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shannon_aI find it entirely bizarre, but there is now a new car parked in our garage. And by new car, I actually mean *new* car, and if you'd asked me yesterday I would have said that I didn't ever expect to buy a new car in my life.
But, I dunno, maybe the car market is in a weird place right now post-COVID and post-tariffs. Or maybe Hawaii is just a weird car market. But it made sense!
So we made a decision on Saturday to go ahead and replace Julie the Benz this year. I was driving out to Kealia to hang out and bike and write and I just wasn't loving the way Julie was shaking and shuddering. I think maybe she might have had a while to go before that transmission died entirely, and I'd wanted to get more value out of the battery and tires that were only 2-3 years old each, but I decided that I wasn't going to enjoy having her running so badly for that year. And I'd also that morning gotten an advance for some tech writing I've got on my schedule for this year. So it felt like the fates were conspiring to encourage us to go ahead and get a new car.
K. did some research on Saturday (while I was at the beach) and came up with what looked like the five most reliable manufacturers, and then Sunday we started spreadsheeting cars we found for sale that meet our criteria of brand, style, and cost. We ultimately decided that we wanted to look more deeply into Kias, in large part because we were seeing some reasonable prices at Hertz, but we wanted to see what the cars looked like. In particular, we wanted to understand the difference between the Seltos, a compact SUV, and the Sportage, a regular SUV.
Now we'd actually gone back and forth beforehand about whether we should get an SUV at all, but we ultimately decided that life in a semi-rural island, where we have to haul things like recycling and green waste around, due to the lack of curbside pickup, really called for the SUV (or a truck, but we were 100% uninterested in that). We hadn't realized that discussion really meant that a compact SUV was what we were looking for. Heck, I hadn't even known they existed.
So on Monday we went into the Kia dealer and we looked at the Seltos and the Sportage, and we ultimately decided that the Seltos had plenty of space for the riders (especially since we rarely have more than just K. and me in the car) and the cargo space looked smaller than Julie, but probably enough for our purposes. (Still to be seen what that really means, but I think it was a nice compromise.)
Now we looked at the new Seltos they had at the dealer, and we though it seemed nice, but we weren't really interested in a new car. (And I do mean the singular there: the dealer had exactly one Seltos left.) We did ask about used stock, but it's pretty scant on the islands. A single 2023 Seltos had been at the dealer, but sold some time in the previous few days. But there was a 2024 over on Oahu with a high level of trim (meaning lots of nice features which would put it more on par with what we'd come to expect from even a 15-year-old Benz), and that seemed interesting.
After Kimberly and I went home, we ultimately decided we'd definitely like to get a Seltos, and it was either going to be the fancy one on Oahu or the cheaper one from Hertz (but less nice, and possibly badly used by tourists, and also with less warranty because it wasn't directly from Kia), which was also on Oahu.
So I messaged our Kia salesman this morning that we'd like to get the nice Seltos on Oahu, and that we'd also like to see some price reduction, and showed him our comp from Hertz.
Much of the day went by, and he called me up and let me know that his sales manager was unable to negotiate with the sales manager on Oahu to actually get the car.
Alas. I thanked him for his help and said I was sorry we weren't going to be able to get a car from him.
But that's when he started to really push that single new (2026) Seltos they had.
He dropped it about $2000, and I said no, sorry, we were going to pass and get the Hertz one.
Then he said to name a number and implied he could drop it another $2000.
K. and I talked, and I ultimately asked him to drop it another $3000, figuring we'd land halfway at $2,500 if he was serious. I also told him that I wanted to get Julie wholesaled. We'd previously talked about her as a trade-in, but they ultimately weren't willing to because of the trouble selling a Mercedes and the fact that it had a big costly repair. But now I was basically saying: I want you to deal with it, because I can't see selling it for hardly anything with the transmission going out, and I don't want to deal with it, and if get some money, great, but I'm not counting on it.
So he came back with two offers. Either a total of $3,500 off the MSRP (and I should note new cars are often marked *UP* from the MSRP in Hawaii, but Kia had already dropped their mark-ups, I assume because they're trying to empty out inventory). Or $5,000 off the MSRP if we offered the trade-in, which I just wanted off my hands, and not ending up on a ditch on Kauai after someone tried to muck with the transmission and decided it was too expensive to do so.
