Our Story Thus Far V

V. Gas mileage.

The EPA SAYS their numbers are for the median driver: some will do better, some will do worse.
I can and already have gotten 40mpg out of this car. It's only rated 28city/36 highway/ 31 overall.
("Lightfoot Bob", they call me....)

The EPA says the automatic-transmission version actually gets slightly better mileage, which I find hard to believe. But the AT would be about $14.27 more per monthly payment; not enough to offset the theoretically lower gas bill, not until gas goes to $10/gallon or so. (Or unless I keep it another twenty years, which is now demographically unlikely. (I've already outlived my mother....))

The recent visit to Utica was definitely over 40-mpg, for 200+ miles. I need to keep "Leadfoot Maggie" away from the car if I hope to turn in a >40mpg tankful, though.

Oh, and the thing with "How can you live without A/C?"
It was 84F over Labor Day weekend, and we did fine with it. It won't be that warm again until April or May.
Hypothetical A/C would be nothing but useless dead weight - and probably close to $200 in car payments - until then.
For what I'm not spending on A/C, I could rent an air-conditioned car for the worst week of the summer.

Our Story Thus Far IV

IV. The Radio

Being the stripped version, the car arrives with speakers - but no radio. I laughed when the salesman offered to sell me an $800 dealer-installed radio. I checked with the dealer's parts department: I could buy the factory radio over-the-counter myself for $430 + tax, install it in myself, and save over $330. They'd have to order the thing, but that should take only a few days. Or I could install my own after-market radio and save something over $600.

But, for a while there, it looked like I might have outwitted myself: neither Crutchfield nor Scoche, (nor the other brand whose name escapes me) has an installation kit available just yet for the brand-new Civic. (Oops.) I even called Crutchfield; they said they'd have a kit by the summer of 2012, nine months from now. Three local installers said they didn't have those parts. Best Buy said they'd certainly be able to do something - I even made an appointment with them - but when I went in, they wanted me to buy my own harness connector kits first. (Best Buy graciously gave me the Scoche parts numbers, which helped me figure out what I needed.)

My pal Aaron ran down an on-line forum where a guy posted pictures of his radio installation: by looking at those, I was able to confirm that the parts numbers that Best Buy provided me were correct. (The wiring harness is available because it's the very same as the one in a 2008 Accord - which makes it a perfect example of how these options move down-market after a few years.) I ordered the wiring harness and the antenna connector on-line; went to Walmart and bought a Sony head-end with radio/cd/ usb connector.

- Sony receiver: $79 + tax = $85.32.
(Which is sort of astonishingly cheap: 4ch x 50W, AM/FM/CD/ USB/aux)
- Wiring harness: $16 delivered
- Ant. connector: $22 delivered
- A bit of heatshrink and solder
...for a total of just about $125 - say, about $675 less than letting the dealer do it, a saving of fully $11/month on the car payment. That's a total saving of more than two car payments, 1/27 of the entire cost of the car.

I spent a very pleasant hour one recent Saturday afternoon (Oct. 8) soldering up the new wiring harness. So it took me 38 days to assemble the elements for this job, mostly because I couldn't believe that parts for such a common car weren't yet for sale SOMEWHERE, o I kept looking in ever-more-improbable places. (It also took me a few minutes to locate the right toolbox, the one with the soldering gear....)

Now I have a car stereo that's at least electrically connected - I'll mechanically finish the installation when those parts are available in the spring. (Probably another $25-40.) Right now, it's rattling around loose in the dash, propped up on some scrap wood. The Youngest Member and I took a lovely Sunday drive up to Curtis Lumber to shop their 'exotic wood' department, and came home with a $1 scrap of cherry to mask the opening in the dash.

The stock speakers aren't bad at all. The 21st century receiver has a basket full of annoyances - multiple menus, unlabeled controls, arbitrary and unmute-able beeps, etc. But despite that, it's a joy having a CD player / iPod player in the car. My family minivan has had a CD player since 2002; but my commuter cars haven't, not until now, in the year 2011.

Our Story Thus Far III

III. Buying the Car

Was relatively painless. It had taken me a month or so of shopping to get serious, a while longer to email Honda to ask for their help in finding a stripper, and then a couple weeks for it to come in.

For the first time in my life, I didn't even bother to drive the thing beforehand, figuring that the ninth-generation Civic could offer me no surprises, certainly no surprises that would be a dealbreaker. As the Death Car shows, I'm reasonably accepting in what I can accommodate myself to driving. So, why even bother with the test-drive ritual?

The salesman was somewhat bemused by my car and by my deal: he noted that the CUSTOMER is allowed to call Honda and request a specific configuration of car, but the dealership is supposed to take what they're allocated.

They DID try to sell me a dealer-installed radio: $730, plus sales tax, plus financing. That was nearly 5% of the price of the car. I passed on that chance.

(ProTip: you can spot the DX at a hundred paces because the cheap version comes only in silver, and it has cheap black-plastic doorhandles; every other Civic on the road has door handles that match the paint job. And we quickly learned that a "four-door compact sedan in silver gray" is just about the most anonymous car on the road. It's like every tenth car matches this description.)

