Friday, July 17, 2009

Autotrader.com



We had to stay home and wait for the towtruck to arrive and take away my PT. And of course he never showed up. Even experienced drivers get lost this far away from everywhere. He will try to get here today, at 8:30am. We'll see.

In the meantime Dave introduced me to shopping for cars online. There are many many different sites to peruse, but I found Autotrader.com very easy to navigate.
Type in your zip code and decide the range of miles to search for your desired car. It is possible to narrow the search by model, year and price parameters. This is a good thing since the choice is overwhelming. Dave has greater endurance for this sort of thing, but I had to stop and take a nap after a few hours of dinkin' around.

One begins to forget what one initially wanted and doubt one's reasoning. For example: what is the most important feature one must have? I got stuck on heated seats. Wha? Yes, I know I live in warm weather 90% of the year. But that fact left my cranium for a spell. Coming from the frozen north made me think heated seats are a must. OK... I finally crossed that off my list of demands.

Since we live far from town and wanted something specific, I typed in a radius of 100 miles to search. I found the above pictured vans in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee. Two are 2007 with nearly the same mileage, and one is 2006 with less mileage. All are the same price. As you might have guessed, I was partial to the red ones, but I do have a speck of sense left in me, and decided that the lowest mileage, but one year older model is my final pick.

That doesn't mean a thing until we go down to Alabama and drive it. It's only a two hour drive.

Geesh.
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5 comments:

  1. sorry to hear about the PT. We bought my Explorer Sport Trac through Cars.com and they delivered it from New Jersey to Long Island for me. The whole experience was surreal but not un-pleasant.
    Good Luck with your purchase.

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  2. Heated seats are still a biggy for me! We were just looking around a couple of weeks ago and my favorite car now is the Venzia! It has a little place to put your iPod and it automatically hooks up and plays it! Unfortunately, that little doo-dad now tops the need for warm buns.

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  3. We bought our Ford Sport Trac through autotrader.com. It turned out to be very convenient too because the gal from which we purchased it only lived about 10 miles away. It was a great experience and we'd do it again!
    D~~~~

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  4. Heated seats? What have I been missing? Never occurred to me. I guess we Canadians are cold in the rear. lol.//I'd look for van seats that are truly easy to remove or fold down into the floor for cargo space (some designs are really bad for this) . Electric windows (found out the hard way that this is not always a given in newer cars). A/C. I always go for low mileage too (even if it's older). //Hope your road trip goes well.

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  5. Anonymous1:18 PM

    Actually there is another difference....the red one is the shorter version of this van; so the storage behind the last seat is almost nonexistent. Plus the way to "get rid of the seats" changed in there some time. On the newer models they fold into the floor...older ones you have to unhook them and carry them out of the van. Just thought you might want to know.

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