ford fiesta and other failures

car buying sucks in many ways when money is an object (and remembering a time when money was almost no object brings a whistful smile, but that's another story for another horse of a different rider, or something like that), but car buying is much worse when there are no cars to choose from... take about a sellers market, sheeesh...

so i very well would have bought a ford fiesta se with auto and the 203a option package (just in case any ford dealers are savvy enough to be googling out there) and the blue with black/blue interior would likely have iced it, but there were none to be found in the country, apparently, and in their infinite wisdom to make the extra buck, the very few that were available were packaged for optimal profit for the car seller and not for the buyer...

research showed me that reliability aside (and while that would be a large set of dice to roll, i was ready to take that gamble), the new 2011 fiesta was the best bang for the buck in sub-compacts offering the best gas mileage and best options packages...

while honda and toyota may still have the best reliability and longevity ratings and resale value (though gm has the longest warranty), they've come down in stature in recent years and their cars themselves are no longer ranked in the top few of subcompacts... add to that the fact that their prices have risen above most of the other brands, especially when you compare the option packages... ford is the first manufacturer to offer the good options in the subcompact model and still brings the car in at a price under the bare bones models of the perennially most reliable foreign makers...

the 100,000 mile warranty gm offers almost had me going for the chevy aveo but it ranked fairly low on the scales i reviewed (for instance, using multiple other reports and this methodology) as did many other small cars that were at the top of the rankings for most of the last twenty years...

i decided there was no good reason to compromise on what i felt was the best car package for me for under $20,000 so i am tossing the $2000 i would have put as a down payment on the fiesta into the old cavalier which means no new car (read my lips) for at least a year or two or maybe few since the cavalier has just 82,000 miles on it and that means it should have another few years of low cost after these big repairs are done... as long as aamco does them right, that is...

maybe i'll actually clean and even paint the old flippantly casual automobile now :)