Catch more bees with honey

Posted on | July 6, 2006 | 6 Comments

The farewells continue

I can safely say I know a lot more about the used car market today than I did a month ago. The upshot of this is that I think I got a bargain selling my car this morning for 100 bucks, not the 70 I was offered, or the thousand that the optimistic mobile mechanic suggested a while back. I just can’t believe I went to the trouble of washing the damn thing before making the calls, given that its fate now lies in the recycling plant. One thing I did know already was how hard it is to get advice from people who don’t understand what it’s like to live on your own, without any family support or heaps of mates who have the time or the interest – let alone the wheels – to take you places so you can test drive and research your next purchase. I have been entertaining the thought that not having a car in these oil mad times is a badge of honour as a left-leaning academic type. I have similarly been entertaining the thought that if I don’t get a car with air-con soon, Brisbane is going to get increasingly claustrophobic and depressing for moi.

To get to my title: when I called some car removalists yesterday, reconciled to the fact that no one will buy a 1990 sedan with two gears, the first guy offered me $100, talking over my attempts to explain what had happened to the car and arrogantly diagnosing that ‘no one else will give you any more than that’. On the second call, the nicer guy patiently explained that if I had alloy wheels then maybe the car would be worth more than $30. When I told him the wheels were old, dusty and rusty, with no hubcaps either, he was still pleasant in tone when I asked him to come get it anyway. I told him just now that I had asked him to come even though he wasn’t going to pay me as much as someone else, because the other person was rude. And even though he was going to offer me more than he quoted on the phone anyway, he gave me the $100 I asked for. He even listened to my boring story about how the car had moved state with me twice and so had all these extra associations, and asked what it was like living in Sydney. I’m sure that financially there might have been a better solution to my car problem (I will get more for cashing in the registration than for the car itself) but the emotion and energy involved was affecting my confidence and concentration. And I actually feel like the process had a happy ending, because the car went to someone who seemed like a nice human being.

I’ve been thinking a lot about ethics lately. Not only because I have an overdue book review for this, or because ‘cultural studies – ethics of’ turned out to be one of the longest entries in my now finally finished book index (favourite entry: ‘American Dream – baby boomers’ relationship to’). It’s also because I grew up with this guy, and I’ve been a little bit unsettled by what’s happened to him. I haven’t known how to react, save from maybe moving my bank account from his former employer (but surely all banks are as bad as each other? I hestitate). Talking to my brother about it the other night I was surprised to find out that the two of them had never really gotten along, and that it was because of some of the same characteristics that have led to the present situation. It made me realise that I was too young (and had too much of a country girl crush on the guy in question) to know what he was really like. But on another level, it made me wonder whether our personalities are already established much earlier than we think. Maybe growing up is actually about learning how to find and keep and cherish the person you’ve always been, but without the original reference points.

PS I spent some of the $100 on drycleaning.

PPS I learned the expression ‘Catch more bees with honey’ from another friend I grew up with, who also works for a bank on a ludicrously high salary.

Category: Randoms

Comments

6 Responses to “Catch more bees with honey”

  1. glen
    July 18th, 2006 @ 2:20 am

    hmmm, that is shithouse you don’t have anyone to help you find a car. do you need help?

    The logisitics thing: You know that dealers (and sometimes sellers, as I found when I bought my car in Sydney) will go out of their way to help a successful, quasi-professional-looking person, ie pick you up from train stations, loan cars for weekend test drives, etc. They would have dollars signs in their eyes.

    On the other hand, if you want some help sussing out the second hand market or want a second (if maybe biased;) opinion on some generic models then send me an email (ie holden astra or vectra are the classic young successful euro styling jobbies that are not my tastes at all). I am doing a phd on car stuff you know! I recommend second-hand camry! Also Mitsubishi currently have some good deals on some well optioned older cars (if you can handle the depreciation of a failing company!!). A couple of my friends in Perth bought a Magna last year after I pointed out to them that they would keep it for 5-7 years and the possible depreciation worked out to be quite fair compared to other, less optioned, more expensive cars. I guess you found out the hard way about depreciation!!! If buying a car then you should be working to minimise running costs (reliability, efficiency, insurance costs, etc) and depreciation.

    stripping it for parts would’ve been the most cost effective way to get rid of it. Front and rear lights alone would go for $10 each, doors 20-30 bucks each, bonnet, interior, etc. you need a yard to do it in. That is why it is a suburban sport;)

    it’ll be towed to a wreckers yard, one of he new ones that have a glorious sign out the front saying “Bring UR own tools” which means they have figured out it is both *cheaper* not to hire ‘breakers’ who ‘break’ the cars down and *fun* for the backyard mechanics to trawl through the yard and find the hard to get bits for much less than dealer spare parts prices.

    my car sitting in storage back home perth shall be broken down and sold in bits if (or when) I sell it (diff, top-end of motor, bottom-end, gearbox, etc).

