I tried to buy a new car over the weekend. We’ve been researching this for a few weeks and it’s been a big time suck. I’d test driven a 2011 Ford Explorer and liked it well enough. Good power, handling, interior room, looks. It’s an all-new and therefore unproven design, but is highly rated by everyone who does that kind of thing. So I succumbed to the temptation of a shiny new car. Problem was, the dealer didn’t really have a car to sell me, just an imaginary future car. In other words I’d have to order one. The problem with that was dude couldn’t predict how long it would take to deliver the car. He’d told me about eight or ten weeks before, but now it was fourteen weeks or more. On top of this, he didn’t really want to give us any kind of a deal, or even a good trade-in price on my old car. There was language in the agreement that if we got tired of waiting didn’t want the car we’d loose our deposit, but if they failed to delver the car in a reasonable time, we’d get our deposit back and agree not to sue them. Problem was they didn’t want to commit to a number for a reasonable amount of time, and when pressed they wouldn’t commit a number I could accept. I would have gone up to ten weeks, which is into mid-June, but no. So that was that. Too bad, too. I had a name all picked out for her: “Dora the Truck”.<\/p>\n
So now we’re back to looking at Pilots, which is another perfectly cromulent car, although built more for comfort than for speed. Still Honda has better fuel economy, better reputation for long-term reliability, and most importantly, actual cars to sell. Other good news is the 2009 Pilot is basically the same as the 2011, and they have plenty certified pre-owned ones listed in inventory. We’ve done well buying cars off of lease returns before. It looks like we can save a good 10 grand, and maybe get back to the program of upgrading my studio gear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I tried to buy a new car over the weekend. We’ve been researching this for a few weeks and it’s been a big time suck. I’d test driven a 2011 Ford Explorer and liked it well enough. Good power, handling, interior room, looks. It’s an all-new and therefore unproven design, but is highly rated by … Continue reading “Supply and Demand”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-automotive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}