I both love and hate car shopping.
I love it because I enjoy cars. I enjoy looking at them, I enjoy driving them, I enjoy looking at all the little nooks and crannies, judging them to see whether it’s something I like or not.
I hate it because, eventually, you have to make up your mind. I’m a lot less good at that.
At the moment I’m not shopping for a car for myself, as my car is great and also pretty new. It’s the better half that is in the market, because her car has been having a series of exciting and varied mechanical failures – right when you start getting suspicious of the fuel pump, suddenly a spring breaks. It has been a wild ride, and not just because I drove around all morning with a spring chewing through the tire without realizing it.
Of course, as several car dealers in the area know, we have been looking for a replacement for this car for a pretty long time. And we haven’t made up our mind in all that time. All of our many test drives have been informative and valuable, but we’ve also bounced between different market segments, different body styles, hopped between new and used, and generally have been pretty indecisive.
This makes sense though, it’s a major decision. I’m surprised anyone buys a car without a long, protracted debate over what they want, what they can afford, what they’re actually looking for and so on. When a friend of ours bought a car without a test drive, we were stunned, because it takes both of us several test drives and months of debate to make up our mind. And, when there’s not much of a deadline on the horizon – after all, we have one good car – that debate could last a long time.
I bet car sales people don’t like us very much at all. The first time we meet, we’re not buying a car from you, no matter how much we might like it. When it comes to the old question “what will it take for you to take this car home today,” the answer is inevitably “nothing, still have to sleep on it.”
Hopefully, this protracted decision-making process will mean that we get the perfect car at the end of it. And, hopefully, that will be something that’s reliable, good looking and comfortable and will give us years of faithful service. And hopefully someone else we know gets in the market but wants some help, so I can continue to do all the poking, prodding, testing and searching without the hassle of actually making up my mind about what to take home.
