Our New Wheels

When Mark moved up to Utah 4 years ago, his parents gifted him a 97 Infiniti that he had been driving since the day he got his permit. You could guess that with it being 17 years old now, it has plenty of miles on it. Despite it's age, Mark always loved his sweet ride and would spend hours washing it up before taking me out on dates back in the day. I remember anxiously sitting by the window pretending to be cool calm and collected each time this green car pulled up to my house with a very handsome driver in it.

As time has gone on, the roads and weather of Utah took its' toll on Marks car and more and more problems came up as it aged. Every time it got close to renewal for his car, some major light would come on that would prevent it from passing inspection. Each time we wondered if this was going to be the moment where we bite the bullet and send Mark's precious baby to the junk yard. But it fought hard and every year it proved to be the little V8 Engine that could...

Mark always said eventually we'd get a safer car. Having a baby sort of makes that higher priority than when it's just two of you. We have been talking about a new car since the end of summer and spent months convinced that the Subaru Impreza was the car for us. We had heard good things and since you don't see them being resold but driven, we figured that it had to be a pretty good car. Mark did endless hours of research looking at safety, snow handling, quality of the car itself etc. The new car was to be my "mommy" car and he would take the Rav4. In September we went and test dove an impreza and really liked it. Then we got thinking about how compact it was so we went back 2 weeks ago to see if our carseat would fit. Sure enough it would. But we were still not ready to bite the bullet.

Another week of researching and thinking. On Saturday we decided to look at Honda Civic and a Mazda 3 to compare and come to some sort of decision. We had been saving for a down payment for a while and I was ready to just purchase a new car. So we test drove a Honda Civic and really liked it. The salesman was really nice and we asked about other years. They had 2 2013's left on the lot and we started thinking about the price difference (not to mention financing deal offer for 2013's). We never even got a chance to head across the street to the Mazda dealer or head back up to the Subaru dealership because he convinced us to go in and wait for a trade-in estimate for Mark's car. After haggling and negotiating, and roughly 3 hours later, we signed paperwork and walked out with keys to our new 2013 Honda Civic which had all of 49 miles on it.

We lucked out and since it was a leftover model, it came with all-weather mats, so even though I didn't get the car in blue like I hoped, the mats are definitely a bonus. Also, because of the car's design, it's hard to see when backing up. So all of the cars come standard with a backup camera (yep, we are those fancy people). It was surprisingly hard to make the commitment to buy. There wasn't anything really swaying us either way. A few factors with the Honda that sold us over the Impreza was it had bigger trunk space, better mileage, and slightly cheaper price. The Honda also came standard with a lot of "fun" extra features that definitely didn't come with the low-end model Impreza we were looking at. We also really liked our sales guy. Conveniently in his office he had several awards of achievement for the past 15 years of working for Honda which made us feel confident he had some sway to get us a good deal and was probably not hurting to sell a car. He was a salesman, but not pushy and was respectful of our decisions and questions. While we might have perhaps been able to get him to give us a slightly lower offer, we feel like we walked away pretty good.

Here are some pictures of our newest set of wheels.

There is even an auxilary in port. So Mark already filled a USB port with music for me to "rock out" to with the baby. Goodbye CD days! 

So many buttons!!!

The car is not silver...it is Alabaster Silver....so fancy! 

As for Mark's beloved car, we decided not to trade it in (though we haggled a pretty good deal on a trade in price). We ended up selling it to a family friend. So at least Mark can keep tabs on how his car is doing and knows it won't be sold to a junkyard in pieces.

Despite the looming monthly car payment that is back in our life (ironically with the 1st payment due right around the time we expect baby boy to join us), we are excited and are enjoying that lovely new car smell.