Hi all,
Title says it all. I bought my car today. Been looking online for couple months & test driving seriously looking for the last 3 weeks or so & today its finally mine
Saw a lot of cars, read lots of posts, articles & blogs. Huge thank you to all of you who take your time to give out so much info that has helped me from jumping in too fast & not looking at all the right things when making this purchase. especially this forum, mike focke & his blog & pedros blog. Thanks to this information I knew how to talk to the sellers & mechanics, what questions to ask, what to look for & caused me to spend more than I originally planned (but will save me thousands over the next several years)
If you read my test drive notes post from a few weeks ago I started out looking at several brand roadsters & quickly narrowed it down to the 986 boxster. (I never did get around to test driving that BMW Z4)
At this point I got a bit bogged down with concerns about the porsche, including IMS issues, whether or not low mileage cars may be problematic, not having service records, which year is best, base vs S (because the first S I drove was a tiptronic & I couldn't feel a performance advantage over base) I also had difficulty finding a nice condition car that had all the records locally. Over the last couple weeks I drove about 8 local boxsters ranging in price from $7,000-$17,000 then expanded my search out nationally, looking at literally hundreds of cars. By this Monday I had narrowed it down to 10 cars all over the country & made my calls, a few had sold, a couple I didn't like the vibe of the dealer. I explaining to the dealers that the process I planned on pursuing was to come to a preliminary agreement on price but it would be dependent on a PPI by a local specialist, all the dealers I spoke to said the inspection was fine & they had no problem with that, but almost none of them would follow up or return my calls after that?? Finally after days of calls, examining photos & carfaxes I made a deal on a car, found a mechanic & in the couple hours before the PPI appointment they tell me they sold the car locally & cancelled my deal. All in all I ended up negotiating on 6 different cars, none of which panned out. Then I came across one that had all its records including IMS replacement, the car looked clean & it all went smoothly from there, dealer agreed to PPI, transported the car there & back for me. The independent porsche mechanic gave me a thorough inspection & told me the car is in excellent cosmetic condition, mechanically & electrically sound. I need to do a few things (brake rotors soon, wiper blades now & oil pan gasket is seeping) nothing else needed.
The point of this long story is to have patience there are lots of cars out there & If one doesn't come together the next one will & you may just be better off with it in the end. I believe that by telling sellers I intended to have the car thoroughly inspected by a porsche specialist has filtered out those who didn't really have confidence in the quality of what they were offering. I mean why else would a used car salesman not call back someone with a hard offer?
My new car is an all black '04 "S" manual w/88k & excellent condition. Its being shipped out of Texas tomorrow & I should have it Monday. How awesome is that!
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