Cah Cah Part Deux
Well, that didn't take as long as I expected. This assumes the insurance company pays up punctually.
Thursday I cleaned out my former ride. It seemed likely (from the gleam in his eye) that its next owner will be the industrious mechanic who was in charge of straightening things out for the appraiser. Capitalism, Lesson 1: Anything's cheap if you have the right skills. Our mechanic can buy a totalled car from the insurance company for a tenth of what they pay out for the loss. Once he scores a secondhand tranny, a weekend of sweat equity gives him a six grand car for about one grand. That leaves $5000 for the sound system that he might instal in the trunk.
By the middle of last week, I was expecting to hear the T-word and had already done my online car shopping. We had established our automotive parameters, which were part practicality, part social responsibility, and part psychotic delusion. We wanted something that would carry two kayaks or bikes, have the road noise of a Rolls Royce, the crashworthiness of an Abrams tank, the fuel economy of a bicycle, and a price tag that would leave us with a bank balance.
Gad I love online car shopping! What a delightful tool for making sopranos out of car salesmen. By early Saturday we knew what we wanted, where to look, and the history of the principal suspects. Lesson 2: in a contest of tech vs. horsetrading, tech rocks.
The car business looks like horse trading because the first car salesmen were horse traders (I am not making this up). All of the habits and tricks of the horse trade moved entire from the one business to the other. Lesson 3: there is no momentum like institutional momentum.
So, we sallied forth armed with internet quotes, book values and Carfax histories, representing tech. However, this venture also involves my dear spouse. She's from a family of horse traders (not making that up, either) and there is nothing so endearing as watching her corner unwary car sales types and beat them to a pulp. The combination of Web data and this peculiar gene ought to be bottled. By Saturday evening she had swallowed whole three salespeople and a finance manager, leaving us to think out Sunday tactics that would keep us ahead of the automotive rumour mill.
I have to say Sunday scored one for tech and the geek who hates horse trading. The question of the day: was the first car I had spotted online still there? It was. Would the dealer stand by the Internet offer, which was near as don't matter to book? They would. I threw in a bit of good old marketing puke smarm (remembering the salesman and reminding him he had sold us the legendary Grape, nearing 160,000 miles and happily chugging along). Voila: an adequate deal. Not perfect from either standpoint, but done neat, quick, and with no gunplay.
I still think the whole business would run better if buying a car were like buying a fridge: here it is, this is what it costs. Apparently that's a minority opinion, and too many people take it as a sport to give my plan traction. Maybe there's something in it: after all, remember the Yugo.
Thursday I cleaned out my former ride. It seemed likely (from the gleam in his eye) that its next owner will be the industrious mechanic who was in charge of straightening things out for the appraiser. Capitalism, Lesson 1: Anything's cheap if you have the right skills. Our mechanic can buy a totalled car from the insurance company for a tenth of what they pay out for the loss. Once he scores a secondhand tranny, a weekend of sweat equity gives him a six grand car for about one grand. That leaves $5000 for the sound system that he might instal in the trunk.
By the middle of last week, I was expecting to hear the T-word and had already done my online car shopping. We had established our automotive parameters, which were part practicality, part social responsibility, and part psychotic delusion. We wanted something that would carry two kayaks or bikes, have the road noise of a Rolls Royce, the crashworthiness of an Abrams tank, the fuel economy of a bicycle, and a price tag that would leave us with a bank balance.
Gad I love online car shopping! What a delightful tool for making sopranos out of car salesmen. By early Saturday we knew what we wanted, where to look, and the history of the principal suspects. Lesson 2: in a contest of tech vs. horsetrading, tech rocks.
The car business looks like horse trading because the first car salesmen were horse traders (I am not making this up). All of the habits and tricks of the horse trade moved entire from the one business to the other. Lesson 3: there is no momentum like institutional momentum.
So, we sallied forth armed with internet quotes, book values and Carfax histories, representing tech. However, this venture also involves my dear spouse. She's from a family of horse traders (not making that up, either) and there is nothing so endearing as watching her corner unwary car sales types and beat them to a pulp. The combination of Web data and this peculiar gene ought to be bottled. By Saturday evening she had swallowed whole three salespeople and a finance manager, leaving us to think out Sunday tactics that would keep us ahead of the automotive rumour mill.
I have to say Sunday scored one for tech and the geek who hates horse trading. The question of the day: was the first car I had spotted online still there? It was. Would the dealer stand by the Internet offer, which was near as don't matter to book? They would. I threw in a bit of good old marketing puke smarm (remembering the salesman and reminding him he had sold us the legendary Grape, nearing 160,000 miles and happily chugging along). Voila: an adequate deal. Not perfect from either standpoint, but done neat, quick, and with no gunplay.
I still think the whole business would run better if buying a car were like buying a fridge: here it is, this is what it costs. Apparently that's a minority opinion, and too many people take it as a sport to give my plan traction. Maybe there's something in it: after all, remember the Yugo.
posted by Uncle | 23:29
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