Auto Purchase (1)

Nothing could ever be more challenging than trying to buy a new car in the bay area. Since my return to Berkeley after graduation, Gang and I have been planning to buy a new car, in replacement of the old Nissan Altima 1996 which we have been using since 2008. Well, so far it's "planning" only as we have hardly made any progress beyond this stage.

There is an online forum "mitbbs.com" which provides all sorts of information for the Chinese community in the US. I've been visiting it quite frequently recently, the sector of "automobile" particularly, where people share their experiences of choosing auto models and accessories, negotiating prices and filing finance applications. All these posts build up my knowledge of auto purchasing, though many of them could be controversial as debates occur from time to time.

In my psychology class at Princeton, the professor mentioned the dilemma of having too many choices. There was a study (or sth alike) showing people are less capable of making choices when they have 12 different jams to choose from in comparison to 3. Too many choices drive consumers away! This is exactly true when you are facing ten different models of cars with similar appearances, functions,consumer ratings and prices. Some people can make a quick decision because they have strong preferences for a certain producer (e.g. Toyota), or some exclusive functions (e.g. key-less entry or power seat). However, for people like me, who only need a car to shuttle from Place A to B in absence of the public transportation system, it is a disaster to make the choice!

At the beginning, I tried to make a "rational" choice, by listing all the pros and cons of each model and assigning monetary values to each of them. For example, how much do I want to pay for a less ugly appearance that Honda Accord acquires in comparison to Camry? How much do I want to pay for a higher MPG, which of course can be translated into the NPV of gasoline expenditures, with uncertainties of oil prices in the next decade taken into account? And how much do I want to pay for a little bit more room in the back to accommodate a baby seat in the future?

Then I realized I was trying to accomplish a mission impossible. Since all the prices are close to each other, and the uncertainties can be so big (when to have a baby? Predict the oil price in the international market in the ten years?), the beautifully designed spreadsheet did not make much sense. The solution was simple and irrational: I limited the choice to Japanese cars arbitrarily and went to do test-drive in Toyota and Honda dealers in Berkeley. Test-drive helped in the sense that it reassured me of the similarity among all these models. "Which is your favorite?" I asked Gang after the test-drive. He was silent for a while, with that extremely confusing look on his face, "I don't know. The Camry is too high-tech, I'm not comfortable with the keyless start, and there is no handbrake! But I like Prius, it's so green."

I thought we would go for Prius until half an hour later, when Gang read some comments on the difficulties of reselling Prius because of the concerns on its battery. Therefore, after a week, we were back to the beginning.