car hunting in hot summer's day

what a draining and hot day spent in our sheep-skin covered car with koi. today's the first day i went out during business hour to go serious car hunting. sleep got really interrupted this morning so was really sleepy the whole day, yawning, coughing and sneezing all messed up into my brain with added flavour of hunger and dehydration. excellent condition for walking in the scorching sun to test drive cars. hmmm... anyway, decided to raid the highway motor groups of dealers today, so drive down to springwood with koi. must say that i learned quite a few things and picked up quite some tips from talking to dealers young and old. more importantly, the last guy ron told me that cheap cars then to get cheaper and mazda 3, corolla and astra tend to retain their value better. which is true 'coz commodores are already cheaper than astras from the same model year. first we popped into the southside honda dealership. a young guy greeted us and led us to see one of the hail damaged jazz vti. the price was 23000 something which is a bit dearer than our budget. he was nice enough to offer a test drive on the new jazz which is updated than the previous jazz i drove that has shift gear buttons on the wheel. now it's all behind the wheel affair with paddle shift. paddle shift on the jazz turned out to be much light and shallower than i expected, they are more like two plastic buttons behind the fat wheel. another thing i figured is that most people if not all, will tend to just lock the driving mode in auto without bothering about the 7 gear CVT thingy. the 7 gear is too gadgetry and shifting is a bit undirect and jerky. auto mode provide much oomph and smooth acceleration without human intervention necessary. so in other words it's just gimmicky without much real use. it's all pre defined shifting points on a continuous CVT gear anyway. koi reported that the back seats aren't quite as roomy as expected either. but that's mainly due to the back headrests are taken off and she's uncomfortable without them. so no more jazz please. we then rock up to the nissan dealer down the road. it's as if everybody is grabbing any remaining pulsars on this planet, all the new pulsars left are black and the only 2nd hand pulsar st left is a gold one with 10910 or something on the clock. the guys is offering around 18000 for that car. will think about it. pulsar st's don't have rear head rests, which surprised us a bit. finally, we found ourself in motorama holden looking at a silver2004 astra hatch. it has done more than 40,000 km and without abs. with trading in my precious red car, it can probably be driven away for 17000. but then again it isn't particularly powerful. the guy and the previoius nissan guy told us auctions has worries. the title may not be guaranteed, and you have to register and put plates on them urself. hmm food for thought. the holden guy says usually company fleet sell their cars when it's about 40,000 km, so there should be a lot of them on the market. sounds like we just need to shop around for a good buy. i'll rather have abs i think. the problem with astra is that since it is so popular, there is no road presence to speak of.

tomorrow me and dad will go auction house to see if there's cheap nissan pulsar or maximas for grabs. maxima is much more expensive, 04 model year cost about 28000 to 32000.