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Minivan Shopping for the Parents of America

Author’s Note: Writing this one as I have mentioned car shopping on Notes a few times. Not pushing it out to the mailing list as I do think it’s probably not that interesting. Will work on the pieces that won in the voting polls this week plus some Trust Assembly pieces, finally.

An Anecdote of my Wife’s Cheapness

Why is there a picture of collagen powder on an article about buying a minivan from Carvana? Well, because it’s difficult to go shopping with my wife and you need to know that first. The best way I could figure to explain that is to give a brief aside about that little plastic cup you see above.

Vital Proteins used to include that plastic cup with every container of collagen powder it sold. It stopped doing so a while ago and updated its packaging, supposedly for environmental reasons, but more likely to save on costs. My wife buys this stuff in bulk when it goes on sale. She waits for the exact moment Costco feels like it has over-ordered and then we end up hauling home eight containers home. That’s why you see the new and old packaging side by side.

Well, one day, I really stepped in it.

I threw away the old container and the cup.

My wife was sick to her stomach. She’d read a post on some deal group she follows that the cup was no longer going to be included in every container. That’s the kind of thing she reads instead of Substack. Monitoring the presence or absence of a free plastic scoop in a collagen powder she buys once every eighteen months is that important to her.

This is what she thinks about instead of the ultimate fate of the universe. We’re very different people in that way.

How could I have done such a thing! Why wasn’t I paying attention to the free plastic cup situation? What were we going to do? I’d thrown the cup away a few days prior and tomorrow was garbage day!

Being a man, I opened up amazon and told her I’d order her a brand new metal cup of the same size. If she needed it right away, I could go to the grocery store.

Problem solved?

No, Dear Reader. No.

It wouldn’t be her perfect plastic cup.

And it would cost over $3.00?!?!?

Being a husband and knowing that my instincts don’t matter on this kind of thing very much, I went out to the garbage as if my time has no value, cleared out the bags from the previous few days into another garbage can I normally use for lawn clippings, and got to digging as if my personal preferences don’t matter at all.

I found the stupid cup, brought it inside, and washed it.

For all that this doesn’t make sense to me in terms of value and reward, this is my wife’s love language and making her happy makes all the sense in the world to me.

Order was restored.

I believe we will have that plastic cup until we die or Vital Proteins goes out of business.

I’ve got a hundred stories like this. I love my wife dearly, but I was not happy to be shopping for a vehicle with a person who has this kind of mindset. She’s a tough customer to please and for a long while kept going back and forth on getting a new vehicle.

I knew she’d only be happy if we basically stole a car from someone, which made me uncomfortable.

Kids are Expensive

Our regular car is a 2006 Prius, which gets great mileage but is super cramped for a family of four. Especially a family of four that plans to one day be a family of five. On our first trip to Costco with the new baby we realized the Prius wasn’t going to work long-term.

The Prius is also old enough that upkeep is starting to be a major investment category. We replaced the hybrid battery not long after our second son was born which was a very harrowing journey home through the Black Hills. While we have plenty of money to deal with emergencies like this, it’s not something we want to deal with when we have two small kids in the car.

My other vehicle is a Chevy Silverado, but I almost never drive it unless I’m hauling something to the dump or going to the lumber store. It’s just not a great family car. Plus, it has terrible fuel efficiency.

I’m not as cheap as my wife, but I also hate that cars are so expensive and generally always a bad deal. The best rule I’ve ever found for car-buying is: buy the most reliable vehicle you can afford and then drive it into the ground.

We determined that we would sell the Prius and buy something with a lot of seating and cargo room. It was time, Dear Reader, to buy a minivan.

The Hunt for an Economical Family Vehicle

We briefly looked at the Tesla Model Y because of the $7.5k tax incentive and special financing but my wife was scared to get to an electric car. My secret reason for wanting one is that I think self-driving is going to take off very soon and my wife has driving anxiety. I follow that news closely and part of me was thinking, “wouldn’t it be nice if I didn’t have to drive the car literally anytime anybody wanted to go somewhere?”

