The New Car (2010 Edition)

After a few months of fiddle-farting around (and, really, honestly, about 3-5 years of Hey We’re Really Seriously Considering It Now procrastination), we finally bought our replacement for the van.

As a recap, we’ve had the 2000 Toyota Sienna since before Katherine was born — in fact, we got it explicitly as part of our pre-baby prep (it replaced Margie’s old Acura hatchback, another good car that was ill-suited to baby hauling).  It  has served long and honorably, through good weather and bad, visiting relatives, sheets of plywood and other building materials, short commutes and cross-country hauls.  A good car.

But it was beginning to show its age.  The power train was all in good shape (due to regular maintenance), but the various bits and bobs were beginning to deteriorate — the door handle on the power door was broken, the power window on the passenger side only intermittently worked, little plastic thingummies were beginning to snap off or break, etc.

Early on I wanted to go with Subaru — we’ve been pleased with my 2004 Impreza, especially with its All-Wheel Drive here in intermittently snowy Colorado. We’ve driven the Forrester a few times as a rental on vacation, and I’d thought that would work well. But in the past few years, Subaru redesigned their classic Outback into something that  get classified either as a large wagon or a small 4-door SUV.  The result is pretty much as large as a Forrester, but even more roomy and comfy inside.  Thus, we purchased a 2011 Subaru Outback 2.5i Premium.

More importantly, it’s large enough that we can get around town carrying five (i.e., when the ‘rents visit); the back seat is quite wide enough for all the butts involved (as tested by our own), but the leg room makes it quite comfy even with the front seats pushed way back.

The dimensions had to be smaller than our old Sienna (193.5″ long, 73.4″ wide). The Outback is five inches shorter, a bit under 2″ narrower (188.2″ x 71.7″).  That will be something of a relief in our very tight  garage.

Mileage is a better than the van, though not wildly faboo — 22/29 (CU rates overall at 24).  Acceleration is not snappy compared to some other competing cars in class, but it’s smooth and fast enough.  It also has a continuous variable transmission, which avoids a lot of revving and jerkiness (it also has a pseudo-manual override, so you can use steering wheel paddles to up- and down-shift). It’s also a PZEV vehicle due to its good emissions and clean manufacture.

The purchase process at Go Subaru Arapahoe was as (relatively) painless as one might expect.  We’d met with one of the sales peeps (Matt Osborne) there on a couple of times, who’s a very personable young guy who’s part-time in sales and most-time in the engineering/maintenance side of things. He was helpful, patient, and pleasant, and as such brought in the sale.  He (and “Jenny” at the dealership) managed the final sales job.  (It was all made easier by the fact we’d already arranged for our own financing on favorable  terms.)  The whole process took about two hours, including choosing the particular vehicle …

Well, we’d delayed our purchase long enough that Subaru had shifted from the 2010 models to the 2011.  Which meant we had pretty much all the colors to choose from in the package and feature set we were looking at.

The whole purchase was tough on Katherine.  She’s known the Sienna her entire life, and that’s generally been the car she’s traveled in since she’s been an infant.  And, alas, she’s gotten Sensitivity and Nostalgia genes reinforced from both parents.  So the idea of getting rid of The One True Car (Of Which All Others Are But Shadow) was wrenching.

We tried to make up for it by letting her choose the color, and she ended up choosing “Graphite Gray Metallic,” which, while not my top choice, was perfectly acceptable.

(It was still  tough for her leaving the Sienna behind at the dealership, having gotten a good trade-in price for it.)

Anyway, there was not much more to  it.  After signing all the intent-to and yeah-that’s-what-we-want docs, we sat around while they did all the detailing and gassing up, the moment broken only by a stint in one of the Finance guys to actually, y’know, pay for the thing.

And then Matt gave us the Final Briefing (e.g., this is the carpeting, do not eat it), and we drove off.

In our new car.

Woot!

I don’t expect we’ll be doing this routine for some years yet — the Impreza’s about 7 years old, so it’s got a few years left in it.  I suspect, when we get to that point, we’ll end up with something small and hybridized and high-economy.  But that’s well into the future.

For now … we have a new car.  And are pretty pleased with it.