The New Car

As we enter Day 4 I was thinking back about how long we have our new car, mainly as it is not getting driven much these days, and thought, ah, a blog post on how I bought a brand new car through a chat window on a dealer website.

First off I should add some context,, us buy a new car was in the works, when we visited Nanaimo back in October, wow seems such a long time ago, we where kind of shocked at the price of gas. Sure we knew gas was more expensive on the island, well pretty much anywhere in BC, but seeing it on a sign really rammed it home.

We did some initial looking at both fully electric and hybrid technology, and pretty much decided that fully electric was not for us just yet, some trips back top GP after we move would mean longer trips and even then not sure if it would be feasible. So hybrid would be the way to go or even a plug-in hybrid would work.

We looked at many options and brought it down to a few different vehicles and then decided we will see what is around when we get to the island.

Just over a month a go I was doing some random reading and read that Subaru had a option, the Crosstrek Hybrid, this really started the thinking again, but when investigated it seemed that it was only being sold in Quebec in Canada with no indication as to when it would start to sell in the rest of Canada.

During this reading I doubled back to one of the options we had looked at, the Hyundai Sonata Hybrid, this reading took me over to West End Hyundai in Edmonton and their website, what got me more interested was a discount on the 2019 models of the Hybrid. I noticed that they had a chat window, my experience with these in the past has been negative as they are usually just either a bot or a person in a centre somewhere who then asks for your phone number to call you back, this was different.

I asked about the car in the chat window and right away a response came back saying they would pass me over to someone from internet sales, this person the proceeded to have a real conversation with me. I asked for the price and said I had a trade in, they took all the details and said to give him a few minutes to talk to the sales manager, never understood this, nobody runs off to the sales manager when you buy a lawnmower!!

Long store short, with a few mins I had agree a price on the trade and the new car, sent a photo of my driving license and then through a short call and text session sent my credit card for a deposit, done, pick the car up on Friday.

We had a trip planned to Edmonton that weekend anyhow, so worked out well to drive down on the Friday, right to the dealer and did the final paperwork and drove the car off the lot, minus our water bottle, ask the wife about that… we did get them the next day.

So Day 4 comes to a close and the numbers in Alberta are still alarming but, to me, seem to be on the more positive side in that the graphs don’t seem as sharp on the upward trend, we be a good boot for everyone if we started to see some change for the better.