Crash & Burn

This past weekend was crazy hectic. Saturday I got in nearly 60 miles in with Lee on the road bike down in Va. Sunday I got a shortened loop in at Schaefer (more to come on that, let’s just say it involves another wheel failure)

Along with lots of riding and puppy duties K and I decided to start new car shopping. The Saturn is nearing it’s end of life as it gets closer to 150,000 miles. I get kinda nervous with all the driving around I do regarding reliability so it’s time to swap it out. With the 07 models coming out we decided it was a good time to shop. Last time when we bought our Accord we got a smoking deal on a 04 just as the 05’s were hitting.

Initially we had three vehicles on our list. The Honda CRV, The Toyota Rav 4 and the wild card I threw in the Subaru Forrester. We were able to find dealers that were open over the weekend so we did some test driving. First off we hit the Honda dealer and test drove the CRV. It’s a solid car handles pretty well and well it’s a Honda. I’m a big fan of Honda quality. We were pretty impressed overall, like the handling and extra room it had over the Accord. It even had K’s must have feature of “Bum Warmers”. The only things we didn’t really like were the placement of the gear shift and emergency brake.

Next off we hit up the Toyota dealer to scope the Rav 4. Initially the Rav 4 feels alot like the CRV. It’s obviously built to compete. The problem is while it looks kinda like it the quality doesn’t feel up to par with the Honda. The tactile feel of everything in the cockpit really pales in comparison to the CRV. Things had a chinsy feel to them. Mostly little things but once you add it up it gave me the feeling of an inferior build quality when compared to the CRV. Handling wise the Rav 4 was great. It had a pretty peppy 6 banger and maneuvered quit well. It’s definitely got alot of motor stuffed in a small package. In the end though the build quality and overall feel caused us to nix the Rav 4 as an option. This just left my wild card pick of the Subaru.

Now when shopping for the Accord I looked at Subaru but they didn’t have anything in the price range similar. This time out I was surprised to find the Subaru was very competitively priced. Many of the features that were add ons with the CRV were standard on the Forrester. When Karrie and I arrived a sales guy by the name of Bob took care of us. Of the three dealers we visited he was by far the best. He answered our questions without being intrusive and best yet when it came time for test drive he let us take it out by ourselves.

The car was a blast to drive, easily my fav of the three. Overall a bit more hp and better handling that the CRV. More features, better handling combined to make this car my choice. When we returned from our test drive we found we had just test driven the new 07. A few small differences over the 06 such as satellite radio and an Aux jack set it apart.

Karrie really liked the car but wasn’t 100% sold on it. It took a day of further research and price negotiations before she came around. If all goes as planned we’ll have the Forrester by the end of the week.This means I’ll soon be replacing the Saturn with our Accord for my daily driver
Since I generally don’t like driving a new car on a daily basis K gets the new car and I get the hand me down. I get to drive the new car on weekends etc but don’t have to stress about scratching our new car etc… I’ve already got a rack for the Accord and the Ipod cable connector is on the way as well. Next week I should be cruising to work and to the trail in style.

I’m pretty excited to be picking up a new ride. I’m also kinda stoked about supporting Subaru as they do a bunch of stuff with IMBA etc. (BTW I negotiated a better deal than the IMBA discount)

I’ll get some photos up when we pick it up. This is almost as cool as getting a new bike

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 10:43 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.