New Car

This past Monday my wife and I set out on the arduous quest that is car buying. My father worked for GM and as such I have always been able to get what GM calls an "A Buyer" discount. It's basically a few thousand dollars off MSRP depending on the car. One of our biggest problems is and has been that many of the GMC / Chevy / Pontiac / Saturn cars just don't appeal to us. It has always seemed like the majority of their business is geared big vehicles and the few smaller sized sedans that they do offer often fill one extreme of feeling very cheap or being very powerful. Neither my wife nor I are big fans of the SUV or the Mini Van. There are times I wouldn't mind a truck but those times are few and far between and wouldn't require the monster sized trucks being pushed. We just want a car, preferable a sedan as the insurance is cheaper and a 4 door vehicle is easier to use if we have kids. Right now I drive a Chevy Aveo, and before the accident my wife also drove one. They are both all right cars. We drive 80 miles a day to work so gas mileage for them being a non hybrid has been nice. I will have to say that hers was much nicer than mine but neither of them are anything to talk about. When we started looking for cars I really wanted to try and find a GM / Chevy car, I couldn't believe how hard it was to find what I wanted. For starters the Chevy website is horrible! The main Build it Now link doesn't work on the site so I actually had to find another way to get the page. Unlike other websites that let you build or add features and show the prices Chevy kicks you to a dealer customized portal with some type of list item feature application. You can't tell what your adding, what it does, what it will look like, or even what it will cost. Frustrating! When it came down to it we couldn't find the kind of car in our price range. The only cars with the features we were looking for were only on the highest end models, and even with a discount applied the price was outside what we were looking to spend. We strongly considered buying another hybrid. We loved our Civic hybrid and we like her parents Prius but this time we were trying to keep our costs under $20,000.00 and preferably closer to $15,000.00. After alot of searching we started looking at used cars. Used cars make me nervous in general, I haven't owned one in almost a decade as my past experiences were typically poor. After some research we decided to check out Carmax. I see their commercials all the time but I never realized they were a "No Haggle" dealer. The price is the price, which was somewhat odd for me. Randi found a Chrysler Sebring she was interested in on the site and after test driving it and looking at some other models we settled on it. At the end it did come down to a choice between two Sebrings but I more and more I feel like we chose the right one.