K. and I crunched the numbers looking at the Hertz car, the Oahu Kia car (which we could have negotiated for directly with them, since they wouldn't work with our dealer, but which I figured we'd be doing from a very weak bargaining position since we were on another island), or this brand-new one. The new car was more expensive than the older Hertz car and slightly more expensive than the older but fancier Oahu Kia car, when we calculated things like shipping them to our island, but not hugely so. And we thought it probably wasn't actually more expensive when you amortized it against that extra 2-3 years that we hopefully get out of it because it's a newer car.
So we opted to buy the new Kia at a discount that our seller claims was approximately at their invoice price (albeit, with them getting in a trade-in of some value), and that seems pretty close to turth given additional costs to Hawaii.
I was worried that we were going to have trouble not getting taken advantage of in this whole working with a dealer thing. I'd dreamed of no-haggle pricing (and that was actually one of the reasons that Hertz was appealing). I'm not great at in-person conflict. Despite a long history of gaming, that includes negotiation (at least out-of-game negotiation). I think it helped that the real negotiation happened via phone and messaging, so I didn't have quite as much of the personal pressure. But the real gamechanger seemed to be research. I'd researched what the dealer add-ons were that they use to jack up the price a bit, and I explained why I found them non-interesting (and the salesman was clearly quite shocked that I knew what they were). And we had comps on hand that showed we were clearly willing to go elsewhere, and I actually linked out salesman straight to our main comp (the Hertz).
Some combination of that research and my saying "no" (and clearly their desire to get the car off the lot) put us in the driver's seat (ha!) and turned it into a buyer's market. So I just said "no" until they dropped the price and then I said "no" until they told me to make an offer, and then I went lower than the number that they'd suggested, and ding. ding.
I'm pretty sure there was a discrepancy in our valuation of Julie too and that was to our benefit (and their benefit, probably, which is the best type of deal). I saw her as a problem at this point. A car that we'd bought six years ago for $10,000 and that would very soon need a new transmission which we got quoted $7,000 just for the parts. I thought maybe we could get $1,000 for her, but that it'd be a pain, and that we might have to dispose of her. But I suspect Kia knows how to get at least that $1,500 for her and maybe more. I mean, that's how most trading and economic games work: they're about the delta of valuation between seller and buyer. And I'm totally cool with that. Because it's not about Julie's valuation to them, it's about the valuation to me.
So, we have a new car. My first new car ever. My first car I've ever bought from a dealer. Actually my fourth car ever, but that happens when you go 30 years without driving.
And it's weird that there's a different car in the garage.
But, I dunno, maybe the car market is in a weird place right now post-COVID and post-tariffs. Or maybe Hawaii is just a weird car market. But it made sense!
So we made a decision on Saturday to go ahead and replace Julie the Benz this year. I was driving out to Kealia to hang out and bike and write and I just wasn't loving the way Julie was shaking and shuddering. I think maybe she might have had a while to go before that transmission died entirely, and I'd wanted to get more value out of the battery and tires that were only 2-3 years old each, but I decided that I wasn't going to enjoy having her running so badly for that year. And I'd also that morning gotten an advance for some tech writing I've got on my schedule for this year. So it felt like the fates were conspiring to encourage us to go ahead and get a new car.
K. did some research on Saturday (while I was at the beach) and came up with what looked like the five most reliable manufacturers, and then Sunday we started spreadsheeting cars we found for sale that meet our criteria of brand, style, and cost. We ultimately decided that we wanted to look more deeply into Kias, in large part because we were seeing some reasonable prices at Hertz, but we wanted to see what the cars looked like. In particular, we wanted to understand the difference between the Seltos, a compact SUV, and the Sportage, a regular SUV.
Now we'd actually gone back and forth beforehand about whether we should get an SUV at all, but we ultimately decided that life in a semi-rural island, where we have to haul things like recycling and green waste around, due to the lack of curbside pickup, really called for the SUV (or a truck, but we were 100% uninterested in that). We hadn't realized that discussion really meant that a compact SUV was what we were looking for. Heck, I hadn't even known they existed.
So on Monday we went into the Kia dealer and we looked at the Seltos and the Sportage, and we ultimately decided that the Seltos had plenty of space for the riders (especially since we rarely have more than just K. and me in the car) and the cargo space looked smaller than Julie, but probably enough for our purposes. (Still to be seen what that really means, but I think it was a nice compromise.)
Now we looked at the new Seltos they had at the dealer, and we though it seemed nice, but we weren't really interested in a new car. (And I do mean the singular there: the dealer had exactly one Seltos left.) We did ask about used stock, but it's pretty scant on the islands. A single 2023 Seltos had been at the dealer, but sold some time in the previous few days. But there was a 2024 over on Oahu with a high level of trim (meaning lots of nice features which would put it more on par with what we'd come to expect from even a 15-year-old Benz), and that seemed interesting.
