So it has finally happened. After 25 years of going to school, university, and work on either public transport or on foot, I spent a good part of Saturday test driving a car, and then haggling over a price and signing on the dotted line. Well, I don't suppose I did most of the haggling, L did that, and so I cooked her dinner for a job well done. The car on the right is the picture on the front of the Subaru XV brochure, but it might as well be my car.
I'd sat in one at a car show on the Stampede grounds in February, and test drove one at one of the two Subaru dealerships in town last week. The salesman was not terribly interested in selling me the car, or doing a deal. He's allegedly one of the top-selling Subaru salesmen in North America, according to one of my colleagues who bought a car from him a few weeks ago. But our test drive didn't encompass any highway driving at all, which is a pretty big thing given how far I now live from work (over 16 miles). And he wasn't giving me a terribly hard sell. So I booked a test drive at the other dealership, went, met a much nicer, football-playing salesman, and took it on the highway. All of my concerns were met, and so it came down to availability. Of the seven colour schemes the car came in, I liked the silver and orange the most; the black/dark grey ones would be impossible to keep clean in the winter, the green and khaki colours are not my thing, and the white one didn't really float my boat either.
He had a dark grey and a white one at the dealership, and also the silver demo one; to cut a long story short and at least two rounds of "I'll go speak to my manager", I bought the silver test vehicle for a nice discount, given there was only 300km on the clock. Now there is the wait to see if the financing application is approved, and the process of having the winter protective coatings applied, registration, insurance, and so on.
It'll be nice to not have to spend two and a half hours on the C train and bus each day.
