say goodbye to Hank, even though he’s long gone, probably already scrapped. I’ve stopped saying hello to him in the morning or commenting on road conditions and other drivers/vehicles to him, and within the last week or so, finally developed a happy friendship with the new car, but I still miss him. Alas, he’s long gone.
This is a loooong post, and so I’ve serialized it. I hope to get them all out today, but we’ll see how it goes. Most of this was written a few weeks back, so some editing needs to happen to bring things into the present
