Meet the New Car, (Almost) the Same as the Old Car
For those who aren't on Facebook, I got a new car back on September 6. You might reasonably ask why I got a new car when I was perfectly happy with my 2000 Honda Accord LX? The reason, of course, is that I managed to wreck it in a high speed collision on the interstate the week after I got back from Iceland. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. If I'd been going 5 miles per hour slower or been a second faster I might have avoided the collision entirely, but as the saying goes, if wishes were horses... The airbags did not deploy, and I didn't even get a seat belt burn. The other car was slightly dented and the occupants were unhurt.
I managed to nurse my car back to my driveway, but it never moved under its own power again. To absolutely nobody's surprise, the insurance company was not interested in shelling out a lot of money to replace a twelve year old car with 193,000+ miles on it that had had its crumple zones smashed, so it was totalled out.
I'm going to miss that car. I got it back in May 2003 after tigerlily_blue and I shared a car for the first year I was employed. It was the first car I ever bought, and although I paid for it I didn't actually do the purchasing myself. After being completely unable to find a used car that I wanted in Cleveland, my parents spun by a lot in North Dakota and found one with exactly the desired feature set. Well, the beige color (excuse me, GOLD) wasn't what I wanted, but everything else was just fine, so they acted as my agents and then drove it to Cleveland when my sister graduated that May. It had 53,000 miles on it when I took possession from my parents, and when it met its demise it had added almost exactly 140,000 miles to that tally.
Frustratingly, not two weeks previously I had spent money on it to get the emissions system fixed. Such is life. I was really looking forward to driving it another 75,000 miles and beating my family's all time record of 260,000+. It was definitely a feasible goal.
Fortunately, 2000 Hondas still have a lot of resale value so the check I got from my insurance company was pretty substantial. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that a three year old used Honda with a manual transmission was going to be a lot more expensive than the $9,990 I spent last time around. Between Cash For Clunkers removing a bunch of used cars from the market and consumers being generally more conscious of gas consumption than they were back in 2003, I realized that for $10K I would be lucky to get a six year old car. In fact, I found a 2000 Honda Accord for sale with a list price of $8,000, only $2,000 less than I spent on mine back in 2003!
My shopping list was "Honda", "Manual Transmission" and "Small Enough to Fit in my Garage". Honda is thankfully a code phrase for reliable and efficient, manual transmissions are a personal preference, and size was an issue because my 2000 Accord was just slightly too large (I broke off a mirror by accident) and the newer Accords are even wider. I did test drive a few non-Hondas, but was mostly unimpressed.
Finally I settled on a 2010 Honda Civic VP. It had a mere 22,389 miles, which was enough to knock the the price down a lot what it cost new. This, alas, was not the same thing as cheap, but fortunately I also am doing a little better financially than I was in 2003. So while I couldn't pay cash or get the monthly payment down to my 2003 total of $150/month, it was still well within my budget, although I do need to rebuild my savings account since "down payment on new car" was not in the budget. On the plus side, when my mechanic inspected it he said it looked like a brand new car and the interior and exterior are essentially like new.
I've been happy with it so far. For starters, I'm consistently getting 32-34 mpg. The flip side is that the gas tank only holds 11 gallons instead of the 15 my Accord held. The end result is that I stop at the gas station slightly more often than I did before, but I buy a lot less gas on each stop, so overall I'm spending less on gasoline.
The VP in the title stands for "Value Package", and the things they chose to economize on are a little odd. It makes sense that it doesn't have cruise control or automatic mirrors, but those are two things I rarely used in my Accord so it will really only matter on long road trips. On the other hand, it has power windows but NOT power locks? Weird. I'm told that it's because the doors have to be different to have manual windows and it was cheaper to have one door style than two. In any event, I had to have power windows (for Tulip in the backseat, of course!) and I got them. It is a little weird that the "roll all the way down when you press it" option on the driver's window isn't there even though I have power windows, but it can be added (for a fee) if it ever really matters. I also priced out power locks and in the unlikely event that I suddenly start driving other people around all the time it'll only cost about $400 to get them put in.
