Macchina rosso

Buying a new car takes forever. We went to the Toyota dealership wanting to look at a Yaris, but after a drive around I found I was not so thrilled with that car. The gauges are in the middle of the dash, and I didn't like looking over at them. That, plus the fact that it just wasn't very comfortable, whereas the Corolla was. The Yaris came with $1K back from the feds, but other than that, there wasn't much difference in price or in gas mileage. So we chose the Corolla.

It took about an hour to go for the two test drives, after waiting for the salesman to find the keys for the second car, and for both Hub and I to drive both of them (with the salesman, and with Big One, who was along with us. Little One was at a birthday party). After that, it was waiting for the salesman to get all the data together so we could make a decision, which we'd already done. He got the books anyway, and went through them, painstakingly slowly. It took another hour to look at everything and make decisions about which options we wanted, and to sign a piece of paper so that I could ring the bell. When you buy a car, you ring a big bell and everyone claps. It's very fun. More cowbell. We need more cowbell.

Signing the piece of paper with the salesman meant nothing, however, because that's just the thing that says you're going to give them a small deposit and the middle toe of your right foot as surety that you're really buying the car. Then you meet with the finance guy. You get to wait to meet with the finance guy, for longer than you want to, and you have to go and get Little One from the birthday party. The finance guy went through more excruciating detail about the financing, the options, the money we could spend on top of the money we were already spending. While he highly recommended extra insurance in case one of us dies or can no longer work, and while he really really tried to push us to spend that extra $1600 to get said insurance, we had to turn that down in favour of physical protection of the vehicle. Rust protection, fabric protection, repainting twice in the lifetime of the vehicle to cover up stone chips...etc.

We didn't need no stinking insurance. We're going to live forever, healthy. At the time, while talking to the finance guy, we didn't know that. We weren't sure about the extended insurance, but after asking if we had time to think about things, we chose to wait. No one tells you that you don't have to make decisions immediately, but if you ask, you'll find out that the car company is more than willing to give you enough time to make rational decisions.

In all, time with the finance guy took another 1.5h, then there was the hand-shaking and the smiling, and we went home. They gave us a little bit of money for the old car, which we had to take home again with its putt-putt motor.

This was Saturday. The new car took just over a week to arrive, and in the meantime the exhaust blew out on the old car and it got very very loud. Deafeningly loud. Impossible to drive sort of loud. Intense.

Monday we got the new car, and it's very nice and I'm very happy with it. It's sort of my car, although neither of us claim outright ownership of either car.

Really though, it takes a very long time to buy a new car. It's not for everyone.