Well, that was a surprise. Amazing what a dealership can get done when they want your business.

After the cagey approach I had from the Mini dealer I spoke to in Mountain View, I was quite disheartened about the prospect of easily buying a car in America with no US credit history.

Enter the Chrysler/Jeep/Dodge dealership in Sunnyvale. I was out and about flathunting on Sunday when I drove past it, and thought I’d just drop in for a quick look at what they had on offer.

Three hours, one test-drive and a damn good salesman with the voice of Samuel L Jackson, the approximate demeanour of an ex-Navy SEAL (which he claimed to be), the gangster name “Tony B” and the real, strong desire to win my business, and I was signed up.

So that’s goodbye to the concept of driving around in an open-top Mini, and hello to the concept of driving around in an open-top 4.0L V6 Jeep Wrangler!

It’s bright red, great fun to drive even in town traffic, and I’m generally very glad I stopped by the dealership. Here’s the really weird thing (for me): it’s actually an Automatic, a decision I thought I’d never voluntarily make. But having driven around here for a week, I’d come to decide that the constant stopping-and-starting at intersections is just so much easier in an Automatic. Since that’s the bulk of the driving I’ll be doing, it all made sense.

The finance deal isn’t necessarily the best at nearly 10% APR, but for a first-timer with no credit it’s not bad, and I have the next week or so to see if I can find a better deal with a Credit Union or similar. The trick is to ask for an “open contract” on any dealer-provided finance deal, and just see how far you can get them to extend the open period. Dealer/car manufacturer financing seems to actually be quite flexible if you’re persistent about what you want - they’d rather shift the car and make less on the finance deal than lose your business entirely.

So anyway, all I need to do now in theory is make a down-payment on the vehicle, and she’s mine. Unless there are complications, photos should follow in the next couple of days.

And finally, here’s perhaps the best part: I sealed the deal exactly a week after I landed here, to the minute.

Having heard so much about life being impossible without Social Security numbers, accounts being hard to arrange with unfriendly banks and so on, it’s nice to find that (so far) everything in America has been relatively easy to arrange. Well, most things at least…

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005 at 4:46 pm .
It's arbitrarily categorised as being about: 5371 Miles, Thinking.
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There are thousands of articles on this very subject all over the internet. 39% of them are cleverly-disguised attempts to sell you little blue pills, 26% of them lead inevitably to a badly-researched, logically inconsistent Wikipedia article and 5% are written in an ancient Navajo dialect which is only spoken by 2 professors. The remaining 30% are, like this one, of very little interest to anyone besides their original author (and even he's a bit bored by it).