More Car Shopping

I continued my car shopping saga today. I took an hour or so and went over to the Brent Brown Toyota dealership to take a look at a Corolla and a Camry. I decided pretty quickly that the Corolla wasn't for me. I wanted something a little bigger and a little fancier. I actually took a look at two Camry models. They had both a 2006 LE and a 2007 SE. The '07 SE was much fancier and was a better comparison to the Passat. But the LE was a really comfortable and nice car. I'm going to wait until I can take a look at a 2007 LE but the Camry is definitely a strong competitor to the Passat.

It was interesting to compare the experience between the two dealerships. They were definitely much friendlier, lower pressure and had better service at the Toyota dealership.

• I waited nearly 15 minutes to talk to a salesman at the VW dealership. And when one came it was some guy who came up from the used car lot not even one of the regular new car guys. At the Toyota dealership, I still had to wait while they paged someone, but she showed up within 20 seconds of being paged.
• The guy at the VW dealership didn't want to let me leave and pretty much told me that he wouldn't deal with me except in person. The girl at the Toyota dealership was totally laid back and relaxed and wasn't pressuring me to buy right then at all. In fact she almost seemed to be working on the assumption that I wasn't going to be buying that day.
• In general the guy at the VW dealership took his sweet time to do everything. He didn't really seem to value my time at all. The girl at the Toyota dealership, when she couldn't find the keys to one of the cars that I wanted to look at, actually ran back into the office to get them. I generally got the impression that she valued my time and realized that I was the customer.
• The Passat that I drove seemed to having trouble with it's automatic rain detection system. The wiper blades kept turning on automatically even though there wasn't a drop of moisture on the car. The frustrating thing was that there was no way of turning them off. I can understand something going wrong on the demo car, it happens to me all the time when demoing software. The thing that bugged me, is that the salesman says, "Oh yeah, I forgot this was the one that has that problem with the wipers". If he knew about the problem ahead of time, why didn't he just have it fixed?
• When I tried to email the VW sales guy for more information (since he didn't email me like he said he was going to) my email bounced with an invalid email address. The email address I was using was right on the business card that this guy gave me. That is just so unprofessional.