#CarBuying

Last week, we asked you about the most underrated car/truck on the market. Since most of you are enthusiasts, I'd guess that some of you recommend underrated vehicles when your friends and family ask you about purchase decisions. But what are the cars/trucks you steer your friends/family away from?

The COVID-19 pandemic brought a seismic shift in how people work, play, and live, and that includes car shopping. Faced with the existential crisis of having no physical customers, dealers began offering remote car-buying services and shipping. Online retailers took off, too, but the party never lasts forever. Vroom, an online used-vehicle retailer, recently announced that it would sunset its e-commerce business, suspending sales on its website.

Look, we’re all for a pinch or two of financial prudence around here. Springing for luxury items just isn’t in the cards for most of us, despite the lavish recompense* deigned upon us by our corporate overlords in Downtown Canada. (*note: the recompense isn’t actually lavish at all).

But even we feel comfortable calling out moronic fiscal advice when we see it. Case in point – a post on a website called Investopedia suggests that anyone making $100,000 per year should spend no more than roughly $15,000 on a car.

About a week and a half ago, we asked you how the automotive media influences your car-buying process. Now we're going to ask you about J.D. Power, specifically.

Bark opined back in May of 2020 about how the pandemic would change car buying. Now that we're approaching three years on and we're living something resembling normalcy, was he right?

Anyone who has ever bought a new or used car from a dealership knows the minefield of add-ons customers must generally navigate before signing on the line which is dotted. Just this week, my own parents were presented with a deal sheet that showed an admin fee ($799), tire warranty ($499), and undercoating ($999) on a second-hand Lincoln from a non-Lincoln store. They walked.

Consumer Reports has recently published a list of dealership extras they recommend binning when buying your next car.

Thankfully, we’re mostly past the degrading trend of creating smaller, “more appropriate” products for women, but companies are still incredibly interested in how they buy and perceive products. S&P Global Mobility recently conducted a study to find which car brands resonate most with women, finding that Buick and Toyota ranked highest.

Picture it. Last Tuesday, late afternoon. Checking the used convertible listings like I’d been doing for some time, it seemed the right car would never materialize. But on that particular afternoon, I happened to check Facebook Marketplace, a terrible place to search listings which I generally avoided. The default 249-mile search radius showed me a particular convertible I hadn’t seen listed before. Turned out it was the one.

Would you believe it’s been a year and a half since we last discussed used convertibles? Much has changed during the interim: The economy, the used-car market, and life in general. While some of you were fairly convinced I’d purchase a car “on the rebound” after I’d dumped the quality control nightmare that was the Golf SportWagen in July of 2021, you were wrong. Let’s catch up a bit.

Matt's story about car buyers being willing to pay a LOT over MSRP begs the question: How much over MSRP would YOU pay if you were buying a new car?

The Big Idea

When one’s employer tells you that you are required to go to San Diego, California for a company event I guess most people’s reaction would be “hey, I hear they have a great zoo there”.

I suspect I am slightly an outlier in that my first thought was “I should buy an old car and drive up the Pacific Coast Highway and consign the car with a shipping agent to transport it home”.

We would wager our combined annual salaries – a sum roughly equal to the value of a half dozen donuts from Krispy Kreme – that every single soul reading this website has a story or three about being blitzed with products in a dealer’s F&I office. Vehicle etching, useless warranties (sorry – this paper only covers mechanical fuel pumps), and p-packs up the wazoo are the bane of most shoppers’ existence when trying to buy a car.

Make no wonder some people call it the “Effin’ Eye” office.

This environment may change if the Federal Trade Commission gets its way. According to a report by Automotive News, a new proposal by the FTC would ban finance/insurance coverage and physical vehicle add-ons “that provide no benefit” while also requiring expanded disclosure on such items.

Nobody should envy car shoppers right now. With production shortages ongoing, there’s never anything you want on the lot, and what is there is likely to be grotesquely overpriced.

This has encouraged consumers to wait longer before replacing their current ride, which is statistically likely to be far older than years past. But not everyone has the same level of patience or financial wellbeing, meaning certain parts of the country are seeing longer intervals between cars than others. There are also regional inventory disparities to account for, encouraging analytics firm Growth from Knowledge (GfK) to conduct an investigation into which parts of the United States are waiting for the longest to procure a new automobile.

A new survey from Cox Automotive is suggesting that people are relatively pleased with their trips to the dealership these days — at least compared to the last few years. According to the team that’s been crunching the numbers over at Automotive News, “Buyer satisfaction with the shopping experience from the research stage through delivery dipped to 66 percent in 2021.” Back in 2020, respondents claimed they were happy 72 percent of the time. But in 2019 Cox was only getting 60 percent of shoppers to say they had an okay time buying a vehicle.

The uptick in 2020 is obvious. Showrooms were devoid of customers, production shortfalls hadn’t yet become the norm, and dealers were selling just about everything at a discount — keeping prices low until 2021 sent them into the stratosphere. However, the outlet still framed it as a win against 2019, suggesting that consumers are more satisfied with their shopping experience than before the pandemic. It also claimed that people who purchased vehicles online, the no-haggle alternative to going to a dealership to argue in a small room, tended to be happier overall.

Sketches of the next bite-sized Honda surfaced this morning, showing a vehicle with an admittedly big gob but wearing proportions that are a smidgen less awkward than the machine which has been around now for very nearly a decade in some markets. If this were pre-pandemic times, we’d be bleating that a Right Spec would help buyers select the best of what’s being cleared out of dealer lots in favor of the new rig. That’s hardly the case these days.

Nevertheless, it’s entertaining to learn where the different trims land in terms of desirability. Let’s find out what’s on tap for the final model year of this HR-V generation