{"id":5469,"date":"2012-01-31T16:12:55","date_gmt":"2012-01-31T21:12:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/forgetful.ca\/?p=5469"},"modified":"2012-01-31T16:29:27","modified_gmt":"2012-01-31T21:29:27","slug":"a-new-car","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/forgetful.ca\/?p=5469","title":{"rendered":"A new car!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I thought I had bought my last brand new car. \u00a0I bought the blue 2002 Mazda Protege5 brand new in 2001, and Shannen and I leased a brand new blue 2004 Mazda Tribute in 2003. \u00a0For a brief period of time, we had 2 navy blue Mazdas in our driveway.<\/p>\n

After the Tribute, we got a screamin’ deal on a dealer demo 2007 Mazda 5. \u00a0Its only downfall is that it’s white. \u00a0Shannen calls it the Delivery Van.<\/p>\n

The Protege5 was a wonderful car in almost every way except for the cancer. \u00a0Every Protege5 from that era rusts in the same spots – the hatch around the badge, the rear wheel wells, and the hood. \u00a0In Saskatchewan, cars don’t rust. \u00a0You see tons of 15+ year old cars still on the road. \u00a0Not so in Ottawa. \u00a0Cars rust away before your eyes. \u00a0I knew this, and I considered rust-proofing services like Krown, but made the conscious decision to see what happened without it. \u00a0Knowing now that those Mazdas were made of budget steel, I would have rust-proofed.<\/p>\n

All that to say, the Protege5 was in pretty rough shape in fall 2011, despite only having 175,000 kms. \u00a0The next repair was going to be $1000 or more, and I started to consider replacing it.<\/p>\n

I put 80 kms on a day going to and from work, so fuel economy is critical. \u00a0I also love the 5-door hatchback. \u00a02 door cars and trunks are persona non grata in our house. \u00a0Why suffer through them when there’s a clear alternative?<\/p>\n

We didn’t have any cash under the mattress, so knew we had to finance. \u00a0And financing a new car is expensive in today’s low interest rate environment! \u00a0Best you can get is ~7% over 5 years. \u00a0I looked at some 2010 Mazda 3’s, Hyundai Elantra Touring’s, and a Tribute, but all were ~$15k, and with financing the payments were … unreasonable.<\/p>\n

So I started to look at new cars. \u00a0Warranties vary – everyone offers 3 year \/ 60,000 kms except Mazda who offers 3 year \/ 80,000 kms, and Hyundai \/ Kia \/ Mitsubishi that offer 5 year \/ 80,000 kms.<\/p>\n

I was tempted by Hyundai and Kia’s small car offerings, the Accent 5 door and the Rio 5 door, and the Ford Fiesta 5 door, and the Mazda2. \u00a0However, as soon as you try to put a carseat in the Mazda2, you realize that this class of car is pretty limiting. \u00a0Sure they’re good on gas, but you can barely fit kids behind the driver’s seat, and you certainly couldn’t put much in the trunk.<\/p>\n

So I bumped my sights up to the Hyundai Elantra Touring, the Ford Focus 5 dr, and the Mazda3. \u00a0I took the family for test drives of the Mazda3 and the Hyundai Elantra Touring on the same day – the Mazda was the clear winner. \u00a0I’m sure the Elantra would be a fine car, and the 5 year warranty is definitely worth something, but we realized that we’re Mazda people, and there’s nothing wrong with that.<\/p>\n

The model with the best fuel economy is the Mazda 3 5-door hatch manual with the Skyactiv 2.0 litre engine. \u00a0Unfortunately, none of these had arrived in Canada yet. \u00a0The same thing happened to me with the Protege5 – I ended up paying list price for the car!<\/p>\n

I wasn’t doing the same thing this time. \u00a0I sat down with a salesman at Mazda and remembered that I hate the car buying experience at the dealership.<\/p>\n

So I decided to do things differently. \u00a0I started digging on the internet. \u00a0I found 2 separate services that offer you an “invoice” price for new cars (www.carcostcanada.com and www.apa.ca). \u00a0Both services charge nominal fees ($40, $75) and both give you very similar reports for a new car: the list price, the “invoice price”, a breakdown of incentives that are currently in place at the dealers, and a referral to a dealer that will sell you this exact car at an “invoice +x%”.<\/p>\n

In parallel, I thought I’d try cold emailing every dealership in town with the car I wanted, and asking for their best price. \u00a0I told them that I was contacting all area dealerships, was well aware of all incentives available to them, and would happily purchase a car from whomever offered the best deal.<\/p>\n

The day after I sent those emails, I found www.unhaggle.com. \u00a0For a fee, they offer to manage a blind tender for you to all area dealerships. \u00a0I wish I would have found these guys on day 1 – they contact all dealers, give them a deadline of 3 days, and forward you all of the offers they get back. \u00a0They claim satisfaction guaranteed.<\/p>\n

I received a few emails from dealerships with different versions of “if you come into the dealership, I can get you the best price.” \u00a0Only 1 salesperson was willing to negotiate to his best price over email – David Boyce at Carling Mazda. \u00a0He was extremely helpful, and ended up hundreds of dollars below the best unhaggle price (Unhaggle refunded my fee when I told them I was able to negotiate a better price outside their service). \u00a0If you’re in the market, I highly recommend David. \u00a0If you talk to him, tell him I sent you and I get some credit at their service desk!<\/p>\n

So I bought a car over the internet! \u00a0Kinda. \u00a0I avoided the barfy experience of negotiating with a car salesman in the dealership. \u00a0It was all done very calmly over email, and I spent a grand total of 45 minutes at the dealership between the day I signed the contract and the day I picked up the new car.<\/p>\n

And I love our new car. \u00a0My only complaint is that January is a terrible time to take delivery of a new car. \u00a0It was clean for all of 5 minutes.<\/p>\n

And I’m going to rust-proof this one. \u00a0Hopefully I’ll still be driving it when it hits 250,000 kms.<\/p>\n

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I thought I had bought my last brand new car. \u00a0I bought the blue 2002 Mazda Protege5 brand new in 2001, and Shannen and I leased a brand new blue 2004 Mazda Tribute in 2003. \u00a0For a brief period of time, we had 2 navy blue Mazdas in our driveway. After the Tribute, we got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[29,60],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/forgetful.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5469"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/forgetful.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/forgetful.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/forgetful.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/forgetful.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5469"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/forgetful.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5474,"href":"http:\/\/forgetful.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5469\/revisions\/5474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/forgetful.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/forgetful.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/forgetful.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}