Cars

The wife and I have been car shopping recently. I've never bought a car. She's only bought one with her parents. The experience is very different from almost anything.


For one, I'm very used to buying things on sale -- sometimes you get a good deal, sometimes you don't for expediency's sake -- but cars are one of the few things left you buy through old fashioned haggling. And it's not something I think I'll be good at.


We need a new car because my old car isn't just my old car. It's my brother-in-law's old car. And before that it was the wife's car. And before that it belonged to somebody else. It's a 1994 Camry and, as the wife is fond of telling me, it's as high-end as you could get back then. CD player. Leather seats. Sun roof. Doors. Wheels. The Works.


The problem is that, in the last 14 years, something went wrong way down deep in the engine where it's soft like a woman. So it belches oil smoke when I start it up. And that oil smoke comes from a cylinder where the oil is burning. And every so often, it fouls a spark plug and I have to take it into the shop. It's embarassing. It sucks. I feel like I'm killing the earth and paying out the nose because my car isn't getting the gas mileage it should.

So we're looking for a new car. And at this point in our lives, with gas prices climbing daily, we're pretty set on fuel efficiency. So what do you look at? A Prius, of course.

Except that everybody else on the planet is trying to get one of those cars. We go to the dealership and they tell us they mark them all up. Why? Because they can. Are there any new ones? No. And they've pre-sold any new ones that will come in.

So we look at Hondas. The mpgs aren't as great, but they're not bad, either. And all of them cost...what's it called...oh, yeah: money. Which we don't have. I mean, we're not doing so bad we can't make payments, but we have other bills that currently use that money. And with a used Prius at $25k or a new Fit at $16k, it seems like a lot of money to fork over to not get what you want.

Now we're thinking about waiting and trying to get a new Prius next year, which means waiting until August '09 when the new ones come out, but I'm not even sure if we could put money down now to reserve one, etc. And in the meantime, I have to keep driving a moneypit around, leaving blue clouds of smoke in the parking garage and getting stabbed in the wallet every time I fill up.

Hell, I'd get a scooter if it made more sense -- i.e. my commute wasn't so long and fraught with 4-ton pickups driven by lunatics.

Can't somebody just invent a goddamn teleporter already? That's all I really want. Teleport to work, teleport home. Just so long as I don't have to fill the damn thing up with unleaded every few days.