Newly Minted Yaris driver

[kameele]

Greetings to all the Yaris folks,

I am now the proud driver of a 2009 Zephyr Blue Metallic sedan as part of a Cash for Clunkers deal. I say driver because my wife was the owner of record of the 1993 Voyager we gave up to get it. She’s very happy to remind me of that, but since I drive 100 miles a day, it makes a little more sense for me to have it. She gets the Subaru Outback that I’ve been using.

I started out looking at Corollas, but found I couldn’t get a manual with any power options without going into the S and out of my price range. A dealer south of Boston had advertized a couple of Corollas and a couple of Yarii as specials, so when I went to look the Corollas were already gone, but a Yaris was still available. It was a manual with the power package, just like I wanted. Took it out for a drive and loved it. On special for $11,888—would have been really cheap with the $4500 off. I got back and sat down with the sales guy to start the C for C’s paperwork—he took some of my stuff to check to make sure the van qualified and came back to tell me that someone had phoned in a deposit on the car WHILE we were on the drive and it was no longer available! WTF? Then the sales manager came out to offer me another Yaris that wasn’t on sale—a 2008 with 3000 miles for $15K. And that was the only thing that they (supposedly) had to offer. Needless to say, it wasn’t too hard to turn down that gracious offer.

At this point I was determined to get a Yaris, but discovered that they were rather hard to come by in stock around Boston. Finally found the one I got and went to visit the dealer. I had the consumer reports pricing guide, so I knew that there was not a lot of play between dealer cost and list (roughly $900 by my calculations). I knew the c for c was running out quickly and there weren’t many of these around so not great negotiating position. I got it down almost $400 and decided I’d rather leave $500 on the table than loose the $4500.

I’ve been lurking here since I made the offer and enjoying all the information available. I don’t think there’s likely a lot of mods in my future, but it’s nice to dream.