car shopping

I've never really thought about it, but car shopping is a huge pain in the arse. Today my dad and I went to 5 different car lots and only found a handful of cars that were in my price range or half-decent size/model wise. Very few of that handful were both in price range and a half-decent model.

The fourth place we looked had sent out a flyer with "cars from $76 a month" and so since that's in my budget we decided to go there. HAH! What they should have put was "1 Car that is sold on first day if it really exists at all is $76 a month the rest are over $200." And like an idiot I gave him my information before finding all that out so I'm probably going to get spam/calls from their stupid business. Boy are they in for it if they call me, they really pissed me off. And the "free" MP3 player that I won according to their flyer? Yea it's free but they don't keep them in the dealership and so I have to send away for it with a money order for $15 to cover shipping charges. Whatever happened to free???

The next dealership (and last one of the day) I almost bought a car for a really really good price, but after considering the little things that were wrong with it my dad decided it wouldn't be a good deal... and considering what I know about cars mechanically could fit in my little pinky finger I trust him to make that judgement. Certainly trust him more than myself. And we hadn't even taken a test drive, that was just from looking at the outside of the car and the undercarriage (it looks like it had serious front end damage at one time in the undercarriage).

And then when the car dealer finally got there (he was away so we had to call his phone) and he attempted to start the car... it didn't start. So he pops the hood and says its just the battery and it only needs to be charged. Ok, fine. The car dealer gets the battery charger out, puts it on the battery spots and the car alarm starts going off! Right at the exact time that my dad's head was down at the engine, so he got a nice loud ringing right in his head (he had a headache after). Figuring he could get the alarm off from the inside he had my dad put the charger on the battery as he tried to start the car... nope! More alarm. Over and over and over again this happened as the guy tried to figure out what was wrong. Finally my dad said we'd come back tomorrow and maybe they'd have it fixed by then.

We'll go back, but chances are we'll be looking at another car on the lot. That one just seems like way too much trouble. So we're taking it as a sign that we should keep looking...

Dad said we'd go looking more on Monday but I think my pesting is getting to him because I've already kind of gotten him to say we'll go to that place plus another place tomorrow. Yay!

Now if only one of these places would have a decent car for a decent price...

(I'll update tomorrow with the car quest results)