Our New Car!

We have been talking about getting a new car for over a year.  About ten years ago, we decided that we would keep our cars for 8 years (alternating every 4 years between the two of us).  We special ordered the Tahoe right off of the assembly line in September of 2000.  Then we waited until March of 2006 to buy Bart's Civic.  When we bought Bart's Civic, we only bought a two door car because it was his commuter car.  We were surprised to find that we started taking it everywhere to save on gas.  Two years ago, when it was time to for me to get a new car, we kept putting it off because we didn't really need a new car and there were better things to do with our money.  I was still always looking at new cars and deciding what kind of car I would want when we finally decided to buy.  For a while, I wanted a Honda Pilot, and then I wanted the Chevy Traverse.  I was sure I wanted a "smaller" SUV than the Tahoe. 

Last fall, we finally decided that we would buy a car in the spring.  By the time spring came around, we had decided that it would be better to buy a car that gets better gas mileage and then just keep the Tahoe for snow, car pool, and hauling big things.  We looked through the Consumer Reports Auto Issue and made a list of all of the cars we were interested in.  Because of Bart's illness, we waited until the end of May before we started test driving cars. 

We started out at the Nissan Dealer in Bountiful.  It was the craziest experience ever.  The salesman was new and not very good.  He liked to point out the obvious, like "here is the rear view mirror" and "it has four tires" (okay maybe not that bad, but he didn't tell me anything I couldn't figure out on my own).  Also, all of the cars had dead batteries, so we had to wait for him to get the battery charger before we could drive any of them.  He had us drive a top of the line Maxima and a very base Altima and then asked which one we liked better.  Duh?  We went to dinner at El Matador after that and laughed about it the whole time.  Then we went to Willey Honda (where we bought the Civic) and drove the Accord. 

I really liked all of the cars we had driven and wasn't ready to make a decision.  As I mentioned earlier, we weren't in a big hurry, so we put off buying again.

Finally, in August, there were special financing deals for both Nissan and Honda, so we decided it would be a good time to buy a car.  (Otherwise we would probably be waiting until Spring again.)  We decided to go through the Costco Auto Program which pointed us to both of the Ken Garff dealerships in Riverdale.  First, we drove the Nissan Altima.  Then we drove the Honda Accord.  Again, I liked both of them, but we decided on the Altima because we thought it had better features. 

We went back the next day to buy it.  We took it for one last test drive (this time with the kids) and we all loved it.  We ended up being at the dealership for like 4 hours.  It wasn't the best experience, but they had free popcorn and drinks and Bart ran to Arby's to grab us some lunch.  Finally, I got to drive it home and it was wonderful.  I love my car!


Black Beauty