Got the new car coming

We’ve already settled with GEICO, a surprisingly hassle-free process. I guess it could be said that rather than learning any new lessons about the fragility of life or suddenly sprouting a new appreciation for the people and things around me, I’ve managed to learn that my insurance company is pretty good. That’s not nothing.

So we picked out another Mazda5 and ordered it. It’ll arrive this weekend; I’ll believe it when I see it, and I probably will see it. We’d just paid off the last one, so going back into debt is about as attractive as it sounds – we had just over 20k miles on the last one, maybe 24, so there was some life left in it and we could have lived car-payment free for a while. Oh, well. Anyway, the color we had before is no longer available – not enough weird-green enthusiasts out there, so we had to pick the next-weirdest color – and if you get any options at all, they force you away from a manual transmission so we chose an automatic model with hesitation. So it’s not exactly the same car, but there have only been minor tweaks since we first bought ours as far as the things we loved; flexible seating, great cargo space, handling, and the overall safety structure. After seeing how the last one protected me and how every single passenger area was surprisingly intact, we figured we’d stick with something battle tested. When we were having the worst problems with our pickup, we were considering trading it off and getting a second one. We were half joking, but half not, so we’re happy that the new one will be enough different to feel new, and enough the same that we can pick up enjoying it where we left off.

The new car will have leather; the last one seemed to have almost velcro-like qualities in attracting crumbs and dirt, and my daughter has less than total recall when it comes to remembering things like “don’t put your feet on the seats,” so something that’s ostensibly wipeable and doesn’t soak up V8 Splash ought to be good. I want to get some kind of cargo liner for it for when the seats are folded and I’m moving instruments or something, shouldn’t be a problem. The new models all come with window tint; I’m not sure how they pulled it off, I understood that in the US, passenger cars weren’t allowed, and the Mazda5 was classified as a passenger car even though it looks like a minivan. But I haven’t wondered enough to actually look anything up; window tint is legal in New Mexico, and we’d been talking about doing it anyway.

The rear seats now get their own climate control vents; one of my few complaints about the last car was that the A/C and heat were basically for the front seat, and anyone else got Reagonomic cooling and heating – it would eventually “trickle down” to them. When you’re driving 70 miles with a 3 year old who says “I’m too hot” every 18 seconds until passing out from heat, it makes you think thoughts like, “I’d sure like for that to stop,” and “I wonder if there’s a way to make the back seats cooler more quickly.” We were apparently not the only ones to experience this, and Mazda apparantly listened. In the US, the Mazda5 has been available since the 2006 model year, so that means they responded pretty quickly if they’d already updated it for the 2008 model year.

I remain pleased with Mazda. Mazda doesn’t seem to elicit the same kind of loyalty that Toyota or Honda do, but I’ve got no complaints. Little things help that impression; after the first year of ownership, they sent us a little gift box that said, “We hope you’re still happy with your car, and to help keep you that way, we’ve sent you some touch-up paint in your car’s color to take care of any little scratches you may have picked up.” Something to that effect. It’s not the biggest deal in the world, but it left an impression on me. The dealership experience has been solid; I never cared about that aspect before I’d gone through the Dodge experience with our pickup, and it’s clear how terrible it can be, so the fact that the experience at our Mazda dealership is pretty transparent has a great deal of meaning now.

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