If you had about $50K to piss away....

[Perfectlap]

Yeah since its a bonus and you're not selling your current Pcar, I was going to suggest investing it like LB says. But this is not an investors market yet, definitely a traders market.
The exception being that I was going to suggest buying gold (GLD or IAU) and T-bills until the market starts to pull back up instead of continuing to search for lower and lower bottoms. Once we see a recovery in the stock market (which will probably come well before an economic recovery--house prices going up, unemployment going down) get out of gold and bonds slowly and get back into stocks like energy, tech and bio tech. You'd probably miss the first 10-20% of the recovery with this strategy but if you are speculating on 100% to 200% return then you aren't missing out much, you just have to pay attention. We had a nearly 30% pull back after the Presidents inauguration in financials like Bank of America and Chase but that disappeared quickly....there's just still too much bad news yet to come like we saw with AIG this week. anyhooo.....

But if you're going to throw away money at a car, this might be the best time to be a buyer. Just drive a very very hard bargain. Like "your life depends on it" hard bargaining. That car will be worth way less in 12 months, which is how long I think it will be --at least-- before people start getting comfortable with loans again.
It's a tough call. Depends how much you have in your retirement already.