After Kimberly and I went home, we ultimately decided we'd definitely like to get a Seltos, and it was either going to be the fancy one on Oahu or the cheaper one from Hertz (but less nice, and possibly badly used by tourists, and also with less warranty because it wasn't directly from Kia), which was also on Oahu.
So I messaged our Kia salesman this morning that we'd like to get the nice Seltos on Oahu, and that we'd also like to see some price reduction, and showed him our comp from Hertz.
Much of the day went by, and he called me up and let me know that his sales manager was unable to negotiate with the sales manager on Oahu to actually get the car.
Alas. I thanked him for his help and said I was sorry we weren't going to be able to get a car from him.
But that's when he started to really push that single new (2026) Seltos they had.
He dropped it about $2000, and I said no, sorry, we were going to pass and get the Hertz one.
Then he said to name a number and implied he could drop it another $2000.
K. and I talked, and I ultimately asked him to drop it another $3000, figuring we'd land halfway at $2,500 if he was serious. I also told him that I wanted to get Julie wholesaled. We'd previously talked about her as a trade-in, but they ultimately weren't willing to because of the trouble selling a Mercedes and the fact that it had a big costly repair. But now I was basically saying: I want you to deal with it, because I can't see selling it for hardly anything with the transmission going out, and I don't want to deal with it, and if get some money, great, but I'm not counting on it.
So he came back with two offers. Either a total of $3,500 off the MSRP (and I should note new cars are often marked *UP* from the MSRP in Hawaii, but Kia had already dropped their mark-ups, I assume because they're trying to empty out inventory). Or $5,000 off the MSRP if we offered the trade-in, which I just wanted off my hands, and not ending up on a ditch on Kauai after someone tried to muck with the transmission and decided it was too expensive to do so.
K. and I crunched the numbers looking at the Hertz car, the Oahu Kia car (which we could have negotiated for directly with them, since they wouldn't work with our dealer, but which I figured we'd be doing from a very weak bargaining position since we were on another island), or this brand-new one. The new car was more expensive than the older Hertz car and slightly more expensive than the older but fancier Oahu Kia car, when we calculated things like shipping them to our island, but not hugely so. And we thought it probably wasn't actually more expensive when you amortized it against that extra 2-3 years that we hopefully get out of it because it's a newer car.
So we opted to buy the new Kia at a discount that our seller claims was approximately at their invoice price (albeit, with them getting in a trade-in of some value), and that seems pretty close to turth given additional costs to Hawaii.
I was worried that we were going to have trouble not getting taken advantage of in this whole working with a dealer thing. I'd dreamed of no-haggle pricing (and that was actually one of the reasons that Hertz was appealing). I'm not great at in-person conflict. Despite a long history of gaming, that includes negotiation (at least out-of-game negotiation). I think it helped that the real negotiation happened via phone and messaging, so I didn't have quite as much of the personal pressure. But the real gamechanger seemed to be research. I'd researched what the dealer add-ons were that they use to jack up the price a bit, and I explained why I found them non-interesting (and the salesman was clearly quite shocked that I knew what they were). And we had comps on hand that showed we were clearly willing to go elsewhere, and I actually linked out salesman straight to our main comp (the Hertz).
Some combination of that research and my saying "no" (and clearly their desire to get the car off the lot) put us in the driver's seat (ha!) and turned it into a buyer's market. So I just said "no" until they dropped the price and then I said "no" until they told me to make an offer, and then I went lower than the number that they'd suggested, and ding. ding.
I'm pretty sure there was a discrepancy in our valuation of Julie too and that was to our benefit (and their benefit, probably, which is the best type of deal). I saw her as a problem at this point. A car that we'd bought six years ago for $10,000 and that would very soon need a new transmission which we got quoted $7,000 just for the parts. I thought maybe we could get $1,000 for her, but that it'd be a pain, and that we might have to dispose of her. But I suspect Kia knows how to get at least that $1,500 for her and maybe more. I mean, that's how most trading and economic games work: they're about the delta of valuation between seller and buyer. And I'm totally cool with that. Because it's not about Julie's valuation to them, it's about the valuation to me.
So, we have a new car. My first new car ever. My first car I've ever bought from a dealer. Actually my fourth car ever, but that happens when you go 30 years without driving.
And it's weird that there's a different car in the garage.