Yesterday we were on the last day of our vacation, and I noted the mileage on our car and suggested we might think of replacing it with another CR-V that we would expect would last us all the rest of our days.
Mr. brown would buy a new car every year if he was given free rein, so he was immediately obsessed with this. The instant we returned home today at noon, he dropped me off and drove straight to our local Honda dealer and within a couple of hours returned home with a 2026 CR-V. He has been fervently going over the manual and playing with the new car ever since. I’m glad he has something that makes him so happy, but I hope he knocks off soon. We drove a long way home from this morning and it’s a very hot summer day.
Comgrats on the new wheels, but … how is this possible? Don’t they do dealer prep any more? Have things changed that much since I last bought a new car? I remember an anxious wait of several days before I actually got my new toy.
Days? Heh. Where I am, the wait for a new vehicle is invariably a few weeks. Our car dealerships don’t have vast lots with dozens of vehicles in common/typical configurations, ready to go. No — the dealer has a small fleet, one of each model, in which everything is a sample vehicle, selected and configured to represent the scope of options across the collection. This vehicle has a moon roof, that vehicle has upgraded seats, etc etc. You test drive your chosen model, you check out the options in the other models on the floor, and then you make your own personalized selections on the car design menu.
Even in the unlikely event one of the dealer’s car matches your specs, they wouldn’t sell it to you anyway, because it’s part of their sales fleet. You always have to wait for your car to be assembled and delivered. Of course, if you happen to select a no-frills configuration that allows them to basically button up their base model and ship it with no add-ons, you might get it in two or three weeks. But they still do have to button it up, so ya gotta wait.
If you need a car faster than that, you’re shopping used, period.
They had hundreds of new cars on the lot, including plenty of CR-Vs, which is their best seller. It wasn’t hard for him to pick one which had most of the features that we wanted. It wasn’t our first choice for color, but it was our second choice. And it has black wheels, which we weren’t keen on, but that can be remedied in time.
Yes, it’s a fun car. I remember when we got our old CR-V. Because it’s an SUV, I was expecting a lumbering, kludgy vehicle. But it wasn’t; it’s fun to drive and it has exactly the amount of room we need. It’s big enough to load up purchases from a big Costco run or bags of mulch from the nursery, but it’s not enormous. It’s also terrific for our road trips to vacation spots up and down California, as it just the size to hold all our luggage.
I also mistakenly thought back then that the car would get crappy mileage as compared to a small sedan, but it gets surprisiingly good mileage.
So the new car has all these advantages plus it has more bells and whistles than our basic older one. I’d give details, but I was too exhausted from traveling yesterday to absorb all the technical stuff that Mr. brown was excitedly reading to me out of the manual.
Really? In all the places I’ve lived, dealers had lots full of cars, and if you wanted one, you would walk out with it a few hours later. If you didn’t want to haggle and were happy with the list price, you could probably get it all done in less than an hour, with just some paperwork to fill out.
We bought a new Subaru a few weeks ago and that was our experience too. Test drove a few cars, picked one we liked
and sat down to discuss price. Went home with it a couple hours later.
If you wanted a color or configuration they didn’t have on site, of course you’d have to wait then. But otherwise, why wouldn’t they want to sell you one of the floor models?
I live in a small European country. We don’t have the acres of parking lots that are common in the States. Villages and towns are compact and everything in a given location is easy walking distance from everything else.
This is a map link to a location about ten minutes from my house. If I’ve configured it right, this should be the satellite view.
Please note the red pin, and two locations adjacent to it: “Garage Kieffer” to the north, and “Garage Neugebauer” to the south. (You might need to zoom in or out a bit to get the map to display the names.) Both of these are dealerships: the first for Volkswagen, the second for Citroën.
Observe the limited footprint of each business. Each one has a parking lot that holds maybe 30 vehicles, and that’s it. Half of the parking spaces are generally being used by the cars that have been dropped off for servicing. The other half are for visitors and employees. There is no giant lot with a collection of ready-to-sell cars. That’s simply not the way it’s done here; all the dealerships look like this. As I said, you go into the showroom, and you check out the dealer’s own mini-fleet of sample cars; and when you’re ready to buy, you complete a spec sheet, which begins the final assembly process at a vehicle plant dozens if not hundreds of kilometers away. When your car is ready, it’s shipped to the dealer for your retrieval three or four weeks later.
And the dealer won’t sell you one of his demo models, because then he doesn’t have that model on the floor to show other prospective buyers, for as long as it takes the manufacturer to send him a new one. You might be able to talk him into it, but it would be unusual.
This kind of business model is applicable to more than just cars, incidentally. If you go into a furniture showroom, for example, you are, again, looking at a range of sample assemblies of couches or dressers or beds. There is a base model of couch, say, with twenty or thirty different customization options available. Some of these options are simple, like various leg styles. Some of them are more complex, like arms that open for storage space. What you see in the showroom is not for sale — the items are just illustrative of the available options. You look around, you tell the salesperson how you want your couch constructed (“fabric from this one, cushion style from that one, arm shape from this other one…”), and then… you wait a few weeks while it’s put together in a factory far away.
