Car shopping
Craig and I went mutual car shopping tonight (he needs one, and Karen and I are looking to replace the rust bucket). It was a reasonable time, we hit 3 different dealers (Mazda, Honda, Toyota) to see what there was. Karen was mostly looking for hatchbacks, so I wanted to see how the Mazda 3, the Honda Fit and the Toyota Yaris compared.
Mazda
The Mazda 3 seemed to be a really nice car, more of a mid-size as opposed to a compact economical car, so I’m not sure that was quite what we were trying for, but overall I liked it and Jim (our mechanic) said there aren’t many issues with them.
Honda
Next was Waterloo North Honda - that was a total bust, the guy was useless (and I told him that), didn’t want to sell a car and wasn’t interested in even talking to me, so we left with LESS information that you can find on their website. If we do buy a Honda, we probably won’t buy it there because they don’t deserve the business.
Toyota
In stunning contrast, the Toyota dealer was fantastic! He had comparison pricing for us to review while we were sitting in the cars within minutes of us expressing interest (definitely going back to test drive there).
Two interesting bits of information we noticed. One is that all new stereos in cars are embedded parts of the dashboard (i.e. you can’t remove them or change them if they break)… that’s not so important, but it is interesting. The second and more notable thing is that these compact economical cars have the same mileage numbers as the mid-size cars and cost the same or more! A fully loaded Yaris is about $25K not really any different than a mid-size Corolla and the same gas mileage for quite a bit less space – all of that is making us rethink what is important in a new car.
1 comment July 17th, 2006