I got a new car. It's the Honda Fit Sport. It's red. I'll take some photos of it later, but for now I want to record the tale of my buying experience.

My credit union has a service where they negotiate prices for all kinds of cars with dealers throughout the country. For some reason, Airport Marina Honda was being coy about offering me the pre-negotiated price. It was weird. So I hemmed and hawed, trying to figure out how they were going to give me the price I wanted. Finally, I figured maybe I missed a step in the process and started over from the beginning. That was on Sunday morning.

Oddly, the process ended with my credit union telling me to go to Honda of Hollywood this time. Within minutes, Honda of Hollywood responded listing the price I wanted. I wrote back asking when I could come in, and they said now!

I cleaned out my old mercury sable (marshmallow car of sex!) of all the accumulated junk and drove over to the dealership. I found the internet sales manager and he asked me to wait. A few minutes later, he came over with another sales guy and said he was too busy right now, but this guy would take care of me. His name was Gary.

So Gary took me up to the roof of the dealership (weird, but that's where they keep most of their cars, I guess). He showed me a pretty light lavender fit sport. I was like, yeah, but what about that rust orange one? He went over to it, and said oh, this is an automatic too. I much preferred the orange to the lavender, so we took it out for a test drive.

The test drive was fun. Gary encouraged me to put the car through its paces. He let me floor it up an empty street, corner hard and test the ABS. Nikki didn't really appreciate that part, but I thought it was fun. I guess you're not really supposed to do these things to a new car during its "breaking in" period, but I didn't know that, and neither did Gary, apparently.

So we went back into the dealership and started the negotiations. Wait a minute, I thought, this is a pre-negotiated price. What's going on here? Of course, the dealership has to make money, and the price I got was invoice + $100. That's not enough of a profit for the sale of an in-demand car, so they had to find other ways to wiggle. They tack on some random fees and other extra crap. I talked them out of charging me for some of the extra crap. Then we talked about my trade-in. This is where my negotiation gets low marks. The trade-in blue book value for my car was about $1,500 if it were in fair condition. I'm no expert, but it seemed like my car was on the border between fair and good, but whatever. The point is, they offered me $500 for it. I thought I would walk out with at least $1,000 for it, but the highest I got them to was $600.

Anyway, the deal was on the table, I was willing to take it and Gary went to have the car washed. I guess they also needed to run a credit check (even though I was paying with a check and wasn't financing the car) so I guess that was happening, too. So Gary goes away and I hang out for maybe 10 minutes. Gary comes back and says, "there's a problem."

I figure the problem is that my identity has been stolen and I'm suddenly on the hook for a credit card loan of 100,000 or something. panic. Gary looks at me and says, "we already sold that car."

"What? Like, just now?"

"No, yesterday. For some reason the buyer didn't take the car, and the salesman didn't put a 'sold' sign on it. So, you want the blue one?"

"Well..."

"Okay, let's see what else we have. Oh, hey, we have a red one. It's just been serviced and we were going to put it out tomorrow. Let me see if I can get it."

I was kind of shocked, but at least the problem wasn't with my credit rating. Gary left to go do whatever, and the internet sales manager came by to see how we were doing. I explained what was going on, he apologized, and I said it was no big deal. I guess that was my opportunity to pitch a fit and maybe get them to do something nice for me, but I passed. Mostly because it seemed like an honest mistake and I'm a forgiving kind of guy, but I wonder what I could have gotten if I had leveraged the situation.

So I test-drove the red one, just to make sure it worked. I wasn't near as thorough at this point, and I probably should have been, but I didn't do any of the stuff the manual says you shouldn't do for the first 200 miles. So that's serendipity, I suppose. I went through the whole deal again and signed about 8 different documents promising I'd get insurance, and that they get my old car, and if my check bounces they get the car back, etc.

I drove my new car off the lot. It's fun. It has a sweet stereo, nice A/C, it corners great and has nice low-end acceleration (compared with what I've owned previously). It revs up all to hell anytime I accelerate, but I guess that's just how Hondas work. I haven't tried the paddle shifters in 'Sport' mode yet. I'll need to find a quiet road with no traffic before I do much with that.

Anyway, that's the story. Check back for pictures later.