Muy Caliente!

Literal Barrage’s quest for a new minivan sparked an idea I had that I just sort of passed off. When Sara was buying a new car at the beginning of this month (July), she wanted a small, fuel efficient compact car. She also wanted a 4-door since they seem a little more practical and useful – both for our nephews and friends now and possibly children of our own in the future. The problem was we couldn’t find one anywhere! Our local Toyota dealer had one Corolla which was a top of the line XLS and was about 28k. They didn’t know when they were getting more. They hadn’t seen a Prius in a while. Honda dealers expected Civic hybrids by the end of August and they had one on the lot but it was just for test drives. I heard a story on the Civic forums about a man in Minnesota bought a dealer show car model for $32k. I don’t know if it’s true or not. As far as regular Civics were concerned, the two dealers we went to probably had three or four coupes on the lot that Sara was not interested in and one or two 4-doors in either beige or red, neither of which Sara wanted. The beige car, which I agree with Sara, does not look good in the futuristic looking Civic, and her last car was the same exact tone of red and she wanted something different. Hey, if she has to look at it every day for the next 10 years, she better like the way it looks! The expect to get more in a month that you could order, but only like two or three more so they wanted a down payment to reserve it. There was one blue 4-Door Civic at the second dealer we went to but it was sold to another dealership in an inter-dealer trade or something like that. They liked the idea of Sara paying in cash a little better so they sold it to her and some other poor dealership got screwed. Subaru was an increasingly similar story. They had one Impreza Outback which is the wagon but Sara didn’t like it and a WRX which was out of our price range. They seemed to think they could get one rather quickly but their lot was pretty barren. Mazda was the exception, as long as you like the lower trim Sport model of their Mazda3. They had about 10-12 on their lot. They did have 2 Touring models which I thought was worth the extra cash with a little bump in HP, an extra gear in the slushbox (5spd vs 4spd auto), and stability control. Sara thought it was a great little car that accelerated and braked better than the Civic, but the styling won her over to the Honda side. We didn’t check out Nissan because she thought the Versa and Sentra are ugly and boxy. We also skipped VW as she didn’t want to buy a German car for her parent’s sake, even though Jetta’s are made in Mexico/US/Canada like all the others. Chevy’s Cobalt and Malibu were solid cars, but didn’t feel up to the quality of the others. This was offset by great financing and good deals. Honestly if we just drove to the Chevy dealership, either one would have been good enough to buy – until you compare it to something else. There were no Fords, Chryslers, or Dodges and interested her. We were going to check out the Mitsubishi Lancer, but other than rave reviews on looks (and it was my favorite looking as well), it fell far short on all other attributes and was comparatively expensive. We were going to check out Hyundai, but ran out of time. We didn’t think it was going to offer anything significant over anything else we looked at. Kia? Nothing going on there…She also drove the Accord, Camry & Lancer – all of which she liked but not more than the cheaper Civic. So I guess the point of all this is if you are looking a compact car, be prepared to hear “These things are selling like mad! We’re all out, have a nice day.” Is this just a NJ thing or is this going on where you all live?