We knew with Reed coming home for 10 days for Thanksgiving break that juggling everyone's car needs would be tough. Amy feels very strongly that she should have access to a car every day so she can drive a couple friends to school, drive them all home again after rehearsals, and of course drive to work at Hallmark (fair enough). Reed had signed up for some jobs with Woofie's. Tod drives to work every day. I like to leave the house in farther than a 2-mile walking radius. So we started shopping for a fourth vehicle.
I'll start by saying this is a terrible time to buy a car. With supply chain issues caused by the pandemic, new cars are hard to come by and sold at a premium, so used cars are in tremendous demand. I scoured the internet searching for suitable cars for Reed, and eventually went to the local Honda dealer to look at a few of them. Saw a couple of decent options for around $20K. Then the sales guy said hey this Honda Civic is above your price range, but it's a 2022 with about 2K miles on it (he said it'd been used as a loaner for people whose cars were being serviced). So it's basically a brand new car, without the $4K additional premium that's being added to the cost of new cars these days. It's a basic model (sadly...no heated seats or sun roof!) of what should be a very safe, reliable car – we are viewing it as an investment (is this a delusion? maybe!). Though it seems kind of crazy to buy a basically brand new car for a 19 year old, that's what we did. Our thought is that it will be his car for many years to come, and will allow him to have no car payment when he graduates college, and he'll have reliable transportation for quite some time. Reed was grateful and happy to have his own transportation without having to bicker with Amy for access to the Cube, but in typical Reed fashion he didn't want to be part of the search process and didn't seem particularly jazzed about the fact that he had a brand new car. He just takes things as they come. I suppose that serves him well.
On Thanksgiving, when we'd had the car for only six days, Reed decided he'd drive to Wanda's house for Thanksgiving dinner separately so he could stop by Aly's apartment to take care of her cat while she was away in Florida. In hindsight, really wish we'd gone together. On the way home, we didn't even make it out of Herndon before we saw blue flashing lights behind us, and watched as Reed got pulled over. He ran a red light (he says it only turned red as he passed underneath it). We pulled over nearby and Tod walked over near the car to be there for moral support. We all hoped he'd bet let off with a warning. No such luck. It's a $170 ticket, and it's not going to be pretty once that hits our insurance. (We will be looking for a driver improvement class to try to help defray these penalties.) I'd ridden with him in the new car a couple times before this happened and I told him he needed to temper that lead foot he seemed to have developed – I sincerely hope that this will truly be a lesson learned and Reed will drive more slowly and carefully from here on out.
No comments:
Post a Comment