Rajah
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Aug 17, 1999
- Messages
- 9,632
Got my "new" car this morning!! I'm very happy. 
The only two painful parts were leaving behind my Taurus (though they gave me one heckuva trade in value on it... my parents, DH, and I all expected $600 less than they actually gave us) and telling the other dealer that we'd been talking to that we found one somewhere else. (that other dealer's sales guy was really sweet, too, and I hate telling him he lost a sale, but he didn't have exactly what I wanted, and I didn't like the location of the dealership -- where I just bought is *so* much closer, and furthermore another coworker told us this morning that he's known several people that will deal *only* with this dealership because they've been so happy.)
Other than leaving the Taurus and disappointing another cute old grandpa, it was a pure breeze.
I gave the sales guy a call this morning to let him know we were coming in and ask for the VIN number. He gave it to me no arguments, then said if I was going to run the CarFax report, he'd be happy to do that for me so we wouldn't have to pay for it (it's $20 for a month of unlimited reporting). I didn't tell him we'd already paid for a month's subscription, I wanted to do the run myself and compare to what he found.
Carfax was good report all the way. What I expected, but it made all of us feel a little better seeing that anyway.
Drove up and the dealer was waiting for us outside and immediately took the Taurus back to be appraised. Which didn't take long at all (I was surprised at how fast it was).
Then they brought the car around from where they'd been filling it up and giving it one more look-over and rub-down, and he told me to drive it again, this time with DH.
So we went home and made sure I could get into the driveway without scraping (the other Regal, the LS, we'd been looking at would have scraped). It made it in just fine. And we gave it a *very* thourough look-over without the dealer hovering over us. It passed our look-over, and DH even found the maintenance history report on it. Only "major/repeat" problem it's had has been with the motors on the automatic windows. That's an annoyance issue. I'll take window motor issues over engine issues any day!
It had a good history of having things cleaned and replaced and all that, had new tires on it (or almost new, anyway -- newer than they were on my Taurus and the Taurus tires were only about a year and a half old).
Got it back and were immediately taken back to the general manager to do the financing. That was a breeze as well -- even with adding the 3 year warranty (I was wrong about the certification warranty, that was only 3 months), the payments were still down in what the range we could afford.
So, everything went off without a hitch!! Took about an hour and a half, if that.
I'm sorry I had to lose my baby Taurus, it got me through a *lot* over the past 5 or 6 years that *I* had it (my parents had it for a year or two before I got it) and there were a lot of memories in that car, but it was time to replace it.
What finally got me more willing to part with my Taurus was going through the repair history for the past year and realizing that if we paid for the latest repair and spread all the repairs out over a year's time, the cost on my Taurus was equal or maybe even a little more per month than this Regal will be.
I also started thinking... would I feel safe driving from Houston to Austin and back in the Taurus. Answer was no. In the Regal? Yes. I'll take the Regal.
So, I drove it off the lot this morning! It's going to take a little getting used to, but already I love it. I even discovered it has some of the "toys" that I absolutely *loved* having on the Aurora DH and I had in Washington DC last June that I didn't realize it had -- that's the gas mileage indicator, tire pressure indicator, oil life indicator, etc.
I can't believe I got it.
And, as a coworker pointed out, if my car hadn't died exactly when it did, this car would have been gone when I was looking.
So I'm now the happy owner of a 1999 Buick Regal GSE!!! And based on its maintenance reliability rating and satisfaction ratings on MSN, I'll be happy with it.
The only two painful parts were leaving behind my Taurus (though they gave me one heckuva trade in value on it... my parents, DH, and I all expected $600 less than they actually gave us) and telling the other dealer that we'd been talking to that we found one somewhere else. (that other dealer's sales guy was really sweet, too, and I hate telling him he lost a sale, but he didn't have exactly what I wanted, and I didn't like the location of the dealership -- where I just bought is *so* much closer, and furthermore another coworker told us this morning that he's known several people that will deal *only* with this dealership because they've been so happy.)
Other than leaving the Taurus and disappointing another cute old grandpa, it was a pure breeze.
I gave the sales guy a call this morning to let him know we were coming in and ask for the VIN number. He gave it to me no arguments, then said if I was going to run the CarFax report, he'd be happy to do that for me so we wouldn't have to pay for it (it's $20 for a month of unlimited reporting). I didn't tell him we'd already paid for a month's subscription, I wanted to do the run myself and compare to what he found.
Carfax was good report all the way.
What I expected, but it made all of us feel a little better seeing that anyway.Drove up and the dealer was waiting for us outside and immediately took the Taurus back to be appraised. Which didn't take long at all (I was surprised at how fast it was).
Then they brought the car around from where they'd been filling it up and giving it one more look-over and rub-down, and he told me to drive it again, this time with DH.
So we went home and made sure I could get into the driveway without scraping (the other Regal, the LS, we'd been looking at would have scraped). It made it in just fine.
And we gave it a *very* thourough look-over without the dealer hovering over us. It passed our look-over, and DH even found the maintenance history report on it. Only "major/repeat" problem it's had has been with the motors on the automatic windows. That's an annoyance issue. I'll take window motor issues over engine issues any day!It had a good history of having things cleaned and replaced and all that, had new tires on it (or almost new, anyway -- newer than they were on my Taurus and the Taurus tires were only about a year and a half old).
Got it back and were immediately taken back to the general manager to do the financing. That was a breeze as well -- even with adding the 3 year warranty (I was wrong about the certification warranty, that was only 3 months), the payments were still down in what the range we could afford.
So, everything went off without a hitch!! Took about an hour and a half, if that.
I'm sorry I had to lose my baby Taurus, it got me through a *lot* over the past 5 or 6 years that *I* had it (my parents had it for a year or two before I got it) and there were a lot of memories in that car, but it was time to replace it.
What finally got me more willing to part with my Taurus was going through the repair history for the past year and realizing that if we paid for the latest repair and spread all the repairs out over a year's time, the cost on my Taurus was equal or maybe even a little more per month than this Regal will be.
I also started thinking... would I feel safe driving from Houston to Austin and back in the Taurus. Answer was no. In the Regal? Yes. I'll take the Regal.
So, I drove it off the lot this morning! It's going to take a little getting used to, but already I love it. I even discovered it has some of the "toys" that I absolutely *loved* having on the Aurora DH and I had in Washington DC last June that I didn't realize it had -- that's the gas mileage indicator, tire pressure indicator, oil life indicator, etc.
I can't believe I got it.
And, as a coworker pointed out, if my car hadn't died exactly when it did, this car would have been gone when I was looking.So I'm now the happy owner of a 1999 Buick Regal GSE!!! And based on its maintenance reliability rating and satisfaction ratings on MSN, I'll be happy with it.
