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This is a little bit of "Sightings" since it is a bit of a customer service story.
I spent a small fortune on a new car when my old Chevy blew a scoot a couple of weeks ago - more than twice what I paid for my last ride. I should have taken more time to do my due diligence, but I would rather rub my body all over vigorously with a cheese grater than spend any amount of time at a car dealership, and have been known to drive a car down to its component molecules rather than be inflicted with the tools of Satan known as car salesmen. (The Chevy was actually an excellent example. The car literally had to die under me for me to be willing to walk onto a dealer lot.)
However, these days, unlike the last time I bought a car, I carry the Internet in my pocket, and can do all the research, from Carfax to KBB to user critiques, right there on the lot - much to the chagrin of the shadier dealers. Every car the dealer showed me was subject to twenty minutes of research to see what was going to break first and when.
This is Maine, and I only drive 5,000 miles a year or so. That means a car is going to rust before its engine goes - the Chevy was an exception to the rule. So I was willing to buy a car with high mileage and a decent body, instead of the other way around. However, I was unimpressed with the cars they showed me that had six figures on the clock, nor was I getting the price I wanted for cars that had been ridden so hard.
I wound up driving off the lot in a 2009 Nissan Versa. The Versa had a couple of rust spots on the quarter panels where a rock had chipped the paint - nothing a trip to Maaco couldn't fix, I thought. We've had a rough winter, and that's a cheap fix.
However, I paid a small fortune for this thing. More than twice what I paid for the Chevy, in fact. The salesman had to figure that someone so squirrelly about a big-ticket buy was going to inspect the car with a fine-toothed comb, as well as send it to his mechanic to see if anything else needed fixing. The more I looked at it, the more rust spots I found - tiny ones, sometimes just a little BB-sized chip out of the hood, but not all of them in places where the rocks had hit it.
A little research turned up the tragic truth - that model-year Versa is a rot-box. For some reason, the paint job on the 2009 was very fragile, and the paint cracked easily, leading to exactly the problem I was looking at. Either I was going to be touching up the paint for the rest of my life, or the whole car was going to want a complete re-spray. If this was what the car looked like now, it wasn't even going to HAVE quarter-panels in five years.
It seems I'm now confronted with a decision - touch it up myself, have it professionally touched up, get the whole thing resprayed, or swap it for something a little less prone to oxidation. (There may be other options I haven't considered.) Each has its own benefits, drawbacks, and - most important, considering the overall investment so far - price tag. I need to assure myself that buyer's remorse isn't making the spots seem bigger than they are, and I'm also a little annoyed at the "caveat emptor" attitude of the asshole who sold it to me when I mentioned it on a follow-up call. (It's the second time I've had an otherwise "nice" car salesman turn into an utter jerk when I called him about a minor follow-up issue.)
What do you think?
I spent a small fortune on a new car when my old Chevy blew a scoot a couple of weeks ago - more than twice what I paid for my last ride. I should have taken more time to do my due diligence, but I would rather rub my body all over vigorously with a cheese grater than spend any amount of time at a car dealership, and have been known to drive a car down to its component molecules rather than be inflicted with the tools of Satan known as car salesmen. (The Chevy was actually an excellent example. The car literally had to die under me for me to be willing to walk onto a dealer lot.)
However, these days, unlike the last time I bought a car, I carry the Internet in my pocket, and can do all the research, from Carfax to KBB to user critiques, right there on the lot - much to the chagrin of the shadier dealers. Every car the dealer showed me was subject to twenty minutes of research to see what was going to break first and when.
This is Maine, and I only drive 5,000 miles a year or so. That means a car is going to rust before its engine goes - the Chevy was an exception to the rule. So I was willing to buy a car with high mileage and a decent body, instead of the other way around. However, I was unimpressed with the cars they showed me that had six figures on the clock, nor was I getting the price I wanted for cars that had been ridden so hard.
I wound up driving off the lot in a 2009 Nissan Versa. The Versa had a couple of rust spots on the quarter panels where a rock had chipped the paint - nothing a trip to Maaco couldn't fix, I thought. We've had a rough winter, and that's a cheap fix.
However, I paid a small fortune for this thing. More than twice what I paid for the Chevy, in fact. The salesman had to figure that someone so squirrelly about a big-ticket buy was going to inspect the car with a fine-toothed comb, as well as send it to his mechanic to see if anything else needed fixing. The more I looked at it, the more rust spots I found - tiny ones, sometimes just a little BB-sized chip out of the hood, but not all of them in places where the rocks had hit it.
A little research turned up the tragic truth - that model-year Versa is a rot-box. For some reason, the paint job on the 2009 was very fragile, and the paint cracked easily, leading to exactly the problem I was looking at. Either I was going to be touching up the paint for the rest of my life, or the whole car was going to want a complete re-spray. If this was what the car looked like now, it wasn't even going to HAVE quarter-panels in five years.
It seems I'm now confronted with a decision - touch it up myself, have it professionally touched up, get the whole thing resprayed, or swap it for something a little less prone to oxidation. (There may be other options I haven't considered.) Each has its own benefits, drawbacks, and - most important, considering the overall investment so far - price tag. I need to assure myself that buyer's remorse isn't making the spots seem bigger than they are, and I'm also a little annoyed at the "caveat emptor" attitude of the asshole who sold it to me when I mentioned it on a follow-up call. (It's the second time I've had an otherwise "nice" car salesman turn into an utter jerk when I called him about a minor follow-up issue.)
What do you think?
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