Sunday, September 16, 2007

Our Car!

Contrary to what Stacy wanted to name our car ('Tighty Whitey') it has been deemed 'Kooky' by Madi (Full name: 'Kooky Kookaburra Hutchinson'). Personally I am glad that no one agreed with Stace's idea. I don't know about you but I wouldn't ever want to feel like I was riding around in a used pair of underwear! It's just not something that I want to picture every time I climb into my car. In her defense she said that she liked that name because there have been a number of times when we have been packed to the roof driving home with the stuff we have had to buy. Not to mention the first day we moved from the hotel to our house (we were sardines!).


Stace mentioned that I should tell you about my experience making the big purchase so here goes. Well, the first thing I can say is that it is really hard to buy a car when you don't have one to go and look at cars! It makes things a little tricky.


After contemplating both of the options (personal sellers vs. dealers) I decided to try the dealers, simply because I wouldn't have to try and get to a number of personal sellers and spend my time in transit. Plus, I had a friend tell me of a road here that they have nick named 'Auto Ally' because of all the used car dealers on the road (kind of like State Street back home).



I looked into our payment options to see what the interest rate was on a loan, in case we wanted to go that route but you can't get a loan for anything unless you have three months of history or want a very large interest rate. So we went with the paying cash option.

After finding a dealer that said they had a lot of 'people movers' I decided to start there. I walked in and of course the sales person asked me about the price range I was looking for. I told him what our price range was he showed me a row of Toyota Taragos that were in our price range. Every one of the cars had about 300,000 km (186,000 miles). I asked if he had anything with less miles and he said he did but I had to go up to about the $18,000 AUD price range and those cars all had 220,000 km (136,000 miles). Needless to say I was a little discouraged. I didn't want to buy something that was going to die in a month! Oh, and I can't forget to mention that they were all made in like 1992 or 1994.


I continued on down the road hitting all of the dealers. I had a hard time finding dealers with people movers. Apparently they aren't that popular in Australia. I found one more that tried to sell me his people mover (I forget what it was) that ran on diesel fuel and wouldn't start for over one minute of trying and he wanted $18,000 AUD for it as well.


I finally thought I was going to have to go the personal seller route
but then found our car. It is a Mazda (pronounced Maaaaaazda, like you are a sheep saying baaa!) MPV. It is a 2000 and had 136,000 km (84,000 miles). The nice thing about it is that all of the five seats in the back are bucket seats that can be removed. This has really come in useful while we have been buying things and transporting them home. The list price was $18,000 but the manager must have been feeling good that day because we got a real good deal on it (or so I believe). He also had it serviced, comes with the one year warranty, replaced a broken tail light, did an alignment, paid for the initial inspection and told me that he would fix what every was wrong with it (both the front and rear brakes needed to be replaced). It worked for us and, most of all, it just felt like it was the car for us. It always helps to have a little assistance when making big purchases like this!!!!

3 comments:

Travis said...

No better feeling than paying cash for a car, err people mover. When Janae and I have another baby we are probably going to have to get one, I have never really seen myself as a minivan kind of guy, but what can you do?
Travis

Stacy said...

Amen to that - what can you do?

Luvnbnamom said...

Hey your finally a MiniVan Mom...lol I know you've been waiting for this moment for so long. lol Just kidding..We love the new car..Brooklyn says its so cool!