which_chick | (no subject)

Update, not about horses.

I hab a caud, so less horse time lately than you might otherwise expect from our near-seventies temperatures with crystalline-blue skies and whatnot. Me personally, I have snot running down my face, the sort of sinus headache that makes thinking impossible, and a wracking cough that prompts bystanders to inquire as to my imminent demise. So, no horse.

I have bought a car. We recall that I had a '97 Chevy Cavalier with about 250K on the odometer, which I had happily owned for 13 years. It would not pass inspection any longer, so I had to get rid of it and get another car. This was a process somewhat fraught with fraught because I do not like change. At all. I also hate car shopping. Car sales people try to be your friend. They are not my friend and it makes me extremely uncomfortable when they be all friend and shit. I wish they wouldn't do it. They want to shake hands and eyeball-gaze. They want to gratuitously validate my choices in sort of a rah-rah cheerleader fashion. (Do people actually like this? I mean, flesh people, not people like me.) It's dreadful. If there was some way to buy cars, like, online or something and just have them shipped to my house, I would totally do that.

So, for the car shopping, there is the preliminary thing. How much money do I have to throw at the project? About 8,500, including tax, title, tags, etc. (I do not finance cars. It is never appropriate to finance a depreciating liability if there is Any Other Way. As my work transportation is provided by my work and my personal car is purely a vehicle for what we can term "non-work" driving, it is not appropriate to finance it. Persons who are not self-employed and do not have a work-provided car may finance 1 vehicle in order to have reliable work transportation, but they should certainly have the decency to feel guilty about doing so.) Next -- how much vehicle can I buy for around $7500 (because the taxes and shit are another grand)? Not a whole lot, as it turns out.

Given the budget, I was going to be working in the 5 to 7 year old range, about 100K on the odometer. (The style of vehicle is "small car" like the Cavalier I had, like a Ford Focus or a Honda Civic or whatever. I'm not averse to hatchbacks, but I prefer coupes if possible.) This isn't a "new" car by any stretch of the imagination, but it should be a car with some life left in it. Recall, I got 250K out of a Cavalier (one engine). I am not hard on four-bangers, I keep them maintained, and I do not generally drive like an asshat.

So, I got to looking. A lot of the "small car" owners tend to be young people, so a lot of the used vehicles I looked at had aftermarket add-ons that suggested their lives-before-the-car-lot. On Civics, particularly, spoilers were popular. Aftermarket stereos with big speakers were also prevalent. This sort of crap on the car screams "I have been abused by a young adult who can't afford a real sports car." Unfortunately, these were the coupes that I could find. The other sort of person who typically buys a small car is a heavy-duty commuter. These cars have higher than normal mileage, but the vehicles are bland, stock, uncustomized, have back seats that look entirely unlived-in, and (for the excessive highway commuter) tend to be manual transmissions. If it's a stop-n-go commute, folks get automatics. If it's rolling down the highway 50 miles one way, they get a stick for the marginal improvement in gas mileage.

Those are pretty much the options on used small cars -- coupes that are beat to shit by young drivers pretending that their modest 4-cylinder cars are "sporty" and four-door cars driven on serious commutes. Families usually want bigger cars for their kids and their kid crap, so they mostly don't drive these cars.

I drove some young-person-owned coupes. The cars (which came in actual colors like red and blue and yellow) drove like they were beat to shreds. I bought the red two-door coupe Cavalier but it had half as much mileage on it (68K) and half as many years on it (3 when I bought it). Apparently 5 to 7 years is too many to spend in the hands of a younger driver. *sigh* So I looked at the commuter car section -- four doors, mostly grey or silver or beige cars, stock interiors, high mileage, immaculate back seats. And there, I found a 2007 high mileage (125K) Honda Fit with a manual transmission. In silver, black interior, all stock everything. No wear on any seat except driver's. Mmm-hmm. It drove nicely. I paid $7700, which was slightly under kbb value. I should be able to get another 100K out of it without too much difficulty, but as with all things, time will tell. At least I'm done car shopping, hopefully for a while.