  2. melgregg
    July 18th, 2006 @ 3:26 pm

    i need all the help i can get glen! i will be in touch. i also need to know about car finance!!

    i have been told that i should be looking for something like a ‘getz’ which is very cheap new or something second hand but still only a couple of years old, maybe an echo? or a mazda something, josh mentioned??

    i understand depreciation now! if only they taught it at school with real life examples.

    i want something small (3 doors), manual or automatic i don’t care, with air/con for the steamy city of bris and enough guts to get me to byron bay and back semi-regularly. that is girl car speak, i am aware. but at least i’m not as ditzy as jackie o in that stupid ad that’s always on during desperate housewives: i would never leave my puppy on the car roof from perving on a guy.

  3. Nick Caldwell
    July 20th, 2006 @ 6:35 pm

    I’m suddenly struck by the sheer amount of hard work that television commercials have to do to re-inforce and police the stereotypically gendered modes of appreciation of cars. I think–in my own little optimistic way–that it’s an attempt to shore up a gendering pattern that is actually beginning to collapse. I don’t give a shit about the inner workings of cars (heh, not to the extent to which I do about computer operating systems) and never have — though I appreciate that knowing how to do that thing with the water level thingy is important. I suspect that the idea of a boy car verses a girl car, or similarly a boy mode of appreciation verses a girl mode is on its way out.

    I don’t know if that makes any sense though. The thought just struck me.

  4. glen
    July 27th, 2006 @ 9:59 pm

    stay away from car finance and get a personal loan. cheaper rates for personal loans! only if you can afford it tho, as you can’t borrow as much. or conversely use some of your “equity, mate” :)

    the hundee getz, hey…!?!? i rented one once, the getz had no gutz, lol… fuckin massive red button or something on the dash too. rofl…

    no, but seriously, I am coming at this with an already refined sense of the car industry. You need to get a general feel for the cars you like, then worry about the things the car needs to do. buying a car is fun, you know? I recommend a subaru with a fat zaust. that’ll impress the engineering boys with blonde bits in their hair. :)

    the car market is broken up into both vertical and horizontal hierachies that are relative to the identity of the buyer. So you have already picked up on the gendering aspect, that is a horizontal hierarchy. Class, status, refinement are all vertical heirarchies. Now, unfortunately, the vertical hierarchies normally do correlate to a better product. However, the relative difference in product does not correlate to a specific price difference.

    so going by the type of vehicle you want (3 door hatchback, air con, auto, a bit of poke):

    There are the top tier models: 1 series BMW, a-class merc, VW, audi, maybe saab (but they were just bought by GM, who owns controlling stake in Fuji Heavy Industries, ie maker of Subaru, and Saabs are going to be remodelled subarus, err), forget those. I would like a 1 series if it was running the old M3 motor. that would be sweet!

    The the range flattens out to a whole bunch of slightly different sectors or clusters that get turned into specific markets. This is where the majority of the horizontal hierarchy work happens (girl over guy cars, etc) I’ll come back to those.

    At the bottom are the cheap runabouts. These are fine for massive companies who buy them for the office share car and do not like their workers. Or they are fine if you are a granny and drives to the shop cause you can’t walk anymore. Or they are fine for hire cars. But to live with one? You realise you do live with a car, it is very much a social relationship. The car can pick you up when you are feeling blue, make you sad, frustrated, or save you. Forget the cheapies.

    This is really sad because in Japan they have a whole range of the wonderful Kei-class cars (think ‘smart car’). They would be really cool. Here we get the drabbest shittiest cheapest things that the companies can bring in. Kei class cars should be getting subsidies from the govt not bloody 4wds.

