Car Shopping, Part I

Let me resort to a thinking-through-writing exercise. Also, this post is a shared read-only data for interested stakeholders.

Today, I drove with Mike to Kenny Ross Zelienople to have a look at cars. Took us ~50 min one way.

From what preceded the trip, I learned only two things:
1) I know nothing anyway; it's not worth spending a whole lot of time reading about buying cars without sufficient guidance.
2) Creating a list of car candidates sorted by priority/attractiveness makes no sense because this list would be declarative, whereas I need constructive guidance: what to do and when. Such a list does not support deciding which dealership to go to first. And this is a tough decision since it requires serious time investment.

So, after dropping all the thinking and getting to Kenny Ross, I found out that there is (at least at that dealership) a definite list of to-be-repaired things for every car sold as-is (and that constitutes pretty much 98% of cars that I can/want to afford). This list is a minimum prerequisite for the car to pass the state safety and emission inspections. It is more exigent than just "drives safely" requirement.

The car I wanted to have a look at, Elantra'02 with 153 k miles sold for $4k, turned out to have a long list of to-be-repaired things. Mike helpfully identified the associated cost of $1-1.5k, with a little bit of non-deterministic outcome. Hence, we quickly turned it down as well as a couple of American cars for $4k.

However, there was an interesting Camry'01 103k miles sold for $6k that turned out to be a pretty neat vehicle. It's list of suggested repairs had merely three items: brake pads, one of brake rotors, and the driver's side door handle (still, it's $400-500 worth of repairs) . So we decided to give it a try and took it for a test drive.

Camry, front view.

I ended up not crashing the vehicle during the test drive, but didn't have a lot of attention margin to investigate its behavior. To my fairly limited perception, it ran really smooth. No problems accelerating, turning, or braking.

Camry, rear view.

The car's history discovered that it has been maintained well and only had one owner (formally, two: a driver and a bank). The externals were fine, no rust or any kind of crap. To wrap up, even if I don't do anything else towards getting this Camry, it's a good example of what I can have.

CoBot

On a sidenote, there is a new version of telepresence robot CoBot deployed at MSE program space. Now, guys need to figure out how to write a software platform for it. The new CoBot has more advanced wheel mechanism that allows it to move in any direction with little overhead.

A CoBot dressed in two t-shirts.

The car story continues:

Part 2
Part 3