The first car I could afford when I was a teenager was a 1952 black Buick Super that wouldn’t start.
But it was a bargain at $125, and the assumption was that it would sit behind my mother’s house in Evergreen Park until I had the know-how and money to repair it. That never happened.
Since that time, I have owned and driven 26 different automobiles, from the early 1970s until today
The majority of those years, we were a two-car family, so it works out to our having changed vehicles once every 3.2 years of our married life. That’s a lot of license plates. And double the number of floor mats.
Whereas a former colleague of mine, had been driving the same Toyota Corolla for 20 years when I left the high school where we both worked in 1990. For all I know, he may still be.
Why so many vehicles for us? After all, I’m not a gearhead or a vintage car collector.
One reason we’ve burned through so many is that half the time we bought them pre-owned, and many had a short life.
I’m thinking in particular of the used Ford Fairmont wagon whose head gasket blew the day after I bought it at O’Connor Ford on 95th Street and Washtenaw Avenue. And the VW Jetta whose axle broke in half several months after I purchased it from a good friend.
The other reason is that our life choices led to hundreds of thousands of miles of driving. Since 1986, we owned a little cabin in the woods 450 miles away in northwest Wisconsin, which we drove to on a monthly basis for 30 years. And the college where I taught since 1990 was a 70-mile round-trip commute.
Obviously, this also means many hours spent in car dealerships and a ton of experience negotiating prices.
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Generally, it was not something we looked forward to. The ruses used by car salesmen became dreaded and familiar — hidden fees, the waiting game while they consult with the manager and all the trade-in tricks, from pained facial expressions to the “bad” car fax to the inflated value meant to camouflage the inflated new-car price.
I’ve seen them all. And knowledge, of course, is power.
I certainly won’t say I can outfox any salesman, but I am able to stand my ground in a showroom. My daughter to this day maintains that one young sales person was on the verge of tears when I helped her negotiate for her first new car, a 1995 Ford Escort.
Still, you can never be certain you got the best deal. Only the owner of the dealership can know that for sure. Which is why car buying, according to the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, is listed as the 20th most stressful life event, right after No. 19, which is an Argument with your Spouse (No. 1 is divorce).
Yet there is, I am happy to have discovered, hope for a better experience that leaves you not just with a new car but also a smile on your face, thanks to technology.
Many people already know and use car-buying websites such as Auto Trader, Kelly’s, Edmunds and Cars.com, that help research and compare automobiles for reliability, quality and prices.
The Internet has enabled many a customer to better prepare for negotiating, by arriving at the showroom equipped with documentation showing the approximate price one should pay for a particular vehicle and the approximate amount that you ought to get back for a trade-in.
But imagine if you were in a room with sales representatives from three different dealerships, and each was vying to sell you the same car?
Hypothetically, you’d have a live bidding war, during which you could sit back while they bid lower and lower until two can’t go any further and one wins. The result is that you get your car at a price precipitously lower than you would have by negotiating with a single seller.
Now imagine that you can do all of that via email without getting up off your recliner. This is precisely how I made our most recent auto purchase.
After emailing three different dealerships within a 100-mile area, I received attachments of three different price sheets (MSRP, fees, taxes, trade-in allowance, incentives, rebates and bottom line) for the identical car.
When I informed Dealer No. 1 of the lower price I received from Dealer No. 2, he shot back with a revised price that beat his competitor by $1,000. When I emailed Dealer No. 3 with this new and lower bid, she offered another $1,500 for my trade-in to catch up in the price competition.
A day and a half later, and after 30 or more email messages back and forth between me and the three dealers, my wife Marianne and I were on our way to Dealer No. 1 which offered the best price — $4,000 lower than their first quote.
While we were en route, Dealer No. 2 texted Marianne with a last-ditch offer of $1,000 more for our trade. We still drove to Dealer No. 1, where Marianne showed the text on her phone to the sales rep, who brought it to the sales manager, who quickly acceded to the additional $1,000 discount.
The end result was that most, if not all the “haggling” was done in the safety and silence of our home (and car), and that we were edified to know that we received the best deal possible.
The experience also demonstrated that the mark-up on a new car is much larger than I had imagined. So when they tell you little or no “wiggle room,” smile, nod, and, well, wiggle.
All the emailing and trying to keep the price points among three different dealers straight, let alone keeping their names straight, was a bit complicated.
But the beauty of it all is that you could do it without pressure and without time limits. Both of which, at my age, I highly endorse.
David McGrath, a former resident of Evergreen Park and Oak Forest, is an emeritus professor of English at the College of DuPage. [email protected]