New Car!

W00t! We got a new car yesterday. I've been agitating for a new car for a couple of years now, maybe even ever since we got the Honda Odyssey minivan, which made our Ford Explorer not quite as necessary, given the minivan's utility. And with the gradually decreasing reliability of the Explorer, I was looking to downsize.

The Explorer has a lot of good things going for it, despite the bad rap put on it by SUV-haters. In fact, Dora the Explorer was our second straight Explorer. It's main attraction is that it is an excellent dog car. The back seats fold down flat, allowing the dog to be in the back, but sitting up between the front seats. Our previous dog, Homer, just loved to travel this way. Spenser isn't quite so keen on traveling.

It also had a number of other features which are remarkably lacking in many other cars, besides the easy to fold flat back seats. The back window opened separately from the gate, which is a nice little feature you only notice if you don't have it. My brother-in-law poo-pooed this feature, but he grew to miss it in his Jeep Cherokee. This new one finally had some "oomph", which was sorely missed in our first one. With AWD, and switchable 4 wheel drive, it was very useful in our New England winters, and yet it still got nearly 20 mpg, or about what we get in our much less maligned minivan.

But, at six years old and 57,000+ miles, it had gotten to that point where the repairs were beginning to cost as much as paying for a new car. It had been paid off for three years, so it had more than paid for itself. My guardrail accident in the winter was almost the last straw. I shopped it around, all dinged up, and almost pulled the trigger on a Ford Focus. But in the end, my wife convinced me that we didn't need another payment, and I felt the Focus was too small, so we bit the bullet and got it fixed up.

And Fantasia did a fantastic job on it. It came back looking much better than it had before the accident, as they also fixed a previously dinged up rear bumper. It was clean, polished and felt like a new car. So I was very happy. For about a month...

Then, this past weekend, all of a sudden the brakes went on it. You know the sound of metal on metal, as dollar signs fly out from your wheels? That's what was going on here - boom! So I'm thinking it might even be the huge caliper problem I had with it at about 35,000 miles, where the calipers froze and it was a nearly US$2000 job. And then, while it was sitting in the driveway as the minivan was in the body shop (a story for another day), I began to notice small puddles of oil showing up too. That was the last straw.

So even Gabrielle's resistance began to fade. Not disappear, mind you, but ease a little bit. And it was a good fear, too, because a car that is paid for can carry a lot of problems before it outweighs the heavy cost of even a cheap new car. But the idea of putting in US$1000 or more on the Explorer right now was just so off-putting, I started to look in earnest before I took it in for the next round of repairs. And I had been enamored with the Mazda3 ever since it first came out - good looking, gas efficient and a blast to drive, all for under US$20,000.

So I went up to 128 Mazda and said if you give me US$5,000 for my Explorer, I'll buy a Mazda3. As the NADA was around $6,000 or so, they jumped at the chance. They even gave me the car yesterday afternoon, while they looked at the Explorer. My guess, they never even bother to look, figuring $5,000 for the Explorer was a bargain, while I was figuring $5,000 was a steal. Good deal all around! So we closed out the deal last night, and now I get to spend today running around dotting the I's and crossing the T's. But at least I'll be doing it in a new car!

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