Rainy Day Car Shopping

With my car suddenly going kaput, we needed another vehicle to get me to work ASAP. Luckily, the art teacher at my school lives like 3 houses down from us so it was easy for me to hitch a ride with her to and from work all week. I usually stay quite a bit later than her and arrive a little earlier than her so it made it an interesting week, but I was EXTREMELY grateful to have a way to get to work.

Doug had been thinking about trading in his 2004 Civic Hybrid because it wasn't as good for his new commute that involves more high speed interstate travel rather than the stop and go traffic of his last commute. My commute IS stop and go traffic so we decided get a new car for him to drive and I would drive his "old" one.

It's never the best condition to have to buy a car when you ABSOLUTELY need it, but this was our situation. Friday after school was out, Doug picked me up and we started right away visiting dealerships all around the DC metro area. We were looking for a sedan/coupe that cost under $12K, had around 50K miles, was newer than a 2004, and was preferably a Honda or Toyota. (Doug also wanted to get a manual transmission...) We knew that it would be quite the challenge to find such a vehicle, but we weren't going to settle unless such a car did not exist.

It's been pouring down a depressing, very cold, yucky rain since Thursday, so we were the only people out looking for cars. We visited some pretty interesting places from hits that we found on autotrader.com and cars.com. Whenever we got there, the cars that we were interested in were either gone already or hadn't been taken care of. We didn't even get the chance to haggle on a car because they all stunk. They even sat us down to talk to The Manager who asked us, "What can we do to get you into a car today?" It was pretty annoying and exhausting at the same time. We left the last used car place at 9:00pm Friday night and headed home pretty discouraged.

We started early this morning hoping to have better luck at a Honda Certified Dealership up in Maryland where my parents had bought their Odyssey a few years back. We were a little skeptical because these places usually run more expensive. When we arrived, they actually had already sold the two cars that we had come to see, but we decided to stick around and test drive some anyways.

We test drove a 2007 Honda Accord SE first, but Doug wanted to try out a 5 speed. We got into another 2007 Accord that was a 5 speed, but it had some burn marks in the back seat and was more expensive. The last car we test drove was a very low mileage 2008 Honda Civic SI Coupe (2 door) that was a 5 speed. Doug LOVED driving it. I liked the first Accord, but Doug really liked the Civic. Both had their sell points...

The salesman that we worked with was much better than the others that we had encountered the previous day. He was up front with us and supported our decisions. He didn't try to push us up on the price tag by showing us cars outside of our preferred range. He was just a nice guy AND he listened. He left us for a while so we could discuss the decision privately.

I felt really bad as the wife to have to ground Doug, aka Mr. Practical, with practicality because I wanted him to be able to get the fun car. Kids or no kids, Doug drags around a bunch of stuff in his car and it would be hard to get to the back seat without 4 doors. In the end, Doug agreed with me and we decided that the 2007 Accord would be the best buy for our family.

Well, here's our new car... well, at least it's new to us.


2007 Honda Accord SE