Yesterday Stephanie and I got a black 2006 Toyota Camry Solara! We love it so much. It’s a used car, but not very used at all—only 1210 miles on it. We got it from CarMax, and I’d highly recommend anyone looking to buy a used car go there. They have “no haggle” pricing, which is good for me because I think I’d be pretty lousy at haggling (I think Saturn dealerships also do no-haggle pricing... I’ve never been to one so I’m not sure). They’re not paid on commission either, so they aren’t super pushy. Our salesman was an Irish guy, which was kinda neat. The whole process was about as easy as we could’ve asked for.
My 1995 Camry was starting to have a few things go wrong with it lately (which is to be expected for a car with 180,000 miles on it). Most of them were pretty minor issues, but we decided we were approaching the point where it’d be more economical for us in the long run to buy another car than to keep putting money into this one (an economist might call that an effect of the Law of Diminishing Returns). The latest thing was that the car was leaking engine coolant, which meant I had to put antifreeze in it every morning before work for the last two weeks, and by the next morning it’d be almost all gone. It could have turned out to be a simple thing to fix, or it could have been expensive. We decided we’d start looking for a new car and see what kind of trade-in value we could get. Since we now have another source of income (and we’ve been capable of living off of just mine), we figured out how much money we could afford to spend on a car. CarMax ended up giving more than Kelley Blue Book valued our car at, so we took it. Although I have to say that it was kind of sad to see my old car sitting on the back lot to be cleaned up. I mean, we were leaving it for a younger and sexier car, and it didn’t even put up a fight. :)
So far, we are really happy with the car (of course it’s been less than twenty-four hours). We both love driving it, and it still has that new car smell. The ride is incredibly smooth and quiet. We’ve been taking turns driving it, which is different from normal (where neither one of us would want to drive).
I took some pictures of the car, be sure to check them out!
April 23, 5:10 pm
Oh I meant to mention that the salesman showed us that there’s a glow-in-the-dark latch on the inside of the trunk, so we shouldn’t put bodies in the there. I said we’d just have to make sure that they were dead before we put them in there. I thought that was kinda funny.
April 24, 8:32 am
especially since, as an Irish guy, he might have had connections with the IRA.. Just a thought.
April 27, 9:09 pm
I hate to break this to you, but recently they have found that “new car smell” is toxic. So the fact that you can still smell it means that your car was super toxic to begin with. It’s okay though ... my car had that for a while and look how I turned out ... my kids aren’t deformed yet (mainly because I’m not procreating, but if I was I suspect that they would not be deformed.)