gwax's rumblings

My old 1993 Ford Explorer finally decided to come to an end when it started leak­ing gaso­line at a truly alarm­ing rate (you could see the pud­dles and drip trails). I sold the Explorer, right quick, over Craigslist for the rea­son­able price of $150 (with­out the stereo sys­tem). Then, between my solidly good 2006 tax return and my mother’s offer of sup­port, I set out to pur­chase a new vehi­cle. My new pur­chase was intended to be my first pur­chase of a car in good con­di­tion, to date.

I went to a num­ber of deal­er­ships with a very spe­cific set of min­i­mum require­ments in mind: 4WD/AWD, ABS, >20MPG, seat 5, have room for my stuff. The first vehi­cle that I encoun­tered, which met my require­ments was a Subaru Outback Sport but, upon test dri­ving, the car made a funny sound and really didn’t have much pickup. There turned out to be rel­a­tively few cars that met my stan­dards and seemed decent, namely a few Subarus and some Honda CR-Vs. In the end, the spe­cific car that most caught my inter­est was a 2000 Subaru Legacy GT. The Legacy had 71k miles on it, the clean­est engine that I’d seen, sounded great and felt great dur­ing test dri­ving. I ended up buy­ing that Legacy GT and am, really, quite pleased by my purchase.

I’m very happy to have a new car, espe­cially one as nice as the one that I’ve gotten.

UPDATE: It turns out that the Subaru AWD setup is decid­edly not over­rated when it comes to han­dling snow. We had a bit of a snow­storm – just over a foot – and I had needs that were best served by dri­ving to Target and Rainbow (our local gro­cery chain). There was, as expected, a solid layer of com­pacted snow sit­ting on the roads at the time, which allowed for ade­quate adverse weather han­dling tests. During the few instances when I found myself los­ing con­trol, the loss was min­i­mal and con­trol was regained in an instant. I should also like to note that the ABS com­bined with four disc brakes was quite fan­tas­tic in its stop­ping power. All in all, I am pleased to note that my car meets my adverse weather han­dling requirements.