Yesterday Jean and I spent a little over 12 hours searching for her new car. We left the house around 9:30am and headed to the Ontario Auto Center over on Jurupa. We had planned on test driving the new Honda Civic, the Toyota Corolla, and the Volkswagen Jetta. All had listed MSRP’s around $17,000 – $18,000 with automatic transmissions and they all got close to 30mpg on the highway. First we stopped at the Honda dealership and after walking around for 10 minutes and nobody asking if we needed any help, we got back in our car and headed over to John Elway’s Crown Toyota and talked to a salesman names Ray. Jean test drove a Corolla and after a few attempts to get us inside to “see what we could do”, Ray gave up and we left.
As a side note, Jean had originally wanted a Mazda when we decided she needed a new car this past Monday, but I suggested the Civic, Corolla, and Jetta. After seeing the Jetta she did an about face and spent all week telling me about how she wanted the VW. I know that the Corolla and the Civic are the most reliable and hold the most value, and the Civic was priced the best on top of that, but since we were buying her a car and not one for me, I went along with it. I kept telling her she needed to be open-minded about the decision and she’d get upset and say “I am open-minded! I just hope I get the Jetta.” I don’t think it ever quite clicked that her pre-disposition towards the Jetta meant that she was not open-minded, but oh well, she’s my wife, so I had made up my mind that we’d be buying a Jetta this weekend.
Anyhow, after the Corolla, which she’d told me all week she knew she didn’t want, we headed to test drive a Jetta. As expected, there were lots of “ooooohs” and “aaaaaahs” while she drove it. She said a few times that she was very impressed with it’s power compared to the lowly Corolla. I guess the difference between 170hp and 150hp must be quite remarkable. She didn’t seem to mind that the warranty was for 10k less miles, the Jetta got 6mpg less on both highway and surface streets, or that it was priced almost $2200 more than the Corolla.
We left Ontario and drove out to Glendora to look for another Honda dealership so she could actually test drive a Civic, and we stopped on the way for lunch in Rancho Cucamonga. We were disappointed when we got to Glendora because they had a bunch of dealerships but no Honda ones. The only good thing about this Glendora leg of our day was that we saw a store with my sister’s nickname. We decided to jump down to the 60 and head towards LA because I remembered there being a bunch of dealerships in Puente Hills. About 20 minutes later we pulled into the Diamond Honda dealership in Puente Hills. There were probably 25 Asian salesmen standing out front all dressed up when we pulled in, and almost immediately this older guy came running over to us. Jean tested out a Civic and the whole time this guy was saying “so you like better than Civic?” and “how this compare to Civic?”. I had told Jean to not give them too much info, and she did awesome by saying “oh, it’s different… not good or bad, just different”. I had asked him about an extended warranty and he said he’d find out a price when we got back, and as soon as we got out of the car he wanted us to follow him inside and discuss it. I told him “no thanks, I’ll just wait out here while you find out a ballpark price for the 5yr/100k extended warranty”. A few minutes later this guy (Manuel Villasenor) came up and said he was a sales manager and our guy had said we had some questions. I asked him how much the extended warranty would cost and he said “ahhhh, I’m not real sure… ummmm…” How in the hell does the sales manager not know how much the extended warranty cost for their second most popular model?! What really upset me was when I asked if our guy that test drove with us would be coming back and he said “no, he won’t”. I guess since we weren’t going inside to buy right then we weren’t worth his time, so he’d taken his position with the other 24 guys on the curb.
Jean and I had given up on Honda due to their crappy service at two different dealerships. Jean had spent the whole day telling me how sluggish the Corolla was (yea right, that’s why it’s the most sold car on the planet), and I wasn’t looking forward to paying $19,549 for a Jetta with a 50,000 mile warranty and only 27 mpg on the highway. As we pulled out of the Honda dealership in Puente Hills, Jean asked if we could take a look at the Mazda she’d wanted on Monday. I pulled a u-turn and we went to the Puente Hills Mazda to take a look at their Mazda 3’s. We looked at the three they had outside and then this little Asian dude came outside and told us “more cars inside”. He seemed harmless – all day long we’d avoided going inside because these salesmen were foaming at the mouth to hurry us up and close the deal. We headed inside and they did have about 100 cars inside. We checked out the Mazda 3i Touring edition and the Sport edition. We decided the Sport wasn’t what we wanted because it didn’t have the power package and 2008 is just past the time of manually rolling up windows and Jean needed something nicer. We decided to test drive the 3i Touring because it had the power package and it was priced right around everything else we’d been looking at – MSRP $17,790. Jean liked how it drove, and even though our little saleman didn’t understand 85% of what I asked, and I could barely understand him (Taiwanese guy who’d lived her for 5 years), I did understand one sentence – “today and tomorrow this one special price, $14,995″. WHAT?! I confirmed it a few times and he was telling us that this car was $3000 below MSRP for 2 days. Normally in this price range the invoice (what the dealer paid for the car without any specials from the manufacturer) is about $1000-$1500 below MSRP.
There was a catch though, they couldn’t offer the low 2.9% financing that Toyota would offer and more importantly (at least to Jean), they only had the car in red, white, or “ice blue”. To me a color isn’t worth $3000, but again, reason is out the window when you’re trying to make your wife happy. We left feeling ice blue. We headed home and relaxed for a while and then Jean decided that she wanted me to call other dealerships to try and find out if they had the same deal. To make a long story short, I called 4 other Mazda dealerships in the area and all said basically the same thing “that’s around $1500 BELOW INVOICE and we can’t get close to that — that’s a great deal”. Unbelievably, Norco Mazda, which is ranked within the top 20 Mazda dealerships in the entire country, called back and said for an extra $450 they had a silver one with black interior. Jean wanted black exterior and black interior… She’s as hard to buy a car for as she is to feed. Picky, picky, picky. 
But I do what I can to try and make her happy, so I told the guy that if we’re going to get a color we don’t want, we aren’t paying an extra $500 for it. Within 10 minutes he called back and said he found a dealership that would trade with him and for $500 he’d get us the black one. Jean was ecstatic!
We headed down to Norco around 5:30pm and at 9:50pm we left with Jean’s new Mazda 3i Touring, black exterior and interior! We also traded in her old worn out Chevy Cavalier. We were a little embarrassed when we pointed out that the AC didn’t work, nor did the CD player, sun roof, or trunk. Oh yea, a hubcap is missing, there’s lots of dents and scratches, and the side mirror is cracked. They told us that the manager wanted to offer us $200 for it but they’d give us $300. I laughed and said that was fine. Glad we didn’t sink another $600 into this week! We also added on an extended warranty to 6 years / 100,000 miles, plus gap insurance, an alarm system (to be installed this next week), and a Bluetooth system (also to be installed this week). I felt like we got a really good deal, and on top of it we get $15 oil change/car wash for BOTH of our cars at their dealership for now on, she gets 3 years unlimited roadside assistance, we got a pretty good finance rate, and our insurance through Progressive actually DROPPED by $20 per month by purchasing this new car!!
I have to say that everyone we dealt with at Norco Mazda was awesome and I can highly recommend Jose and Daniel, plus the finance guy was very helpful too.
Here’s some pictures from yesterday and then this morning before Jean buzzed off to church in her new car:
Entries (RSS)