    OK, the middle terrain. This is a complex space. Again there are micro-hierarchies. Some of the *received* categories are:

    1) organised around place of manufacturer. Japan has the reputation at the moment. Korea is coming along. Forget the US or Australia. China isn’t really in the game yet. European cars are tricky, especially the cars that were once built in Europe and are now built elsewhere, such as the Barina, which until last year I think was actually built in south america. Dealers will obfuscate this by dexcribing cars as “fully imported”, or my favourite “european styling” (oh, fall off the chair laughing). These phrases mean jack shit. Find out where it was actually built, the plant if you can (unlikely, but normally a model will be built only in one city/town), and then do a google.

    2) There is heaps of goss about build quality beyond national contexts including year of manufacturer. So with 850 volvos as my old man discovered there was a two year period where the engine block castings were shit. This is one of the benefits of buying a second hand car; most things that could possibly go wrong that can be located as build or design fault (compared to general wear and tear) would’ve already happened to someone. Check the recall lists.

    3) Alongside the place of manufacturer to differentiate vehicles are terms like ‘sports’ or meaningless jumbles of letters ‘ssv’ or some shit. These terms signal that the manufacturer would like you to believe the vehicle is special. If you find a vehcile that has been ‘optioned up’, given some special name, and is brand new, it means that instead of dropping the actual sales price on the vehicle, they ‘add value’ to it. If they just dropped the actual sales price it would damage resale value and severely damage the business manufacturers have going with fleet sales. The most blatant of these is the ‘cash back’ mechanism. Thisn is good when it comes to the second hand car market because you can often pickup these optioned models for not much more than an unoptioned one.

    ok, there is a difference between a falcon and fairmont, they are different models (built on the same body), but there are optioned up versions of the falcon, the ‘s-pac’ for example. those are the sort of car I am referring to.

    So think japanese with a 1.8 or 2 litre motor, air con, with as many options as possible. Stay a3way from metallic paint, fixing it is killer. man or auto?

    So there are a narrow set of manufacturers: Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, Honda.

    I think Josh may have mentioned a Mazda 3? There is an SP23 model that has the bigger motor from the larger Mazda 6. sweet.

    The Honda Jazz may be a good car if you could find the right one, it is pretty small tho! mid-1990s civics are a favourite amongst the largely asian performance car enthusiasm. I interviw a dude who swapped a motor in his back yard with his two brothers. I can’t remember the model lettering of the vehicle. I went out with a girl for a few years who originally had a civic, it was a very nice car, very much want you want I think.

    Toyota is well known for producing boring cars that are cheap to run and never break down, so that is awesome.

    Nissan is only worth a look in if you want to become a drifter. My little sister has a pulsar auto, no gutz. Auto is really a bad option for these little cars. one of my friends has a citreon c2 with some speccy variable transmission thing, yep, gutless. Speccy, good for showing peeps in a car park, but gutless. Oh, ‘gutless’ is an absence of torque, torque is what you feel when you accelerate, the ‘grunt’.

    Hmm, that is about it from me I think, well at least until you narrow your tastes down a bit.

    check redbook.com.au do googles on “make + model + year + [problem]” so instead of probelm have ‘recall’.

    car sales sites:

    http://carpoint.ninemsn.com.au/

    http://www.carsales.com.au/

  5. glen
    July 27th, 2006 @ 10:08 pm

    whoops, bloody accidently submitted!!!:

    http://www.drive.com.au/homepage.aspx

    http://carsguide.news.com.au/

    http://www.trading-post.com.au/

    trading post is good but it is the WORST INTERFACE EVAAAA!!!! whoever designed thast site should be shot.

    these websotes are good to get a feel for the industry and what’s available. so is

    ebay.com.au

    ebay is totally awesome for buying cars as they often go for cheaper then what they are worth. limited range tho.

    once you get a feel for the sort of car you want I will pass on some url’s to enthusiast forums that normally have the best (ie well looked after) cars, and sometimes the worst (ie thrashed). yes all models of car have their own forums with for sale sections, heaps of forums it is crazy…

  6. glen
    August 3rd, 2006 @ 10:22 pm

    oh, and buy what is called the “Dog and Lemon Guide” [seriously] from your local newsagent. it should be about $20 and it is a phone-book sized compendium of reviews of all vehicles over the last 20 years. I bought the 2004 issue cause it had an essay by Germaine Greer(!!!) in it called “Women & Cars”.

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