Buying the car

After I moved to German I have had to realize, that I now have a totally different opinion about my car. Cars in Germany are simply to cheap and there are way to many used cars on the marked. The result is, that a car which is 7 or 8 years old is considered old, done and finished. My good old Honda Accord (Acura TSX) from 2007 had this critical age and had only about 172.000 Km on the counter. If I wanted to sell this car it was about last chance. The alternative would be to drive the car another 8 years or till it would fall apart.

The new edition of the model came in 2008/9 and in 2014 it was about the end of this model. During spring 2014 I had noticed, that the price of the last models went down. Huge discounts were just normal. Furthermore they were filled with extras. Things just got better and better. In July 2014 it was time. The last few Accords/TSXs with a lot of extras were on the marked for less than 20.000,- Euro. I had to investigate this further. Even my girlfriend who normally is against anythings which has to do with cars was trying to convince me, that I should change the car. This was a situation which I had to use to the full extend.

Honda Heinen

Here where I live there is just one Honda dealer. This dealer is represented 6 times in this area. I printed all their offers from their homepage and went to the local store. Car dealers are the same all over the world. There wasn't anyone from the sales department around. I used the time to check the used cars standing around to find out what the old car could be worth. I figured out that Ihad to be an extremely good negotiater if I were to get 5.000,- Euro for the old one. But 5.000,- Euro would be my initial goal.

Afer about half an hour we finally managed to find one from the sales department. I had to act quite a bit not to show my interest. I started by stating that I couldn't figure out the prices - which wasn't all that wrong. I showed my prints and I was told that the cheapest offer was the right one. So far so good. I then explained that the offer was interesting, but price alone wasn't selling the car. I need the car to transport me and my girlfriends diving equipment, and if this didn't fit in the back of the car, I'd continue driving the old Accord/TSX. I came with further arguments just to let him know that he had to come with an offer I simply couldn't resist if we were to have a deal.

He then asked what I wanted for my old car. I said that I'd be very disappointed if I were to receive less than 5.000,- Euro. He then offered me 3.800,- which made me very silent for a very long time. This made him raise the price to 4.000,-. Then he reduced the price for the new car with another 800,- Euro so theoretically I received 4.800,- Euro for my old car. I asked for an offer in writing and asked for 4 days to consider this investment.

Final test

4 days later we drove back to the dealer. The car was filled with diving gear. We tryed out the new Accord/TSX and it did fit. Not as nicely as in the old, but it will work out. The boot/trunk is not designed as well as in the old one and definitively not as well as in a Honda Civic ES from 2001. But I was running low on arguments not to buy and a contract was made. I had to raise 16.239,- Euro for the new car including a few extras. The first edition of the contract did have quite a lot of errors which was anything but satisfactory.

• According to contract the color would be Black and I wanted"Alabaster Silver".
• According to contract the new car would be a used car. It turned out that the dealer had made a huge amount of mistakes in their own registrations of the car. It turned out that the car had been manufactured 4 month earlier.

The contract was corrected and after a lot of signatures it was time to shake hands on the deal. This was the time to let the bomb fall. In the offer on their Homepage it was written that the car would be delivered with a TV set and suitcases. The dealer had not seen this error and of course said that it was an error. 10 month later this error wasn't removed from their homepage, but we never received neither TV nor suitcases. Disappointing.

I have never bought a car with so few emotions. I did not even make a testdrive. We sat in the car for about 5 minutes and agreed that we could live with it as it was. As already said - cars in Germany are to cheap. There isn't more to say about that.

Getting the car

Friday the 8. August 2014 was the day where I was to pick up the car. License plates and paperwork had to be made on the morning. The office closed at 12:30. Quite a few things had to be made, so I was in a kind of hurry. We managed to get it all done. We could therefore drive to the dealer shortly after 12:00.

The dealer made a short demonstration of the car. Most of what he told turned later out to be wrong. The plates were mounted and it was time to get out of the showroom. The dealer offered to drive the first feet which I wasn't against as the number of corners inside that building was way beyond what I liked. There was just one thing... The car couldn't start. The battery was low on power. It simply wasn't the dealers day. He managed to get the car running, and we went on a trip to charge the battery. Luckily the tank was 1/3 full, so we managed to charge the battery before we had to turn off the engine to fuel the car.

This was how I became an owner of a Honda Accord / Acura TSX 2.0 in 2014