Tipsy Tuesday: How to Buy a Mazda CX5

Very specific subject, but I suppose anyone could learn from our experience of buying this particular car.

Accidental picture of the car, I'll take it!

Pros: This car gets great gas mileage, is comfortable, has the turning radius of a Jeep which makes it easy to park in tight spaces, rides smooth like a new car should and has all the bells and whistles you expect from a 21 century car.

Cons: There are significant blind spots in the back (although there are monitors that help get around them... you just have to train yourself to use them), the remote start is an expensive joke, and maybe I'm an idiot, but the bluetooth/phone set up does not work for me all of the time. 

The blind spots: I got used to using the monitors - which beep and flash a light on your side-mirror - within the first week. I think that this isn't a real hurdle to buying the car, but that it should be noted. It just takes time to stop looking behind you when you change lanes on the highway. 

The remote start: This car cannot be fitted with a standard, aftermarket automatic start. It has to get the Mazda version make specially for this car. And for that reason, I guess, it's $1,000. Gulp! 

We built it into the cost of our loan, and paid for it before we saw it demonstrated. I don't even think they had a car equipped with it in the showroom. That should have been our first clue.

After having it installed, we were given a bulky, extra key fob to carry around with the regular key fob. It was in addition to, not instead of, like we thought. The start will only work within a very short range and will stop the second you open the door to the car. You can't start the car until you are right up near it... and it will stop when you open the door. So.... whats the point of warming up the car if you are already close to it and it can't keep running while you buckle your seat belt?

Bulky, expensive, proprietary, low-range, have to restart upon entering car. We aren't pleased.

The Bluetooth: The Mr. doesn't seem to have a problem with his phone (both iPhone 5's), so most likely it's me that's the problem. I should note that more expensive makes that we test drove had even more of a problem with Bluetooth technology. 

Bottom line is that we are happy with the car and wouldn't change that decision. If we could, we'd go back and not get the remote start or research consumer feedback more before we did.

Maybe others won't have problems with the blind spots or the Bluetooth because you've already driven cars with these modern issues/advancements. We were upgrading from a 1998 Honda Accord, so all of this stuff is soooo fancy to me!

I spent a total of 12 hours in the car this weekend and had a pretty good time. It handled hilly, curvy southern-Indiana terrain pretty well and didn't cost me a ton in gas. And I looked pretty cool in it :)

How to Make Terrible Things Benefit You

Punchline: start a blog.

Basically it's the concept behind the phrase, "You may not find this funny now, but you'll laugh about this later."

It's like this:

When we were buying a car over the weekend (more on that tomorrow, I think), we were seeing what we could get for our '98 Honda as a trade-in.

We were hoping for a few grand as the car is under 150k miles and we kept it up pretty well and, well, its still running!

Then the dealers all showed us how we'd never be able to sell it for a couple grand...

because the odometer had "potentially" been rolled back.

Why potentially? It was so obvious that it had because the Carfax report showed it having lower mileage in 2004 than when we bought it in 2011.

Either someone rolled it back generously or the car was driven backwards and Ferris Bueller was totally right!

Fast forward to today and we were potentially driving a 200k mile death wagon. I mean, the car would just slow down sometimes for no reason.

Not to mention it rattled over every little big winter pothole at which the Chicago plows have chipped away.

Not to mention that the check engine light was on for so long that it eventually went off... like when you're telling a story in a crowded room, everyone sips their drink and looks away, so you eventually stop the futile story mid-sentence.

So the questions that we're all asking can be answered the same way.

Why did we think we were getting any money for this car?
Why didn't we run a Carfax ourselves? (The dealers told us that every yahoo buyer runs a Carfax*)
Why didn't we just ask someone to fit it for a pair of cement tires?
Why were we still driving the Honda death-ccord?
And why didn't we get so mad at the prospect of this car being a total waste of money?

Because it would make a great story for the blog!

And twitter.
One of my favorite tweets from the whole ordeal was when the dealer told us that it would cost them more to take the car to auction than it was worth. Basically, they wanted us to pay them extra just to take the Murder Accord off of our hands.


*Learned our lesson