As a relocated American, it’s been a bit of an adjustment to live here. I was used to going out to Strip Mall City where acres and acres of space are given to warehouses with pre-assembled furniture you can buy on the spot and have delivered the next day. Here, those kinds of “neighborhoods” do not exist. We lack the American “must shop urgently!” culture; instead, we have an expectation that you can get the couch or the bed — or the car — exactly the way you want it, as long as you’re willing to wait.* While this sounds strange to Americans who are used to immediate consumption, it turns out that it’s not really a compromise. Knowing you need to plan ahead, and have a little patience, rewires the way you interact with the world.
*The exception is Ikea, where you can indeed make choices in the showroom and then immediately collect ready-to-build boxes from the warehouse next door. But that’s pretty much the only large-goods business that offers this kind of service. And it’s also noteworthy that our closest Ikea is way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, away from any town or village, because it’s considered to negatively impact quality of life in its immediate area and had to be sited accordingly.
Just curious; how old is the CR-V that’s you’re replacing? I’m wondering how much of a leap you’re taking. (My only car is a 2010 Honda Fit so when I eventually replace it, I expect a big leap in technology. I don’t even have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.)
It’s a 2019. We bought it from the dealer as a used, low mileage vehicle. We had a big stroke of good luck, because we bought it just after the pandemic started. The old CR-V started life as a fleet vehicle, and as business dried up in 2020, the owners sold off their whole lot of fleet vehicles. We stumbled into it at just the right time and got it as a bargain.
The new one does have a lot of new technology, even compared to the 2019. Mr. brown is in his element as he studies the manual and sets up all the techie customizations. Or turns off the techie features which do not interest us.
It’s not a hybrid, but there were a lot of hybrid CR-Vs on the lot.
We’re going to sell the old one ourselves, using craigslist. It’s a well-cared-for Honda, so it should sell very quickly, just like all of our previous Hondas (a hybrid Civic, a Crosstour, an Accord, and an Accord station wagon). I have to re-educate myself on filling out the title transfer stuff on the pink slip and printing out a bill of sale. It has been five years since we sold a car so possibly something has changed.
Cervaise, it’s very interesting to see how things are done differently in Europe. Some author I read years ago (maybe Peter Mayle?) detailed how he wanted to buy an electric kettle in France. He went in to a kitchenware store and saw what he wanted on a shelf, and tried to buy it. But the salesman wouldn’t sell it to him; the kettle was for show. If he wanted one, he had to order it and it would be shipped within a few weeks. The author was English, not American, but still surprised that that’s how purchases went in France.
I do like Hondas. I had my Civic about 7 years before it was stolen. My current daily driver is a 2008 Pilot that just crossed the coveted third of a million mile mark.
I like technology so that’s one of the fun things about getting a new car; every year there are new technologies, though not always positive ones. One I’m looking forward to is adaptive headlights (called adaptive front-lighting systems) which my next car may have.
We bought a new car last month (Hyundai Tucson, XRT) and love it. We took about a month to do the car shopping, and since the dealer didn’t have the color we wanted, they traded a white XRT which they had on the lot to another dealer who had the black car we wanted.
Previous cars were a 2017 Chevy Cruze (since sold) and a 2013 Dodge Journey (kept).
Going out and buying a brand new car with just four hours sounds insane to me, but we’re all different.
We already knew that we’d want a Honda CR-V, because our old one has been a corker. We’ve driven the hell out of it, up and down the west coast of the United States, and to the Sierras and the Siskiyous, the Willamette Valley, and the Columbia River Gorge. It’s high mileage for its age but is still performing wonderfully, just like all the previous Hondas we’ve owned.
So it was just a matter of Mr. brown doing a little preliminary research about what features we wanted, going to the lot, and pointing.
Thanks for the example! It’s always interesting to know how things are done elsewhere. (Sorry, I assumed you were US-based).
I would actually vastly prefer this model to the US one (for car buying), because then I can customize and order the exact specs that I’d like. I know you can do that in the US too, but the dealers are far less incentivized for those kinds of sales than just trying to move another existing car off their lot.
My sister just bought an Acura ZDX. Her daughter is an engineer for Honda and she got a smoking deal - about 1/2 off sticker. She’s loving the change to EV.
My family is a Honda family. I drive a 2016 CRV, my husband drives a 2008 Civic, my grandfather and my uncle both drive Civics, and my Aunt is driving a 29-year-old Odyssey. It’s at the point where people are flagging her down to see what she’s driving.
I used to have a 2009 Fit, and it was the perfect thing for being a student in an urban area, super zippy and fun, and definitely “Bigger on the Inside" - it’s crazy the amount of stuff I crammed in there. Plus ten drink holders! At the time, the power windows were a marvel. Never had ‘em.
I traded it in for a CRV when I got pregnant with my son. The Fit just felt like not enough protection. My friends called the CRV a Mom-mobile.
At first the CRV felt stodgy by comparison. It was a bit of an adjustment to have to take such slow turns. But it came with heated seats! And I made them throw in a remote car starter. I enjoy driving it now.
I’m terrible at parking it, though. Just terrible. It’s been five years; you think I would have figured it out by now. When my son was about three, I parked in his swim class parking lot one morning, and from the back seat, before I could say anything, he piped up: "Uh, oh, I’ve got to try again!”