Buying a car

Last week I decided it was time to buy a car. My current car basically broke down after a year worth of driving. It's a Kia and I guess you get what you pay for. I didn't pick it out anyway, my wife did. I personally prefer Toyota myself.

Anway, I just wanted to get a car to get from point A to point B because I'm in "economy" mode due to the current economic situation in Iceland. Just in case you have no idea what's going on here, read the news. So I definitely didn't want to get a very expensive one.

My first thought was to go to the Toyota dealer since I like Toyotas. There's one right here in Keflavik so I didn't have to drive so far. It's been colder this winter than previous winters so the snow had not melted away. When I arrived at the dealer all the cars were completely covered in snow.

I went in and basically said I want to look at your cheapest car because I don't want to take a loan. I asked though, if I did take the loan what the terms would be. He said you need 30% down and the interest rate would be 24%. I was like, are you crazy? He said this was a 100% Icleandic loan, meaning none of the loan would be in foreign currency. A couple years ago it was actually better to get loans in foreign currency because you could get them with low interest rates.

He did some typing in his computer system and showed me a picture of the cheapest car he had. It was a really old Toyota but it was cheap so it was in my price range. He asked if I had a driver's license and told me to wait while he went to go get the key. He handed me the key and said it was somewhere outside. I was like uhh, can't you give me a little more information than that? He said yeah, I think it was on that side of the building.

I mean this dealer probably had 150 cars on the lot and I was supposed to go find this one car on my own. I told him all the cars were covered in snow. He said "oh, here, better take this". He handed me a scraper to scrape the snow off all the cars I wanted to see.

At this point I was, give me a break. If you want to sell cars you need to do better than that. First of all, people can't even see the cars or the prices of the cars (in Iceland they hang the price from the window). Go out and scrape the windows so at least you can see the prices by driving by without having to get out of you car. Then if you're showing the car, take the time to actually walk out to the car with your customer.

As it turned out, I did not end up buying a car from this dealer. If they go out of business during these "tough" times, they really don't have anyone to blame but themselves...