It all started Monday morning, when the check engine light came on in my Focus. CRAP. We just replaced a part in January, so this was annoying. Anyway, I left work early to take it in and O'Reilly helped us plug in the diagnostic thingy and it said it was the shift solenoid. Since that's a part of the transmission, that wasn't something Scott could fix himself, so we needed to take it in. We found a transmission place in Sunset and took it in. We told them what was wrong and they started to take a look at it. To make a long story short, they tried to con us out of almost $600 just to take it apart and figure out what was wrong, not even to fix the problem. So we took it to a different transmission shop, who said, surprise, surprise, that it was the shift solenoid. $240 to fix, done in one day.
We've been talking for a while about when we planned on getting me a new car (well, newER, anyway)(we'd never buy a brand new car because they depreciate in value way too quickly) and we had decided that later this year after the truck was paid off would be a good time to get a new car. Well, with the recent car troubles we kinda decided that it would be wise to get a new one now rather than later, since the Focus seems to be nickle-and-diming us at this point. We didn't want to spend the money, but it really had to be done.
So, without further ado, I introduce to you the Nissan Versa, in a lovely, dark chocolate color:
This car is little and fun to drive and very, very cute. We haven't measured the gas mileage yet, but supposedly it gets like 35 miles to the gallon (as compared to the Focus, which gets about 30). It has a much quieter engine, so I can actually hear my music while I'm driving without cranking it up so loud my ears start to hurt.
We haven't named it yet, but we still haven't really named the Focus, and we've had it for almost five years.
We're going to keep the Focus for now, since Scott's company may be moving and we don't know how far they would go. Right now they are two miles from our house, so driving the truck to work is just fine, but it only gets 12 miles to the gallon on a good day, so if Scott's company ends up moving to, say, Salt Lake, then we're going to want a commuter car for Scott. If it turns out they don't move or else they move somewhere close, like just to another office here in Layton, then we'll sell the Focus and put some or all of that money onto the loan on the Versa.
I drove a rental Versa once and it was quite nice. It was like this but navy blue.
ReplyDeleteWe started to look into used cars when we bought the van, but the rates to borrow for a used car were higher than the rates for a new car. Didn't make any sense for us. Which is silly because, like you said, depreciation and whatnot.