Hopefully our mechanic can figure out why my wife's 2004 Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder GTS is overheating, I for sure cannot. If not, we're in a pickle. Not only do we loathe car shopping, but we have no idea what we'd even like to get. In an attempt to combine practicality and performance, I thought a Saturday afternoon kicking the tires on this 2017 Toyota Camry XSE would be time well spent.
Granted, Janet, my wife, wasn't thrilled with the possibility of going from her sporty, little Eclipse to what is a big grocery getter, but car guy here, my thought was she'd fall in love with the way it rode and handled and how feature rich it was for the money. Although to make $18,500 work for an eight- going on nine-year-old, 75,000-mile Camary would require some mental gymnastics for me let alone Janet.
Things went south immediately as our salesperson swung the car around for our test drive. Turned out they had mistakenly listed the car in Cars.com an X-S-E when it was an X-L-E. Big difference. The XLE is a "luxury" car, the XSE is supposedly as close to a BMW like sports sedan as a Camry could be. I let our very nice although somewhat robotic salesperson know that I wouldn't have driven the better part of an hour for a Camry XLE; not his fault of course but he wasn't the first used car salesman to glaze over when they realize they were dealing with a car nerd.
We agreed to a spin anyway but not before we noticed the car had a number of scratches on it, some fairly deep. That and it was filthy. Best was, our sales guy came with us on the test drive. So much for turning I-77 into my personal Autobahn.
The car started and ran fine; it has the same monster V-6 that's in my 2009 Toyota RAV4 so it galloped along strongly. The air blew cold, the power driver's seat had plenty of adjustment and the steering column tilted and telescoped so I could get comfy. It was packed with all the latest techno doo-dads that our Eclipse and RAV4 do not have; uou have no idea what a novelty a backup camera still is to us. The looks we get from salespeople when we get goofy over them makes us feel like we're Amish who escaped the compound.
My issue with the car, aside from its Walter Mitty meets Ziggy sheet metal, was its handling which was just shy feeling as though I was driving bathtub half full of water. That and the brakes were surprisingly not up to modern snuff. I give Toyota hall passes on just about anything I construe as "questionable", but I wondered if there was something wrong with the brakes on this car. Janet refused to drive what she referred to as something her grandparents would own.
I didn't mince words letting our sales guy sitting out back we would not be buying this car. Still, back at the dealership, he dragged us through the proverbial dog and pony show of sitting us down and discussing our "needs". When he fired up the dealership website to do a search of what we might want, I knew it was going to be twenty- to thirty-minutes before we got our butts out of there.
Then the way-too-young-to-be-the-manager-guy came over, I guess, to inquire why we wouldn't be buying this car. He explained their "forever warranty" program to us, as if I'd buy a car based solely on a warranty that I had to pay extra for. You know how that goes, you pay a small fortune up front for what was sold to you as a comprehensive warranty when in fact it's not. After you arm wrestle with the third-party warranty company over coverage, you pay a $500 deductible. That's if you're lucky that when you need the warranty, the company backing it is still in business.
We scooted out of there and hot-tailed it to our next appointment which went no better. Well, I did find that 1981 Corvette I blogged about but aside from that, that was pretty much a waste of time. Detailed blog on that experience upcoming.
PS - the dealership updated the ad for the car we test drove making it an XLE.
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