Broom broom...my adventure in the American used car market

Ladies and gents, I would like to introduce you to my new friend, Vicky the Volkswagen. She is my new favourite thing, but as I am about to describe, our relationship has gotten off to a rather tempestuous start.

Yes, those are gold alloys, and she has an exhaust the size of my head and sounds like a monster coming round the corner. I officially own a chav car.


I always knew I was going to have to get a car eventually, but last week, as I sat at home with Jason gone for 12-14 hours every day (sigh, Disney at Christmas!), I was losing the will to live and rapidly realised that I was going to need one sooner rather than later - especially if I want to volunteer or go to classes to fill my jobless hours waiting for my work card.


So the search began.


Here in an important fact about the American used car market - it sucks. Especially if, like me, you are on a limited budget. It's not really fair to do a direct comparison between the US and UK markets, but even so the US market is excessively inflated, partly due to much higher annual miles and partly due to the recession. I was on a budget of around $5000 - which is about £3500. Back home, £3500 could have bought me a 4-year old Renault ClioSport 172 with 45,000 miles, or a 1.3L 2008 Ford Ka with a tiny 13,000 miles on the clock. Over here, for my budget, I wanted something under 10 years old with under 100,000 miles on the clock. And let me tell you, my options were limited, and when they do show up they are gone in 5 seconds flat. Most dealerships looked at me like I'd lost my mind.


So, limited availability was my first challenge. My second challenge was trying to find something that wasn't going to kill me. One thing I've noticed whilst trying not to get flattened by some of the crazy drivers on the interstate is that cars over here are driven literally until bits start falling off. In Florida at least, there is no such thing as an MOT (translation for Americans: an MOT is an annual check-up that is required by law on all cars over 3 years old that checks if your car is roadworthy. If you car fails its MOT, you either need to get whatever it fails on fixed, or it is not legal to drive.) - so that means that it can be extremely difficult to know whether the used car you are looking at has just had a lot of cosmetic work done, looks shiny, but is going to fall apart 5 minutes after you drive it away.


I ended up getting my new friend Vicky from what can only be described as a fairly sketchy dealership in a fairly sketchy area. I found her on Craigslist after a tip from a nice bloke in the Honda dealership me and Jason visited a few days ago. Craigslist easily had the most vehicle listings that hit my critera, but this was a serious case of sorting the wheat from the highly-illegal chaff. I probably enquired after about 10 or 11 cars, and about 40% of the responses I got were of the 'sob story/need to sell great car at too good to be true price/all I need you to do is send me money via Paypal and I'll ship you the car for a no-obligation trial!' - otherwise known as scammers. 


So when I rang up about the VW and an actual person answered, I decided it was worth checking out, even though I was nervous about parting with my money. The dealership looked rough but the gents were nice. The test drive was good, so I decided to get in there before someone else did...and drove off with my new car about an hour later :)


But then when I went to pick Jason up from work, she wouldn't start. Panic, panic, panic. Warranties on used cars here basically don't exist and it's sold-as-seen - had I just been totally screwed?


To cut a long story short, my friends at the dodgy dealership aren't so hot on battery replacements, and a loose terminal was causing the battery to short out, all the electrics to die, and the engine to stop (including when I was in motion, which needless to say was terrifying). My very handy husband spent all day on Sunday just making her safe enough to get back to the dealership on Monday to be checked out. Fortunately, he succeeded, and now she is running like clockwork - but that doesn't mean I'm not taking her back today to give the dealer an earful. You never know, I might be able to guilt them into fixing the cigarette lighter.


So now I have a car again, after 3 years of being car-less. It feels weird to have that big an asset in my life, and a bit nerve-wracking as buying her took a significant chunk of my Unemployment Survival Fund. But she also means freedom, and that really is priceless.