Ryan James O'Sullivan

Tammy and I bought a car! As many of you know our current priority is saving up for and buying a house (we have a workable target of next summer) and we are planning on moving outside of Toronto (likely to the east) which would require a car. We were planning on waiting for the summer but we hadn’t considered that the insurance for my other car was coming due now. So we had to choose if we wanted to pay double insurance for 2008 or if we wanted to move up our plans to buy the car.

So to help make our decision we decided we’d go out and see if any cars and current promotions would entice us to buy the car right away. I had always wanted to look at both the Honda Civic and Accord so I decided to start our search at Honda.

At the Honda dealership Tammy was a little underwhelmed by the customer service at first. Its amazing how you Americans are beat around by rabid salesman in the US and have come to expect to be jumped by 12 salesman the moment you step onto the lot. The fact that no one attacked us in the parking lot actually frustrated Tammy! We eventually did meet up with a salesman and he showed us around the cars and took us out for a test drive of the Honda Civic DX-G.

We instantly fell in love!!! …. With the dashboard. Oh – the car was great too. At this point I should break this post to show you this:

Yes ladies and gentleman – that is in actual fact the sickest interior in the history of man kind. So we were impressed with Honda and the price was definitely right for a model with some decent upgrades (the base models at Honda all come with a pretty decent compliment of features) but we wanted to make sure we took in the competition and got the best deal for our money. So off we went to check out the competition…

First we decided to check out Chrysler (my family has always owned Chryslers so there is some instilled loyalty there) and it was REALLY disappointing. To start with I told the sales guy that Honda was giving me a 2.9 interest rate. He kept giving me shitty rates that did not compete (from a piece of paper – he did not know his product at all). It was odd – Chrysler doesn’t have one unified interest rate at given terms – every vehicle has its own interest rates and they vary A LOT. I was excited to see the Avenger but in the end no matter what Chrysler model I looked at there was just too much plastic. Ahh well. On to Toyota.

I figured if anyone was going to be able to compete with Honda it would be Toyota so we drove a bit further down the auto strip on Eglinton Avenue to the Toyota dealership.

The Toyotas were nice enough of cars but they lacked the wow factor that the Hondas had. They also had a pretty weak interest rate.

So in the end we went with a Honda Civic DX-G. We will be picking up the car on Friday and I’ll have lots of pictures to share