Expect the unexpected!

Written on 4:11 PM by Tushar

I had thought that the weekend will be a little boring (definitely not exciting!) as Minu and Gud boy had decided to hone their driving skills on a rented car and I was supposed to help them. So I imagined myself sitting in the car yawning for the whole weekend when these guys will make countless rounds of some random parking lot. There was also a plan to look at used cars. We exchanged a few emails during the week discussing the “strategy” and decided that on Saturday afternoon we(our team:)) will practice driving in Oracle and VMware parking lot and in the evening we will visit various dealers for used cars. (We had heard (which turned out to be true!) that if you buy a used car from a dealer then even though you get a warranty and stuff you will end up paying something close to 10K and in our opinion it was too much to pay for an old car! So a visit to the dealer was meant to be an exercise to find out what are the options available if we buy a car from the dealer). Entire Sunday was devoted to meet various sellers (whose info was gathered from craigslist) and a little bit of driving practice.

So if you have read carefully you can see there was not even a remote intention of buying a “new” car.

Till Saturday evening everything was going as per the plan. We practiced a little in the Oracle parking lot, visited Minu’s swanky office at Oracle HQ (it's awesome!) and visited a couple of dealers of used cars. The turning point came when while passing by we noticed a sign for used cars at a Toyota showroom and rushed inside. The salesman mentioned that you can get a new Toyota Yaris in the same cost as that of a decent old car. We took a test drive and were kinda convinced that we can think about buying a new car instead of taking a risk of buying a used one.

On Sunday morning though had we gathered a huge list of sellers from craigslist, instead of calling anybody we decided to visit Ford and Honda showrooms to see if there was anything that could have fit in our budget. Ford focus was really within the budget. Good gas mileage, decent looks and a brand new car within the same price as that of an old one! But we wanted to visit Honda showroom before making the final decision.

We were interested in taking the quotes for Honda Civic as it is ‘the’ car that every desi new college grad imagines as his/her first! Since it was a high demand car Honda had added 2K more on the price of a new Civic. So now a civic was at the same cost as that of an Accord….interesting! So why not go for an Accord than a Civic? Gud boy was fine with that and rumor has it that it was Minu’s childhood fantasy to own a Honda Accord :) Once both the ‘parties’ gave the green signal and negotiations began.

You can imagine 3 novices negotiating

- whose highest purchase in US so far has been a laptop (In Gud boy’s case a ticket to India maybe)

- who had driven a car less than 10 times in US

- who could not tell what a comprehensive car insurance includes, how a burglar alarm system in the car is different than the centralized locking system

- who did not know what would be the best base price of the car that they have just decided that they would buy

- who had no idea from where they can get the car finance at the lowest APR

- who were unaware of Honda Policy that the buyer should have a permanent California license

But in the end it didn’t matter :)

As my dad always says, all you need is a common sense! For everything that we were not sure of we called numerous friends for advice and after negotiating for 7 hours emerged outside the Honda showroom with two (identical;))brand new 2007 Honda Accord at a price less than a Civic !

One weekend…three people…two new cars! That’s exciting!

Minu and Amit: Congrats :)

Posted in grad life

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