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MY WIFE AND I BOUGHT a used hybrid Toyota RAV4 recently. We saw it at a dealership and bought it that day.
This wasn’t an impulse purchase. We knew it was time to replace my 10-year-old Subaru Forester, and we’d done research on hybrids and electric vehicles. Because the new car would be our distance traveling vehicle, and my occasional work transportation, we wanted the flexibility of a hybrid. In time, we’ll replace our second car with an electric vehicle for local driving.
This purchase was part of the decision we made years ago to shrink our energy and other natural resource “footprint.” Our home is heated and cooled with a geo-thermal system, our electricity comes from a solar farm in our area, and we compost and recycle. Trading in our gas-burning cars is just the next step.
We found that the internet has transformed car buying. We’d expected the dealership’s salespeople to interview us and then suggest cars for us to look at, trying to sell us a vehicle from the stock they had on hand. That had been our experience in the past—but that’s not what we found.
We visited two dealerships. At the first, a laid-back fellow referred us to online resources, and said we could have a car shipped to the dealership if we found one we wanted—with no transport fee if we bought the vehicle. So diffident was our guy, in fact, that he seemed almost uninterested in making a sale.
We were bewildered and a bit uncomfortable with this approach. Could we find an informed salesperson who would at least walk us through the dealer’s car lot and then, if necessary, guide us through the first rounds of an online search, all without trying to close a sale immediately?
We had a better experience at the second dealership we visited. The salesman asked why we were thinking about a used RAV4. He thought our reasoning was sound, but told us that not many such vehicles were available. In fact, the only one on the lot was a 2021 model that had arrived the day before. He said if we didn’t buy it immediately, someone else would snap it up.
We thought that might be classic arm-twisting. But in fact, there was a couple on the lot looking at the same car we were interested in. As they say in Chicago, you snooze, you lose. We claimed it.
We found there are some positive developments in car sales. Most obvious to us was the number of women selling cars. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just over 20% of auto salespeople are women, a substantial increase in recent years. Women selling vehicles is good for customers and great for dealers because many buyers are put off by the car industry’s historically aggressive male-dominated sales culture.
Another improvement is a more streamlined purchase procedure. I was dreading the visit to “the money guy” who would subtly nudge us to finance the purchase with a modest down payment, sweetening the offer by discovering little discounts or reconfigurations of the warranties, while still ultimately making good money for the company by signing us to a significant loan at a relatively high interest rate.
We were not going that route. When my wife and I shop for big ticket items, we act as a bit of a tag team. With the salesperson, I take the role of the idiot who needs to have all kinds of things explained. That helps with the dismissive “don’t worry your pretty little head” attitude toward women, which is still all too pervasive. I push for and get explanations and details.
Meanwhile, my wife is the hard bargainer. “I don’t need or want this or this,” said firmly. Then, with a hint of skepticism, “Is that the best you can do?” She gets results that my marshmallow self can only admire—in this case, a 20% larger trade-in allowance on my road-weary Forester, a 20% increase in warranty coverages, and some other little goodies. Yay, team.
We chose to get all the optional warranty coverages for the “new to us” car. Although it’s less than three years old, we’re the third owners of this vehicle, and we don’t want to worry about the cost of repairs, replacement parts and upkeep. Since we’ll drive this car for years, the money we paid for these coverages should amortize well. At a minimum, we’ll sleep better.
When the actual purchase moment arrived, we weren’t hustled over to a separate loan person in a side office. Our salesperson asked how we wanted to pay for the vehicle. We said cash. He said fine, and handed us off to the title, registration and warranty person, who casually punched in a quick query to one of the credit rating companies. She was ready to accept our personal check for the full amount before we’d gotten our checkbook out. The possibility of financing never came up.
So, we drove off in a Toyota that’s all ours. Since then, we’ve put a few thousand miles on it, and used one of the warranty policies to cover the ridiculously high cost of a second key fob. The best part: We’re happily not buying gas every week.
Tom Scott is a retired Episcopal priest. He and his wife live in Evanston, Illinois. They love retirement because they get to see more of their children and grandchildren, and they can spend more time at concerts, the opera and the Chicago Botanic Garden. Tom’s previous articles were Forever Calling and Starting Late.
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My most recent impulsive purchase occurred in 2011 when I decided to buy a BMW 328i to celebrate a job promotion I had just received.
Since 2021, I’ve mainly used my Tesla Model Y due to the advantages it offers, such as free charging at work, affordable nighttime electricity rates, and a convenient supercharger network that eliminates range anxiety. Over the past two years, the only maintenance required for my Tesla was refilling the windshield wiper fluid.
While I understand that many people may not be able to afford a fully electric car, increasing the number of hybrid vehicles on the road can still help reduce overall emissions, despite the complexity and ongoing maintenance costs associated with these vehicles.
However, the most effective way to address transportation emissions is to invest in public transportation networks for both large and small cities, as well as regional rail connections. Unfortunately, this idea is often met with immediate criticism by a gaggle of interests.
We bought both of our current vehicles from the same dealership and the same salesperson, one in 2018 and one in 2020. In both cases, we did some Internet research to narrow things down and then went to local dealerships to test drive the car(s) we were interested in. And in both cases, the model/color we wanted were hard to find.
No problem, our guy told us. He found the first car at a dealer about 400 miles south of us. There were only two models that color in the entire state of California when he started making calls—the first one got snapped up before he could grab it, and the second was the one he got for us. I talked to him on Friday afternoon before Labor Day weekend, and by Tuesday morning, he’d texted me a photo with “come get your car.” He had to get the second car from Oregon, and it took a few days longer, maybe a week.
He calls and emails both of us on our birthdays every year and sends holiday greetings. He’s good at his job and made it easy for us.