I also figured it might make the car a possibly better financial choice if demand for self-driving capable cars becomes high. However, once my wife got a chance to sit inside one she announced it wouldn’t solve our storage problems and even in the seven-seat configuration it was still too cramped for more kids long-term. Looking at the third row seats, she was absolutely correct.

We both agreed at the outset we wanted a car to last something like the sixteen years or so it will take before our kids are driving themselves. That meant a kid and friend hauler with room for sports equipment. So I said goodbye to the idea of a self-driving car with a possible return on investment.

Next, we looked at the Chrysler Pacifica plug-in hybrid, which also qualified for a federal tax credit and would allow us to get a new model super cheap. I wasn’t worried about after-market value because I’m planning to drive it into the junkyard. However, after several dozen YouTube videos, my wife was too concerned about the reliability and even an eight year power train and electric component warranty from Chrysler couldn’t overcome the concerns.

In the end, it turned out that she wanted a Toyota Sienna. This was her car of choice, and it was high up on my list as well so I didn’t mind the flip-flopping. Vehicle shopping isn’t an area where I have a lot of strong preferences and there aren’t a lot of minivan options to choose from. You’re basically going to buy an Odyssey, a Pacifica, or a Sienna. Maybe a Model X if you can afford it and don’t mind the missing cargo space.

The Low T Crisis Among Car Salesmen

One of my big rules for financial decisions is to avoid doing business where I don’t understand how the other side makes money. If I don’t know how a business functions I can’t tell if I’m being screwed or getting a good deal.

A car dealership doesn’t make much money on new cars. They are allowed to charge a little bit over MSRP but the margins are slim. The internet also gives a lot of cost discovery power to consumers. Most of them don’t even mark up the MSRP because it’s too easy to find out how much they paid for the vehicle.

They do make a good chunk of change on used cars, but in order to do that they rely on under-valuing trade-ins versus what a customer could get if they sold the vehicle private party. That’s why I only ever sell cars private party. I figured I could try haggling at a few places since there was wiggle room on used cars. However, at some point all the negotiation power was removed from the actual salespeople and to get any amount taken off is a huge hassle. One sales guy almost cried when I made him an offer below sticker, which we will get into below.

Dealerships used to make a lot more money on financing, and they still do, but not as much as in the past. Too easy to shop around online. Which is what I did, and got a pretty low APR as a result.

Dealerships make their bread and butter doing things like selling warranties, extra maintenance packages, and things of that sort. I already knew I wasn’t going to be buying one of those.

Their expenses are that they have to pay for a giant car lot and the salaries of all the people who work there.

We went to a Toyota dealership to take a look at their inventory.

What I wanted was a one to three year old Sienna with one previous owner and low mileage and only superficial wear and tear. Some people trade-in their cars to buy new almost every year and I am not too proud to purchase their cast-offs. The biggest hits you take to a car’s value are in those first few years, so that is a steep discount for something that still has almost all of its service life left. Plus, we were moving up from a 2006 Prius so anything that’s only a few years old was going to feel like an incredible upgrade to us.

I don’t know if it’s because I look broke or something, but one dealer basically laughed at us and told us that that Siennas are never in stock and they have a long waiting list. Also, he explained, all of these vans sell for much, much more than we were willing to pay which I knew couldn’t be true because I’d already done my market research. While I felt a bit like Julia Robert’s in Pretty Woman, I suppose that’s what I get for wearing a plaid flannel, gym shorts, and crocs. At least I didn’t do anything dumb like demand to buy the most expensive car there just to prove I had the money.

This rebuff was the “hardest” anyone tried to close the deal on a sale. Even after I politely informed the salesmen that we could in fact afford the vehicle we were looking for, he still didn’t seem to care. It wasn’t that he was trying to be a dick it was more like he had trouble paying attention. It’s like I could feel him keep trying to find a way to pull his cellphone out of his pocket. No matter that I make a lot more money than this guy, I couldn’t keep him engaged. This was a challenge I found with virtually every car salesperson we spoke with.

