Test Drives

To make up for driving her car into a parking lot pole and crunching the front driver's side corner on her way to work yesterday morning, The Boss Lady went and test drove a couple of cars last night.

She is considering the Saturn Ion as a replacement for the battered and bruised commuter car. She has been dreaming about the Toyota Prius, but since we might be doing something sooner than we thought, the Prius is too pricey.

The dealership we bought the Vue from has a nice 2004 Ion sitting there with 18,000 miles. It is a decent little car and with the manual transmission, it should get a little better gas mileage than the automatics that they have new on the lot. They sell mostly automatics in the 4 door ion, so they only have one sitting on the lot with the manual transmission and it has no AC. No dice. This IS Texas for goodness sake. It is summer 8.3452 months a year down here.


The quandary is this, is the 3K-3.5K less than new a new car worth getting something with 18,000 miles financed at a higher interest rate? Or should we bit the bullet, buy new, get a lower interest rate but a little higher payments. The downer is having two car payments at once. Ouch.

Because her car is 11 years old, the insurance just might total it out. But the worst part of all, The Boss Lady filled up with gas and washed her car on the way to work. So it is sitting there shiny and crunched with a $3 a gallon tank full of gas. And try as I might, I can't get the siphon hose to work. I want to get that liquid gold out of there before we send the car to be fixed/crushed/exported. Big OUCH.

Through all of this, everyone is fine. And that is all that matters.

That, and making sure The Boss Lady seriously considers the Mini Cooper Convertible before she buys anything...