So, Recently I had noticed that I am driving a lot. Many of you know that I used to work out in Airdrie and drove an hour and a half one way to work every day. My commute now is not that time consuming and only takes 30-45 min. But it is a lot of sitting in traffic wasting gas...
The other day, seriously maybe two weeks ago at most, Scott commented on how we should really be looking at vehicles for when he is done school... Then our talk became replacing the car now. He liked the idea of a crossover to replace both vehicles but I like that the van is capable of carrying a lot of youth to activities and I don't think our family is the size yet where we want to have anything bigger than a car for daily travels... So we discussed different options but I always came back to the idea of a Hybrid. Our car is really good on gas. Being a standard, it is easy to save gas on hills, at red lights, in traffic, and can go 500Km on a tank of gas easily. For a 2002 that is a decent size, that seemed good to me for a regular car so if we wanted something more efficient, I figured we would have to go into the Hybrid idea. We have also never spent too much on vehicles... with the Civic being under $1000 and the Nissan being around $2000, the Neon was probably the most expensive vehicle we owned and it was still less than $5000. Scott had said that maybe we should try for something in the next price range and see if we get a little bit better of a car. We decided to start saving and to look at the savings we already had and see how much of it could be put towards a car.
Then we researched vehicles... We looked on line at consumer reviews, we looked on kijiji, we looked at autotrader, we looked at the websites of car companies and looked at dealerships on line. I kept returning to the Prius but the newest model is over $25,000 for the base model and there was no way we could/wanted to afford that. It's funny that while reading reviews for the Prius, I felt like I was reading reviews about Apple computers. The main complaint is cost, and then there really are no other complaints. Ya, they cost some money, but you get what you pay for and it's going to be something that is going to last. It sounded like Toyota owners, on a whole, liked their cars like we have liked our computers. With that information, we really narrowed the search down to the Prius. That is not to say we wouldn't get something else if it was priced better (A little different than our thoughts on computers PC's are HORRID).
Then it was back to kijiji and autotrader where we found two great cars that we wouldn't mind checking out, one in Calgary and one just outside of Edmonton. After sending two emails, we found out that they had both sold within 48 hours of being on the Internet. :( But it was ok because there were a few others that we had seen but weren't first choices because of the price, one in Calgary at a dealership and one in Lethbridge, both of which had been on the website for apx. a month.
We went and test drove the one in Calgary way in the North and realized that we did not like dealerships. lol Who does? We did get some great information from the salesman though about the Prius. (He didn't realize that we were pretty much sold of the Prius, just not his- so he tried to sell us on the Prius and it was great info) He wouldn't budge on the price though and we weren't willing to spend $1500 on a car even if it did have 77,000km on it.
So, the next day we went down to Lethbridge so that I could get my hair redone for the upcoming events: Rachel, my youngest sister is graduating from high school this weekend, and Elizabeth my second youngest sister is getting remarried the weekend after down in Cardston. Before we went to the hairdresser, a great friend of mine and one of my bridesmaids, we went to test drive the Prius in Lethbridge that was priced at $10,300. It was a year older than the one in Calgary and was a base model where the one in Calgary had the first set of upgrades. It wasn't bad but I wanted to make sure it hadn't been smoked in so took it over to my sister Crystal's house as she is the most sensitive to smoke. After sitting in it for a few minutes, she indicated that she couldn't smell anything and felt fine (she usually gets asthma type symptoms immediately) so we went back and offered the couple a few thousand less than they were asking and they agreed.
WOW! We had bought a car!! Scott asked me once we got to his parents house how I felt about it. He said if you think it was a bad choice you can usually tell right away. (When he said that I remembered last week when I sold my computer. The guy talked me down to $800 but I should have stayed at $900 and I knew it and still feel silly that I let him get away with the extra $100. I had sold my Mac Book for $700 a few years earlier so a Mac Book Pro is worth more than that, especially when we weren't selling it to someone we knew. Oh, well- I hope I learned my lesson) I thought about Scott's question but I definitely did not feel bad, I felt that we had made a good deal and was excited rather than disappointed.
We drove the car back to Calgary and to date we have put over 350Km on it since fill up (it has the same size gas tank as the Neon) and there is at least 3/4 of a tank left of gas!
Definitely a blessing! Lets hope it stays that way!
I'll have to get a pic up but there are so many other things going on lately that it may be a bit.
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