A new car!

Hi! So, this is probably the shortest interval between blog entries, but I couldn't wait to share the news.

Anyway, Nick's lease on his current car ends this month, and since we'll be in New York next weekend, and are returning the following weekend, we realized that the only free days we would have to test drive some cars would be this weekend, or the last sunday of the month. We didn't want to push our decision to the last moment, so we looked for cars this weekend. The short list of cars were: the BMW 325, Infinity G35 and the Honda Accord Hybrid. Nick actually test drove the Accord Hybrid a couple of weeks ago, but hadn't tested the other two.

So we went to the local BMW dealer only to find ourselves waiting for a salesperson. After about 15 minutes, a salesperson was forced upon us by the manager (or some other important looking person)...the salesperson didn't seem interested in helping us at all. In fact, we were thinking of leaving the dealership 'cuz of the wait, and in retrospect, we probably should have since the salesperson told us that the dealership had no 325's available. So we left and walked next door to the Infinity dealership only to find out that they didn't have any G35's in stock. This left us with the Accord Hybrid (which we initially preferred among the short listed cars), so we went back to the dealership where we test drove the car. We asked for the salesperson who helped us during the test drive, but was told that he no longer worked there...it was sad, but another salesperson showed us the car.

Unfortunately, the 2006 Accord Hybrid isn't available until the end of December, which would be a little too long to wait considering that Nick has to return his current car at the end of this month. The dealership only had a couple of 2005 Hybrid availables, so we sat in the only one with the Navigation system and tinkered with it for a while. We were also informed that the car has a voice recognition program which can be used to change stations, adjust the temperature, and control some of the Nav system functions. Unfortunately, it didn't do too well with some of Nick's commands, but that wasn't too detrimental to the overall appeal of the car.

We decided to get it, although I didn't like the color of the only car that met our specifications (it was some metallic silver color). I wanted blue, of course, and Nick simply wanted a darker color. We were told that there were only four colors available for the hybrid: white, silver, some light gold color (I think), and graphite, which is a dark gray...and so we chose the graphite. This meant that they would have to get the car form another dealership, but that was fine, we could wait a couple of hours. We went home and when it was time, I drove Nick back to the dealership so he could drive home with the new car. But before he was able to leave, the salesperson showed him how to use the Nav system and also took the following picture of Nick and the new car:

And I guess he put this picture onto a calendar, so now we have a 2005 calendar with this photo on it.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the car is equipped with XM satellite radio, which we've been playing around with for a while. Actually, that reminds me that Nick and I wanted to go to the XM website and see what the current channel listing is. So that's what I'm going to do now. Hope everything is well with y'all!

Jerry Liu