Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Thursday, December 09, 2004

New Car

We bought a new car yesterday and thus ended the Outback saga. We had finally received word that the engine had completely failed, at least that's what the mechanic told us. We tried to deal with the dealership but they weren't interested in doing anything but gouging us so I wonder a bit about the diagnosis. Anyways, we decided that we really wanted a less expensive car. We loved our Outback but to replace it would have cost us $35,000 and we didn't want to spend that kind of money so we began to consider our second option; a hybrid.

The lovely wife did some research and decided she liked the Honda Civic Hybrid and called a dealership up in Huntsville. She then found that the Honda dealer in Macon had one we could test drive. On the way down I had a realization. Why not just be straight with the salesman and tell him what the dealership in Huntsville was willing to do and see if he would match or beat it. IF he could, we'd buy from him; if not then we'd go to Huntsville. He made us a deal and we now own the hybrid.

To me, the interesting thing is how different being totally straight made our relationship with the three dealerships involved. Had the Subaru dealership in Huntsville looked at us as something beside poor, stranded motorists to take advantage of then we would likely have bought an Outback Sport from them. They looked at the situation short term since they didn't see any advantage in looking at it long term and thus lost the whole deal. They'll get some income from their maintanence department but they've lost the several thousand dollars from the sale of a car. The other two dealerships looked at us as potential long-term Honda customers and did what they could to get us into a car. They worked hard to make things happen for us and we decided to go with their product. In fact, we're thinking of investing in a Honda Element when a hybrid version of that comes out we're so pleased with our experience.

The moral of the story is that the dealerships had different views of the goose and the golden egg and that made all the difference.

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