Five Hours of Craziness…And a New Car
In my last post, I described the demise of our radiator and engine while driving down the highway Wednesday. I had the car towed to our mechanic, who called this morning to tell us that the engine had indeed suffered a meltdown. Fortunately, the consequences are far less severe than in a nuclear power plant, but it meant we either had to spend $3000 to fix it or go car shopping in a hurry.
We’d gotten eight years out of the replacement engine we’d put in the last time this happened, and now the car was 14 years old. $3000 didn’t seem like a wise investment.
So off we went, car shopping. When we get into a riff like this, we’re like a couple of trucks. We go until we get the job done. When we bought our current house (in 1998), we viewed 16 houses in just eight days, and bought #15. And with three drivers, nowhere we can walk, and one working car, we needed to move fast. We had decided ahead that with a new teenage driver in the family, buying new didn’t make sense. The insurance would be huge, and so would the risk. So that made the decision simpler.
In two hours, we went to five different dealerships—four that only sold used vehicles, plus one local new/used .Oddly, we only saw one car that was worth test-driving: a 2005 Toyota Corolla stickshift with only 26,000 miles. (Corollas are typically good for 150,000 or more. Our current one has 165,000.) Considering that some of the other cars we saw included a $12,000 Prius with over 99,000 miles and a $17,000 Honda Civic hybrid with 36,000, we thought we’d found a pretty good deal.
Over the next three hours, we dropped the car off at our mechanic to check it out, stopped for lunch, went to the credit union and got financing through our home equity line of credit (that we had established earlier but never used), went to the library to make sure it wasn’t the kind with the runaway accelerator problem—and while we were there, we also googled the original owner, who had a distinctive name, to make sure there was no report of a major accident in the car (we discovered she’d purchased the car in April 2006, and died the following September of natural causes—and at some point later, the car was traded back to the same dealer that had sold it originally). Then back to the mechanic to pick up the car with a clean bill of health, and back to the dealer to go through the paperwork and specify the very minor repairs to be made.
Yup. In five hours flat, we chose a car, had it examined, and got it financed. That’s fast even by our standards, but we were under some time pressure, with the exchange student and some teenage friends of my son all descending on us in the coming days. By Saturday, the work will be done and we’ll have the car.
Know any Western Massachusetts takers for a 1997 Toyota that needs an engine and radiator?
