My wife and I made a decision when she got pregnant with our son. We decided that she would be a stay at home mom until the kids were old enough to be at school all day. Raising the kids that way was more important that the money she would make. The joke was that when she re-entered the (paid) working world, she’d buy me a new car! I don’t remember why or how it started, but neither one of us forgot it.
Fast-forward about 11 years. Our son was getting ready to enter 7th grade and our daughter was going into 2nd. My wife had gotten her certificate as a Certified Nurses Aid and a job at a nursing home about 5 miles from home. She was able to save up about a decent down payment in about 6 months and we were ready to shop for a new car.
We decided that our first choice was a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited. I had purchased a Wrangler in 1989, my first new car. The only options on it were carpeting and a rear seat. I put a good radio in it as soon as I got it. It was a great car, lots of fun on and off road. I drove it down and back to Florida 3 times with no problems. In our early days together, my wife was commuting about 40 miles a day with it and our gas bills were pretty high. When the water pump went we decided to trade it in for something more practical, a Geo Metro.
We decided on the Wrangler Unlimited (getting the four door was my compromise to practicality) not just because we wanted a fun car, but because it really seemed to fit our needs: room for 4 and our stuff for a trip to Rhode Island or Vermont, four-wheel drive for the winters, able to tow a dump trailer or our family’s snowmobiles, and a top that comes off (Well, that last one isn’t really a need, but we’ve loved convertibles since the first Wrangler. We’ve also had 2 Rabbit convertibles). The bad gas mileage wasn’t an issue, due to us both working less than 5 miles from home. We started seriously researching in late summer of 2010.
The Internet must be the best and worst thing to happen to car salespeople ever. With all the information out there, a customer can be as almost as knowledgeable as the people selling the cars, and sometimes more. The customer can also easily be misled and confused by conflicting information. We started our research at the official Jeep website, www.jeep.com. There you can “Build Your Own” Wrangler Unlimited by choosing colors, options etc. We decided on some no-compromise things we wanted on our car: 4 x 4, manual transmission, half-doors, & the factory tow package. At first we were thinking of the Sport S or the Rubicon, later we decided that if we were going to do this, we’d do it right and go with the Rubicon, and also added heated seats and the upgraded radio with navigation and a built-in hard drive. Our first choice for color was white.
I emailed 2 local dealers, one right in our town and one about 30 minutes away (the dealer where I had purchased my first Wrangler). The local salesman convinced us he’d search the world until he found our car, the other dealer said there weren’t any like that around and that they could order us a 2011 from the factory for 33,000 (I think that was when we were still thinking Sport S instead of Rubicon).
Our optimism got the best of us and we let the local guy look. He found us some with most of our options, but not one with the configuration we wanted. Not only that, but he kept giving us information that conflicted with what we found online and from the other dealer. For example, he told us that getting half doors precluded air conditioning, when in fact it was the fancy climate control (an upgraded a/c that comes with the power package) that was locked out. He also said that white wasn’t going to be a color for 2011, contradicting the information we found in a Chrysler press release on their corporate website. He seemed like a nice enough guy, and didn’t come off as dishonest, but he wasn’t very informed, and he really wanted to sell us a car, even if it didn’t match. Also his sales manager wasn’t very helpful either, telling my wife she’d get a better deal if she brought him a pie! Our experiences with this dealer, combined with negative stories from friends about their service department, convinced us to look somewhere else.
The third dealer I emailed, less than 15 miles from our house, gave us a good feeling right away. The saleswoman emailed us right back with information about ordering a 2011 Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon (the longer this process took, the more Jeep we decided to get). Through just a few emails we were able to get a good price, and she assured us that we could get exactly the car we wanted (she “built” it with her sales manager on their computer). One day after work the four of us went to the dealer to meet the saleswoman and her manager. They were both very nice and no pressure. But when the manager went to “build” the car on the computer for us, the half doors were not an option!
All through this I was spending what little free time I have online, looking for more information, building our car on different website, comparing prices, and just looking at pictures.
The manager assured us that this wasn’t a problem, that things were removed from time to time due to supplier issues. He said the half doors were available a couple days earlier (he showed us a print out of the car he built for us) and that they should be available again. Neither one of them tried to talk us into getting the full doors, or making any compromises. We left with the understanding that they would contact us as soon as the half doors made an appearance on their ordering page again.
After a few days had passed, I emailed our saleswoman and asked her if she had any more info. She said that the manager’s contact had assured them that the half doors would be available again, that they weren’t “built out”, meaning no longer being made. I asked if we could go ahead and plan the order, with the understanding that it would be put in as soon as the half doors were available. She said they could do that and that she thought it was a good idea. We kept asking her to reassure us that if the car didn’t come in as ordered, we wouldn’t have to take it, which she did.
On September 25th we went down and signed the paperwork, and gave them a $500 deposit. our saleswoman wrote on the receipt that if the car didn’t come in as order, we wouldn’t have to take delivery. She assured us (again) that that was very unlikely, but if it did, we’d get our deposit back also. There was some relief that we had reached that point, but not knowing the timeline was frustrating.
At this point we're waiting for the order to go in. I've started this blog to give me an outlet for my impatience. Maybe there are others out there in a similar situation and reading this will give them something to pass the time. I hope it all works out!
