New wheels

Despite my previous post about how much I love my old bomb, the time has come to get a new car. here's why:

• The rusting body is allowing more and more water into the car every time it rains (not that it rains that much in Melbourne anymore) and the floor under front passenger seat becomes a little swimming pool. When I looked at it the other day, I saw little seedlings growing in the carpet!!
• As we now have two precious, little darlings, it would probably be sensible to get a car that has a higher safety rating.
• Last time we went on a holiday (pre-Thumper's arrival), the three of us barely fit all our crap in the back of the Camry, so a car with space for a family of four would be great. Also the Camry has almost no storage compartments for the passengers and driver, and the radio/stereo doesn't really work anymore, which is a nuisance on long trips.
• The current market value of our car is probably $100 or $200, if that, so every time we have to buy a replacement part, service it, insure it and register it, we are spending far more than the market value.
• The air conditioning draws so much power from the engine that the car can barely accelerate if it is running. No fun on Melbourne's 35+ degree days.

Anyway, DeepSpice and I had been talking about getting a new car for many months now. In fact, I had delegate the task of deciding exactly what model of car we should get to DeepSpice. He was supposed to do the research, pick a car and then we could shop around at our leisure until we found the right one. Well, after 6 or more months of waiting, I finally took matters into my own hands.

I did a bit of web searching on the major car sale type sites and spent the past couple of weeks in intensive discussion with DeepSpice about the pros and cons of different options. I made a list of criteria:

• storage space and compartments (both in the boot and the cabin)
• safety
• transmission (has to be manual)
• body (has to be a station wagon)
• priced within our budget (which restricted us to looking at cars around 7 to 10 years old)
• maximum mileage (since we were getting a used car)
• purchase from a dealer (not private sale)
• and all the nice-to-have luxuries that our current car doesn't have (like a working radio, air conditioning, remote central locking,

Then we narrowed down to a short list:

• Toyota Camry
• Subaru Forester
• Subaru Liberty/Outback/Legacy (which are essentially all the same car body, with different bits tacked on)
• Ford Falcon XT
• Holden Commodore

(Mitsubishi Magna was briefly considered, but we both have a thing against Mitsubishi from the days of DeepSpice's old blue van, even though, apparently Mitsubishi produce much better quality cars these days.)

Anyway, this short list was soon narrowed down even further to Subaru Liberty/Outback/Legacy because it is the only car that was readily available in a manual transmission that also met our other criteria. And after only a few days of watching the prices of Subaru Liberty and Outback cars on the web, I soon realised that (a) there are hardly any around Melbourne (though quite a lot in NSW) and (b) the ones on the market in our price range have typically done at least 150,000 kms and often much more.

So when I saw a Subaru Outback that was $3,900 over our budget but had only done 124,000 kms, I figured it was worth a look. (By this time, I had realised that our budget wasn't going to buy anything that met our criteria and we had to either spend more or get an automatic.) We had a test drive on Monday (25 January) and put down a deposit on Tuesday! Never even looked at any other cars (other than online of course). Funny thing is that is exactly what we did with the Camry, and that has turned out OK.

We pay the balance and take delivery on Saturday. I still can't quite believe how quickly it has all happened after months and months on inaction from DeepSpice. I also can't believe that I can make such a quick decision about such a major purchase when I usually spend weeks doing intensive research before purchasing things that cost much less.

Strangely though, I feel very comfortable with the purchase. The car meets our criteria reasonably well, the price seems fair (even quite a good deal actually), the engine runs well, it has a solid service history and the dealer is including a 3 year warranty.

The only thing we couldn't manage was to meet BallFiend's criteria. He has specifically requested that we get a new car in his favourite colour: green. The new car is white. I told him that mum and dad are buying the car with our money so we get to choose the colour and that when he is older and buys a car with his money he can choose the colour. He seemed to be happy with that, but we will soon find out for sure on Saturday.

With the car buying out of the way, my next task has been to organise insurance. Now, that is a real pain in the neck. I have spent most of the past two days getting quotes and trying to make sense of fine print. Bloody boring, but necessary I suppose. Hopefully I can finalise it tomorrow, ready for picking up the car on Saturday.

Then it will be onto the next project - disposing of the dear old Camry. If I can't sell it as a private sale sadly, it will probably just go to a wrecker.

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