The deal itself was only a nominal 2% off sticker - but the sticker price was just about 15% below the MSRP of the standard LX version that they wanted me to buy, so I'm happy enough. Honda offered 0.9% / 60-month financing: a total cost of ~$410 for the loan, spread over five years. That's only about 27¢/day for the loan. Even my Credit Union was at 2.75%, fully a thousand bucks more. My payment is only $303.51. I see 4-year-old used Civics being sold for more than I paid. (Just for the record, I should look up the sticker prices of the top-end Civic, and of the hybrid Civic. Later: The top Civic (EX-L with Sat. Nav.) is a remarkable $24,225; the Hybrid is $24,050, and comes only with a CVT, and gets 44/44/44 mpg. Oh, and there's a 4dr Si for $24,675.)

Now I'm trying to think of something interesting to do with the money I saved. (Something more interesting than buying fuel oil for the winter, anyway....)

Our Story Thus Far II

Part II. The email to Honda

In a flight of optimism, back in early July I had filled out Honda's "on-line quote generator", and asked the five local Honda dealers for a price on a stripped Civic. I learned that using the online quote requestor does nothing except to give their sales weasels your contact information and an excuse to annoy you.

Four of them ignored my request and tried to up-sell me on the standard-issue Civic. The stripper is $16750; the standard LX is $18,625 - but you'd have to special-order even that, as they all come through as $19,425 AT versions. That's fully $2675 more - $2889 with tax.

As in: "Pretty soon, you're talking real money."

Keeler Motors actually quoted me a price on the car I wanted. $16,275 on a $16,575 5-sp 4-door DX.

So I went in to talk to them - and they said that they could ORDER me one for fall delivery, call it three months: but only IF I gave them a $500 deposit. (And I would want to do this, why, exactly?)

So I went home somewhat dissatisfied; and, after a few days, I emailed Honda's VP of North American Sales and asked if HE could find me a Civic DX.
I was stunned when he replied almost immediately, asking for details. He basically told me "we're putting our best men on it. Our best men."

And somewhat to my surprise, twelve days later, he came up with a car: I got a somewhat bemused call from Keeler, that they had a car arrive with MY name on it. Built in Indiana, and re-directed from a Honda dealer in New Hampshire. By bypassing the local dealers, I got the car I wanted.

Our Story Thus Far (Adventures with the New Car)

0. The End of The Death Car (see previous post). We came back from Cape Cod in time to give away the old Civic and turn in the plates.

I. Shopping for the new Civic
So, back in the spring of 2011 - recognizing that my 1991 Civic was becoming untenable - I started tuning in to the new-car market, and noticed that the 2012 Civic was already for sale, spotting it up at Mohawk Honda as early as April. By the time I was seriously shopping in the summertime, their initial allotment of 30-40 Civics was already gone.

I looked at the Smart Car, drove the new Fiat 500, drove a Mazda 3 (and Mazda PAID me $25 to do so...); considered the Fit, the Verso, a few others - including a 2006 $9000 Scion B - but determined that what I really wanted was the stripped Honda Civic.

Only to find that nobody would sell one to me. Rensselaer Honda explicitly told me that "We CANNOT sell a car in this market without air conditioning." Which makes me wonder: exactly how far north do you have to go before A/C isn't considered mandatory? Yes, we get a bit of hot and muggy weather here, but It hits 90F here on all of eight afternoons a year. Eight days, and that calls for A/C? Americans are wimps.

I don't much like or need A/C - and, at least until my Miata finally dies - this car is meant to be primarily a winter beater. In theory, at least, a winter beater should NEVER need A/C.

And the step from the stripped DX to the standard-equipment LX is at least $2000.
Honda asks $800 for an automatic transmission, too.
So the step up to go from from a stripped 5-speed DX to the standard-issue LX with A/C and an automatic transmission is fully $3000. (Maggie's first Civic was only $3400.) And as my father pointed out: "The parts you don't buy will never fail."

On its 20th birthday, the Death Car's registration expired -
and so rather than renew it - and buy new plates - instead, I took it off the road.
Which left us without a spare car. Which isn't a real problem, except my Miata is now solely a fair-weather driver, and the family minivan is the least reliable car I've ever owned. It was time to buy a replacement for the Death Car.

". . . fifteen seconds, MacGyver!"

I've already blogged about The Death Car: I have an old Civic Wagon that I keep on the road as my winter beater. I'm trying to stretch another season or two out of it.

The rear bumper is held on with plastic clips. But the sheet metal that these clips pop in to is rotting away, so the right side of the bumper is waving in the breeze - and now, the unsupported weight of the bumper is beginning to unzip the anchors along the top of it, popping them out from the right side to the left, as each clip in turn is forced to bear more weight.

So when I got to work on Friday and parked the car, I realized that the bumper is distinctly falling off the car. This is not good.

A quick inventory showed that I had a Swiss Army 'Classic' in my pocket, and a desk in my office that was chock-full of paperclips. It was the matter of a moment to take my pocket knife, punch a hole in the plastic bumper, and twist a paperclip through to hold the bumper on to the car until I could drive home and make a slightly more permanent repair.

It worked.

Saturday, I went out with a drill and put a few more holes in the bumper, and attached it to the car more firmly with several nylon cable-ties. Two minutes with a drill and a nickel's worth of ties and I'm good to go.

It's just rude to have major car-parts fall off your vehicle and inconvenience innocent bystanders...


Coda: I was telling this story around the watercooler at my office, and co-worker noted:

My brother who lives in Arizona tells me that a campesinio will pay a
coyote up to $5,000 to bring him into the United States, where he can find work and not have to drive a car like that.