December 16, 2010: Car Shopping

We got up early this morning so that we could run over to our local GMC dealer to see about taking advantage of GMC’s current “no payments till spring” sales event.  We have been wanting an Acadia for some time and this could be perfect.  With the baby on the way we are in a bit of a panic because once the little one arrives we will literally not even fit in the X3.  Not having a vehicle that can carry all five of us (Oreo included) is a pretty big deal.

We ended up waiting for forever and didn’t really get any information on the financing.  The dealer does have a car that we want on the lot but we waiting for an hour and a half and in that time they were not able to figure out the financing so we had to go as I had an eleven o’clock meeting.  It was pretty frustrating to wait that amount of time and get absolutely nothing done.  We didn’t need to look at cars, we already knew what we wanted.  We told them that we just had to find out about the financing when we first walked in the door.  We couldn’t have handed them an easier sale – except, of course, when I bought the original Mazda PR5 in 2001.

So we went home carless and without any information about whether or not we will be able to get one.  We did find out that the BMW had had an accident back in 2008 before we bought it of which we were unaware.  That sucks as it brings down the resell value.  We also found out that we are three thousand more underneath the BMW than we had thought.  Ouch.  We thought that we were in bad shape but it is actually much worse than we had anticipated.  Ugh.

I worked from home through lunch then went into the office for the afternoon.  It wasn’t until late in the day that we found out that we had been “approved” for the car.  But we had no idea what they meant and never got additional information.

I got home but Dominica was asleep until around six thirty.  So when she woke up from her nap we tried to go find out more about the car.  It turns out that the sales department closes at seven.  At seven, really?  That seems crazy early to this New Yorker.  How can anyone get to them after work if they want to buy a car?

Dominica looked on the website and saw that the finance department was open until eight.  So we called to be sure but at two minutes past seven the phone just rang and rang without anyone answering.  Dominica assumed that they were closed but I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and drove over there assuming that their phones were not working properly.

Well I got over there and found the gates down and the lights off.  I was not happy.  That’s a lot of driving and calling and effort for them to close early and not be open when posted.  They could have sent the details via email and we could have made a good decision about all of this this afternoon.  Now we aren’t sure what to do but overall we are not too happy with how the car shopping went today.

I got back home and we decided to run over to a GMC dealer in Grapevine who is open until nine.  If our business isn’t worth being open for, we’ll try somewhere else.

It was after eight when we got over to the other dealer.  We walked in and explained that we just needed to find out about the financing, trade in and other financial information.  They were very nice and very quick running us through all of the details.  They couldn’t get the final numbers tonight but the one thing that they were able to tell us was that they were only able to give us much less for the BMW than the first dealer was going to give us.  Over two thousand less!  More details tomorrow.  So we will wait until then to find out what is going to happen.

On the way home we hit McDonald’s for dinner.  We are getting anxious about getting a car as we really need one come April and if we can’t get one now because of how much underneath the BMW we are we are not sure what we are going to be able to do in April.

Well, we had been excited that we were going to get to bring home a new car today.  Looks unlikely that we will be able to afford a new car at all at this rate.  The BMW definitely did not work out well for us.  It will be a while before I look at a BMW again, I think.

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