I kept thinking of that scene in Jurassic Park where they throw a stick against the electric fence to see if it’s on and it just falls to the ground. This was my repeated experience at every dealership. Nobody seemed to really want to sell me a vehicle.

I did confirm that due to production issues the supply of Toyota Siennas is very limited so it’s hard to get one that’s configured exactly the way you want. As soon as a dealership gets one they usually have a person already waiting to buy one. They’re easy vehicles to move off the lot. That might have been part of the reason the salesmen were so unmotivated to help me when I announced I wanted a high demand car, wasn’t going to do a trade-in, didn’t want a warranty or any add-ons, and I was looking for a something close to Blue Book. All their other buyers were easier.

We test drove a couple of used Siennas at some car lots farther away from our house, and while we liked the vehicle the experience was always that the vehicles on the lot were about $4k-$7k more than what we were finding on the internet from Carvana.

For instance, a dealership with the best price we could find on the trim we wanted was asking for $6k more for a model that was three years older and had double the miles of the Sienna we wound up purchasing. They literally wanted a premium price for a worse car and wouldn’t budge.

Granted, I don’t spend a lot of time buying cars but my experience with the sales people shocked me. I’m very much not an aggressive person unless you’re doing something like beating a kid or a woman. I try not to talk a lot and am always polite. Even so, I hadn’t experienced that much of a testosterone differential since my first day of accelerated honors math in college. It’s very weird for me to walk into a situation and be Burt Reynolds compared to everyone else there. Not one salesperson could look me in the eye. None of them had a firm handshake. All of them seem to be super depressed. Except for the guys at Tesla who just seemed kind of… lazy? One guy started to go on a tangent about his wife leaving him twelve years ago and when I noticed there was a straw wrapper in a cup holder he just shouted out “oh yeah, my daughter is a pig!” It wasn’t like this was his car or anything. He just announced it because kids in general are messy.

The one time I did give an offer for a vehicle, that had been on the lot for two months, I offered $4k less than the dealership price. This was not a vehicle people were demanding so that seemed fair. I wasn’t hostile. It just had a lot of damage that wasn’t in the photos online, which is probably why it was on the lot so long, and I knew I’d want to get it repaired. So I just said my offer and didn’t say anything. I know my last few pieces have been about how bad I am at setting boundaries but this is me now, in the present, and I’m very good at not being the person who talks first.

The salesman’s eyes started watering and looked at my shirt because he couldn’t take the silence… I guess? My wife immediately went up on price she felt so bad for him, which if you knew her would make you feel wretched for this guy. It takes a lot to make her do that! She’d even given me a speech about holding the line only ten minutes before! I felt bad for him, too. Part of me wondered if they were amazing actors and this was some new sales technique. This was the opposite of the “do-anything-to-close-a-deal” high-pressure sales tactics experience that I remembered from my childhood. I felt like Atilla the Hun just because I could shake hands and maintain eye contact.

Then they brought out a guy with a bunch of tattoos who I figured I would at least not feel bad negotiating with and then he started to tear up, too! All I said was that I didn’t want to buy the dealership warranty because the vehicle was still under the manufacturer’s warranty! And I’d already arranged my own financing to pay for it. This thirty year old professional negotiator with tattoos on his knuckles almost lost the power of speech! I shook his hand and told him thank you but no deal. It made me so uncomfortable I was in a hurry to leave.

Gen Z should not be selling cars. I’m sorry. They just aren’t cut out for it. I’m not trying to be mean or cruel or anything of that nature. I wanted to rescue all of these guys from what seems like a really terrible job.

The Carvana Buying Experience

On the way home from almost buying the Sienna on that lot, my wife found the exact trim in the exact color she wanted on Carvana. It had even been shipped locally so it didn’t have a $2k transportation fee. It was only one year old, had a clean title, no accidents, and good service records. All in, it was about $15k less than what it would have cost brand new from a dealership. There were minor scratches but the great thing about Carvana is that they tell you about all of those upfront.

