Five Signs It’s Time to Buy a New Car
1. People on the street laugh at you. This is an easy, albeit superficial, reason to upgrade. Your Eighty-nine Buick just isn’t scoring you the cool points it once did. You find yourself driving to the grocery store to pick up some milk and eggs, and on the way, you pass a group of attractive young people hanging out. This used to be you: cool, young, hip. You smile and turn up your stereo as you pass. Don Henley is still popular, right? As you nod your head to the music, you just can’t figure out why the kids on the corner start to point and laugh. Hard as it may be to accept, the reason is your ride. If you’re single, you’re certainly not going to be picking up any dates as long as you drive this boat. It’s time to go in for something sleek and new; you may not be able to mask your love for “Boys of Summer,” but you might just be able to save your image.
2. That cloud of black smoke every time you accelerate. It’s no wonder so many crooked inspection places exist. The streets are crowded with exhaust-spewing old hunks, and yours just happens to be one of them. Not only do you notice people in the cars behind you gagging as the light turns green and you step on the gas, you notice you’ve been getting more and more “What’s that smell?” comments from your friends as well. The smell is you: your olfactory system has been ravaged by hours spent riding around in a noxious cloud, so you don’t realize that the odor of burnt gasoline has permeated almost all of your wardrobe and mingled with the slightly pleasant fragrance of your shampoo to produce a smell that, if it had a designer name, would be called something like “Junkyard Bouquet”. Head to the dealer now, and just maybe, people in restaurants will stop requesting to sit as far away from you as possible.
3. It costs HOW much to fuel up? After work on Friday, you pulled into the gas station to fill your tank. After standing there with the pump in your hand for what seemed like hours, you finally felt that reassuring click: you’re back up to “F”. The machine prints out your receipt. It only cost you a grand total of…$54.63?! Surely that can’t be right; you just filled up on Monday. Fuel prices aren’t likely to come too far down too soon, so if you’ve had this experience even just once, you might want to start thinking about a new car. This is the age of mileage, and 12 mpg just isn’t going to cut it anymore.
4. That annoying “Check Engine” light. Surely you’ve seen it. But it’s come on before, right? And you didn’t have any problems then. After a while, it just went off again, and the car’s been fine since. Stop fooling yourself. You might have got lucky a couple of times just “waiting it out”, but those indicators were put there for a reason. If you’ve abandoned your regular checkup schedule because you’re afraid your ride is going to need some major work, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re not too far away from ending up stranded on the side of the highway. Get a new car! Your friends will be thankful for not having to come rescue you.
5. Your stereo is on its last leg. Franz Ferdinand sounds exactly like the Beach Boys, and you find it so surprising that modern recording artists have incorporated static and buzzing sounds into their music. While you could always go to the electronics store and buy a new system, it’s important to pay attention to the relationship between a dying stereo and a dying car. Music systems, which are less complex and require much less regular maintenance than your typical automobile, have a pretty decent life span. If you’ve had your car long enough to wear through a stereo, chances are you’ve had it long enough to wear through, well, a car. If it’s not time to go shopping for a new one yet, it will be soon. Save the money for a new stereo; when you buy a new car, the factory system will be ten times better than the one you have now anyway.
If any of these examples sounds familiar to you, then you would do well to pick up a few brochures. There have been a lot of technological developments in the automotive industry in the past twenty years. Hey, maybe this time you can even get a car with an airbag! At the very least give it some thought. Send the old ride to the junkyard, and you’ll probably thank yourself. In fact, we all will.