I no longer have my fancy sunglasses holder in the roof, but there's a perfectly fine slot to put them on the center console. The center console is actually set up better than my old car, although I'm not sure why they didn't put a lid on the main compartment, which mostly makes using it as an arm rest less attractive. More annoying is the lack of easy to reach lights overhead for late night map reading, but I rarely need that sort of assistance so I can cope. The sound system is more than adequate, although I'll miss my cassette deck and it looks like iPod hookup isn't an option. Fortunately, I still have a lot of CDs. While we're on the center of the dash, the air conditioning is top notch and the controls are better than in the Honda. It's like someone did usability testing or something.
The new dash has a digital speedometer that just shows the speed instead of a dial. Interestingly, I'm not speeding nearly as much. I'm not sure if that's because I was in an accident and I'm acting more cautiously or if it's because it's harder to be unclear about the current speed with a big glowing number right in front of you. Also, I can't say that I've "buried the needle"... because there is no needle!
The Civic (and apparently most new cars) has daytime running lights, which I am not a fan of. I keep thinking that my lights are on during the daytime and that they are already on at night. There's a dashboard indicator, but it feels stupid to need one just to see if your headlights are on. Despite the fact that the controls for the brights appears to function exactly the same as in the Accord, I feel like it's easier to flip by accident. This may be because the Civic lets you adjust the steering wheel location, and my current location, while more comfortable for driving, does put the control lower down than I'm used to. VP also means that my variable speed windshield wiper control is not present. Since I used to fiddle with that obsessively to achieve the perfect ratio of "minimal wiping / maximal raid removal", this might actually be a good thing.
The exterior of the car is a bright silver. This is a problem only in that apparently silver is very popular, and cars of this size and style are very popular, so every time I leave work I have to figure out which of ten to fifteen small silver cars is mine. I got brand new CYNIC51 vanity plates to help with that; I would have kept my old ones but the front one kind of got mutilated in the accident. The Civic is notably smaller than the Accord. Parallel parking is much easier, and although I'm being very vigilant I've so far not even come close to knocking off a side mirror.
So it's a bit of a mixed bag in some ways, but in general I'm pretty pleased. Hopefully I'll get this car up to 200,000+, or at least won't run it into anything.
Fun fact - the first tank of gas I bought for the Accord cost me 1.409 a gallon. The first tank on the Civic was 3.849. My records aren't computerized, but it look like the most I paid per gallon on the Accord was 4.059 (the only time it broke 4.000) in May 2011 and the least was 1.319 back in December 2003. Why yes, I do track my gas purchases. Doesn't everyone?
I managed to nurse my car back to my driveway, but it never moved under its own power again. To absolutely nobody's surprise, the insurance company was not interested in shelling out a lot of money to replace a twelve year old car with 193,000+ miles on it that had had its crumple zones smashed, so it was totalled out.
I'm going to miss that car. I got it back in May 2003 after tigerlily_blue and I shared a car for the first year I was employed. It was the first car I ever bought, and although I paid for it I didn't actually do the purchasing myself. After being completely unable to find a used car that I wanted in Cleveland, my parents spun by a lot in North Dakota and found one with exactly the desired feature set. Well, the beige color (excuse me, GOLD) wasn't what I wanted, but everything else was just fine, so they acted as my agents and then drove it to Cleveland when my sister graduated that May. It had 53,000 miles on it when I took possession from my parents, and when it met its demise it had added almost exactly 140,000 miles to that tally.
Frustratingly, not two weeks previously I had spent money on it to get the emissions system fixed. Such is life. I was really looking forward to driving it another 75,000 miles and beating my family's all time record of 260,000+. It was definitely a feasible goal.
Fortunately, 2000 Hondas still have a lot of resale value so the check I got from my insurance company was pretty substantial. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that a three year old used Honda with a manual transmission was going to be a lot more expensive than the $9,990 I spent last time around. Between Cash For Clunkers removing a bunch of used cars from the market and consumers being generally more conscious of gas consumption than they were back in 2003, I realized that for $10K I would be lucky to get a six year old car. In fact, I found a 2000 Honda Accord for sale with a list price of $8,000, only $2,000 less than I spent on mine back in 2003!
My shopping list was "Honda", "Manual Transmission" and "Small Enough to Fit in my Garage". Honda is thankfully a code phrase for reliable and efficient, manual transmissions are a personal preference, and size was an issue because my 2000 Accord was just slightly too large (I broke off a mirror by accident) and the newer Accords are even wider. I did test drive a few non-Hondas, but was mostly unimpressed.
