Note to future parents: Plan your automobile purchases carefully
I’m sure all of you have teenagers that are practically perfect. Straight A’s and they have never been in any trouble. Even if that were true, we are all faced with one issue that is exceedingly hard to forecast. The automobile inventory and lifespan.
My forecasting abilities were doing quite well until late this summer. We had managed to stay ahead of the mayhem that inexperienced drivers bring to the sublime family life. I have already written about some of those horrors. I won’t remind you and thankfully this tale is not yet another wreck with twisted metal and a call in the middle of the night.
Instead, it’s the unexpected stoppage that occurs when the inexperienced driver continues to drive a valuable automobile that shouldn’t be driven. The result? Premature death of a great and fully paid for car. The other ramification sets in.
My plan was always to time the “hand me downs” so that our children would get a trusted machine I bought new. This works out pretty well in small families with a couple of “starter” cars. But the Automobile Sudden Death Syndrome (ASDS) blows that little plan all to pieces, fast.
Now what?
I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. Buy another used car from some nefarious creature in the Metroplex, or give my baby away and hope it makes it to 100,000 miles?
My baby in this case is the 2007 Honda Civic Coupe you see above. It’s coming up on three years old and I just turned 15,000 miles on it. Yea, you read that right. It is driven around the local community but generally it goes from my garage to the garage at DFW airport 10 miles away and back. That is it’s normal commute.
Shopping sucks
Yea, I already tweeted that. I’ve been on vacation this week. Some fucking vacation. Sorry for the f bomb but it’s well deserved. There are some seriously shady characters out there. I can spot them without ever even talking to them.
The best money you’ll ever spend shopping for a used car is the $40 membership to the carfax.com service. This service allows you to look at the history of a vehicle identification number (VIN). The history will tell you if the titled car was in a flood, or wreck, or had the odometer rolled back. You would be surprised at how many times this information comes in handy. I have had two people in the past week refuse to supply a VIN. That’s a big RED FLAG and probably means the auto was stolen or something very very bad.
Websites
Time to rant a little on craigslist.com. They clearly have everything going for them. I assume it’s due to low rates for running an ad. But their UI and data entry sucks.
Freeform text entry is good for some people. Freedom to control the formatting is also good for others. But for the masses that post on craigslist.com, it’s a curse. Many people neglect to supply key information about the product (automobile in this case). And it’s simple stuff like the model, color, etc.
I realize posting mileage might be something they actually want to leave off, but there are a lot of other things people might want to know and it might actually help SELL the freaking car. I realize there’s a language barrier issue at work here, but a better automobile data entry form would help immensely.
The most annoying feature, or lack of feature in this case, is the inability to put a freaking thumbnail on each posting. You actually have to click the posting first. Is this the BBS era of the 1980’s or what? It wouldn’t be so bad but the dealers and other n00bs tend to post their vehicles a million freaking times over the course of a few weeks. I guess they think it’s going to get someone’s attention and help sell the car. Wrong!!!
What to do?
I guess I’ll play the game a while longer. I am taking a break from my vacation (thank god) and going back to work next week. I’ll continue to monitor craigslist, autotrader.com, cars.com and a few others looking for the golden nugget. But let’s just say I am not holding my breath even though I look great in blue.
People, please go to http://kbb.com and read the descriptions for the quality ratings. Excellent doesn’t mean poor.
