I Need A Ride

There really is never a dull moment, is there?

On Saturday I turned in my beloved car because it was the end of my lease term. And, after much research and deliberation, we decided on a new vehicle. In the past when we've purchased a car, we've just shown up, given the dealer our specs, negotiated a price and make our way through the financing process and, voila! we're on our way home in our shiny new ride. Not too complicated at all. But this time?

No such luck.

Who knew that the car we want is so popular that they are selling like hotcakes. Most people I mention it to haven't even heard of it so I have no idea who's buying them. But all of the dealerships we've been to tell us that they "can't keep 'em on the lot." We test drove the car a few weeks ago so we knew exactly which model, color, options, etc. we wanted. Apparently, because of the exterior/interior color combo we chose, it would have to be a special order directly from the manufacturer. And they are all backed up with orders, so the wait time (as of Saturday) was about 4 - 6 weeks. Yikes.

We visited three dealerships in all and because they are all working from the same inventory, no one really has a leg up on the other. We did get a realistic estimate from the last dealership we went to that told us it would be more like 8 weeks (as of Monday) for the factory order, especially now because of the auto worker strike. Bananas. So we decided to reevaluate our choices. I wasn't married to the idea of a particular interior color so we bent on that and that opened up our options. A little. The salesman was able to find one, about 200 miles away, that had all of our options, though an entirely different color. Okay, fine. But once he called to request the car, he was told that someone had put a deposit on it so that it wouldn't be sold before the purchaser went through the buying process. Geez! Onto Plan B. Our salesguy found us another vehicle, about 50 miles away - with more options than we wanted and therefore a higher price - that was scheduled to be sold last night. He said that if it hadn't sold by 9:30am this morning, we could have it. So cross your fingers for us. Taking all forms of public transportation to work with a bad head cold is getting old.

It's so crazy. I mean, it's not like we're buying a limited edition Bentley for crying out loud.

I bet they have a few of those in stock.