No one’s blogged recently, so I figured I’d regale you with tales of the car my wife and I bought yesterday. It’s a
2004 Chevrolet Aveo LS. It’s apparently a rebadged Daewoo, but that’s OK, the car has been very nice from my day or so of using it.
It includes an MP3-playing CD radio, remote lock/unlock (built into the key no less), and is just very nice all around. It’s very small (for an American car), but that was the reason I bought it, as it’s fuel-efficient and oh-so-easy to park. Of course, I showed it to my mother, and she’s all like, “Where’s the rest of it??”
We went to a smaller car dealership, and got generally good service. I got all confused with the APR rate, and accepted financing at the dealership when I could’ve got a better deal at my credit union. I shouldn’t be too surprised, as this is my first major credit buy of any sort, and still ended up with a decent APR (mine’s 11%, my mother’s is 22%). Luckily after I mentioned I’d probably re-finance the loan, the dealership finagled with GMAC (GM’s credit branch) to lower my APR to 7.1%, with my wife and I find acceptable.
One thing which I like about the car is that is almost impossible to lock your keys in it. Although it has power locks, there are no power lock switches on the inside, every lock is a push-lock at the window base. The catch is that the driver’s side lock won’t push down if the door is open. You have to lock the driver’s side door using either the remote (built-in to the key), or by using the keyhole (on the outside). The keyhole convieniently locks every door as well. In my experiments the only way I found to lock the keys in the car was to use the passenger door, which has no such door lock protection.
So far I’d rate the car itself as an 8.5/10. It was a tad pricey for my taste, but it was in the price range was had been budgeting all along, so I’m OK with it.