We hit reserve and when we got home I completed the purchase in something like forty minutes. There were a few follow-up calls and signatures but it was all stuff I could do from my cellphone while on errands. I put down a large payment and financed the rest through a credit union. My rule for financing stuff is that I’m allowed to do it so long as I have enough money to pay everything off in cash and I can get good terms, which I did. When I get around to writing my “Middle Middle Class” piece I’ll share more of my fun tips and tricks. The whole experience was quick and painless.

Three days later, I picked the Sienna up from a lot about an hour away from my house.

So why is Carvana so cheap and why are dealerships so expensive?

Carvana doesn’t have to pay for the kind of staff that dealerships do. They don’t have to play all the games that dealerships play. It’s not the full buying experience but I’ve realized I don’t actually care about the extra stuff I can do at a dealership. I never test drove the car I chose. I didn’t have to pretend to be a gearhead who can “feel” all the minutiae of how an engine is performing. I just relied on it being a huge hassle for Carvana if I chose to return it, which they allow you to do within seven days if you don’t like your car. That meant I trusted they’d checked it out themselves. They’d taken a picture of every scratch and defect so nothing surprised me. The whole song and dance about features was just replaced with a webpage and some links. Carvana runs a cheaper business than dealerships and passes that savings onto the customer.

I will never buy another car in any other manner, barring some kind of crazy tax incentive or special financing. Carvana just systemically gave me a better deal. I don’t know if this holds true for luxury vehicles but for the kinds of cars I drive this is what I am going to do from now on.

This realization also made me feel worse for the sales guys. Their industry is dead and they don’t know it yet. There must be almost no money left in selling cars. You can’t keep an industry going that creates higher prices and worse experiences. I fear that with AI a lot of us will get caught in shitty gigs like this and I hope to God we can all pivot through this gracefully. I bet they have some really terrible bosses who are demanding all kinds of crazy stuff nobody can achieve. There just isn’t value in the dealership model anymore. Not for the kind of vehicles I buy, anyway.

How do I like Our Specific Toyota Sienna?

Well, it’s great! My sons are in love with the built-in sunshades since that was a big problem in the Prius. Direct sunlight to the face sucks when you’re strapped into a car seat. You can tell the whole thing was put together to accommodate kids crawling around. It’s easy for my toddler to step into and jump out of since he’s in his independence phase. Someone made sure to place the seat at a great height for a kid sitting in a car seat looking out a window. You can pull the middle row seats up close or push them far away, so if we want to share some French fries or something while parked it’s very easy to reach them. There’s a mirror that drops down behind the rear view that lets me see what my gremlins are getting up to. They’ve got good air conditioning vents all to themselves. There’s lots of extra space for friends and family and it feels like I could haul home half of Costco if it was necessary.

As the family chauffeur this is the first cruise control I’ve found to be actually useful. We spend a lot of our time driving through the Black Hills, which requires me to constantly change speed. Not having to adjust the cruise control every time a car appears around a bend in the road is a game-changer. It wasn’t the self-driving that I wanted but it’s definitely progress. I even on purpose triggered the auto-brake and lane correction a few times on the maiden voyage, so this is probably the safest car I’ve ever driven. It’s also spacious with heated seats, which was a welcome relief from the Prius, where I often felt like Mr. Incredible whenever I had to get into or out of it in front of other people. It also feels like there are enough cup holders and phone chargers to support triple the number of passengers. All in all… yup, it’s a minivan.

My wife is similarly happy and set a new family record for shortest time spent putting the baby in the baby carrier. The sliding doors do make a big difference.

We’ll take a family trip in the spring, probably to Cannon Beach or Seaside. I went to those places a lot with my grandparents and it’s always been one of my favorite spots. We’ll make sure to get a good long look at Haystack rock which is an important life milestone for anyone who has ever seen The Goonies. I’m looking forward to the next couple of decades of minivan trips.

Some very boring pics after the paywall, so don’t worry if you’re not subscribed. I’m not doing a face reveal. I only do those on livestreams because I like to be inconsistent.