Monday, April 16, 2007
Red is the new green
For the last several years, my sweety has been tooling around town in one SUV or another. First it a Nissan Xterra. It was very rugged and stylistically different from all the other SUVs. It looked really cool, unfortunately it was a little too rugged. It bounced like an old truck and didn’t have the luxurious touches that she tends to prefer. So she traded it in for a new Pathfinder. A much nicer ride, and highly versatile. We LOVED the fold-flat 3rd row seating, allowing for 7 people to ride in that thing, or you could fold down all the seats and stick a couch back there.
However, realistically, how often did we need to cart around a couch or 7 people that would justify driving this thing every day to work? If it was every weekend, then definitely yes it was worth it. Possibly even once a month. But honestly, it was more like once every few months. Not worth the $50 in gas every two weeks, or the extra pollution we cause. It was time for a change.
We’ve been watching the hybrid cars with interest for years. The Honda Insight was the first of its kind available to consumers, and boy was it ugly. (That cheap attempt to make the thing look futuristic just made it look cheesy.) It also had some problems that would have made it a really annoying car to own. I like to wait until they work out all the kinks before adopting new technology. The wait for us is finally over. They got ‘em running smoothly now, and in normal-looking cars that people actually want to look at. Yesterday, after a 6-hour marathon of negotiating (but mostly just waiting around for them to crunch new numbers) we finally came home with this baby:
The 2007 Toyota Camry in this gorgeous shade of red. It’s got an on-board GPS that talks to you (we’ve always wanted one!) and an audio jack for MP3 players. It’s got a lot of other things too, but these were the two niftiest things that we cared about other than its hybridness. It gets 43 mpg city and 38 mpg highway. Compare that to the 15/21 mpg of the Pathfinder! I hate that we wasted an entire Sunday at a car dealership, but she came away with a great deal in the end. They had no idea who they were dealing with!