Finally I settled on a 2010 Honda Civic VP. It had a mere 22,389 miles, which was enough to knock the the price down a lot what it cost new. This, alas, was not the same thing as cheap, but fortunately I also am doing a little better financially than I was in 2003. So while I couldn't pay cash or get the monthly payment down to my 2003 total of $150/month, it was still well within my budget, although I do need to rebuild my savings account since "down payment on new car" was not in the budget. On the plus side, when my mechanic inspected it he said it looked like a brand new car and the interior and exterior are essentially like new.
I've been happy with it so far. For starters, I'm consistently getting 32-34 mpg. The flip side is that the gas tank only holds 11 gallons instead of the 15 my Accord held. The end result is that I stop at the gas station slightly more often than I did before, but I buy a lot less gas on each stop, so overall I'm spending less on gasoline.
The VP in the title stands for "Value Package", and the things they chose to economize on are a little odd. It makes sense that it doesn't have cruise control or automatic mirrors, but those are two things I rarely used in my Accord so it will really only matter on long road trips. On the other hand, it has power windows but NOT power locks? Weird. I'm told that it's because the doors have to be different to have manual windows and it was cheaper to have one door style than two. In any event, I had to have power windows (for Tulip in the backseat, of course!) and I got them. It is a little weird that the "roll all the way down when you press it" option on the driver's window isn't there even though I have power windows, but it can be added (for a fee) if it ever really matters. I also priced out power locks and in the unlikely event that I suddenly start driving other people around all the time it'll only cost about $400 to get them put in.
I no longer have my fancy sunglasses holder in the roof, but there's a perfectly fine slot to put them on the center console. The center console is actually set up better than my old car, although I'm not sure why they didn't put a lid on the main compartment, which mostly makes using it as an arm rest less attractive. More annoying is the lack of easy to reach lights overhead for late night map reading, but I rarely need that sort of assistance so I can cope. The sound system is more than adequate, although I'll miss my cassette deck and it looks like iPod hookup isn't an option. Fortunately, I still have a lot of CDs. While we're on the center of the dash, the air conditioning is top notch and the controls are better than in the Honda. It's like someone did usability testing or something.
The new dash has a digital speedometer that just shows the speed instead of a dial. Interestingly, I'm not speeding nearly as much. I'm not sure if that's because I was in an accident and I'm acting more cautiously or if it's because it's harder to be unclear about the current speed with a big glowing number right in front of you. Also, I can't say that I've "buried the needle"... because there is no needle!
The Civic (and apparently most new cars) has daytime running lights, which I am not a fan of. I keep thinking that my lights are on during the daytime and that they are already on at night. There's a dashboard indicator, but it feels stupid to need one just to see if your headlights are on. Despite the fact that the controls for the brights appears to function exactly the same as in the Accord, I feel like it's easier to flip by accident. This may be because the Civic lets you adjust the steering wheel location, and my current location, while more comfortable for driving, does put the control lower down than I'm used to. VP also means that my variable speed windshield wiper control is not present. Since I used to fiddle with that obsessively to achieve the perfect ratio of "minimal wiping / maximal raid removal", this might actually be a good thing.
The exterior of the car is a bright silver. This is a problem only in that apparently silver is very popular, and cars of this size and style are very popular, so every time I leave work I have to figure out which of ten to fifteen small silver cars is mine. I got brand new CYNIC51 vanity plates to help with that; I would have kept my old ones but the front one kind of got mutilated in the accident. The Civic is notably smaller than the Accord. Parallel parking is much easier, and although I'm being very vigilant I've so far not even come close to knocking off a side mirror.
So it's a bit of a mixed bag in some ways, but in general I'm pretty pleased. Hopefully I'll get this car up to 200,000+, or at least won't run it into anything.
Fun fact - the first tank of gas I bought for the Accord cost me 1.409 a gallon. The first tank on the Civic was 3.849. My records aren't computerized, but it look like the most I paid per gallon on the Accord was 4.059 (the only time it broke 4.000) in May 2011 and the least was 1.319 back in December 2003. Why yes, I do track my gas purchases. Doesn't everyone?