Have I Bought a New Car? I'm Still Not Sure.

This past Sunday we bought a new car. Kind of. We agreed to the price and terms with the dealership's general sales manager and F&I guy. By now everything was supposed to be finalized short of us picking up the car and the keys... but it's not.

• The dealership 450 miles away sent paperwork to a dealership near us. The promise was we'd be able to sign everything that needed a signature by Wednesday. Except the local dealership didn't return any of our calls, and a person in another department said the F&I team there was short-staffed and may not be able to help us. They suggested we go back to the selling dealership.


• The car was supposed to be done with reconditioning by Wednesday. It's still in reconditioning today. It's supposed to be ready tomorrow... though I don't know whether that means tomorrow by about 1pm when we're there, or tomorrow by 6pm, or whether "tomorrow" is simply more happy talk.


• When I called back the selling dealership to tell them that the local dealership wouldn't actually help us with the paperwork, the F&I team was short-staffed there, too. The F&I Guy who sold us an extended warranty is on vacation. And when I called asking for anyone in F&I to help us get details about it, nobody answered the phone. Repeatedly. I finally spoke to a salesguy who encouraged me to email them.


• I finally got details via email today. Well, I got some of the details; the emailed document was incomplete. And some of what's there does not match what was represented to me over the phone. We might need to scratch the extended warranty off the purchase. We'll see how hard the dealership pushes back against that. I expect they'll say that we've already bought it. I'll respond that I haven't actually signed anything yet (see above).

So, tomorrow morning we're flying down to San Diego, 500 miles away, and going to a dealership to pick up a car I'm not 100% sure will be ready for terms I'm not 100% settled with.

Update: Around 5:30pm today I finally got hold of another F&I Guy— I'll call him F&I Guy #2— via telephone. He answered my questions about the extended warranty. The good news is now I understand the details better. The bad news is they are definitely not what was represented to me originally. So we'll be renegotiating things at the very last minute. This is not what I hoped for in being able to do business remotely with car dealers in 2021.

Hawkgirl Rides Off into the Sunset

This evening we sold our car, "Hawkgirl". These are the last few pictures I've taken of her. This evening she rides off into the sunset without us.



She's a 2008 BMW 135i convertible. We bought her used in 2012 with about 30,000 miles on the odometer. I actually wrote a blog entry the night we bought her. (I say "actually" because I blogged infrequently back then. The whole month of April 2012 has just 5 entries.) Just over 9 years later we've sold her with 149,400 miles on the clock.

The red leather interior wasn't our favorite color when we first saw it. Frankly it's polarizing. It grew on us over the course of a few days, though, while we were shopping different vehicles. Among other things, if you're going to drive a sports car with over 300HP you might as well make it eye-catching! I gave her the name Hawkgirl because her color combo resembles one of the costumes the comic book heroine Hawkgirl has been drawn with. Usually she's in yellow and green with a highlight of red, but in one version of the comic she wears black with red flashes. That's our bird.

A One-Car Family?

We've sold Hawkgirl as part of the process of replacing her with a newer car— a process that isn't going well at the moment. As I noted in my previous blog (linked) it's not clear whether we've actually purchased another car yet. For tonight, at least, we're a one-car family. Tomorrow we'll find out if we're back to two. 😅

In the meantime it's bittersweet saying goodbye. She's been our beloved car for many years. We've enjoyed the power, the handling, the style, the size, the way so many things fit together just right. Alas, the repair bills have become too expensive.



It's taken two months to find a replacement we consider worthy— though, even so, we feel the newer car is still a compromise. Tomorrow we'll start that next chapter and begin understanding whether we've made a good choice or a poor one. Tonight, Hawkgirl rides off into the sunset without us.