bl(ip)og

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Guy goes to a Jeep dealership “just to take a test drive” (because he’s already checked their online inventory and knows that they don’t have exactly what he’s looking for) and ends up coming home with a new Jeep anyway.

Um, yeah.

I thought I wanted an Rubicon, but after some thought (and Scott reminding me that when I say “off-roading”, I mean “driving in sand”), I couldn’t justify the extra $3000 for off-road features I’d likely never use. The next model down is the Sahara, and this dealer had one in a color I liked with all of the oddball options I would have chosen.

So I’m now the proud ass-in-the-seat of an ‘07 automatic Jeep Green Sahara 4×4 that has a tow package, supplemental front seat side airbags, Trac-Lok limited slip rear differential, stereo + SIRIUS satellite, and 18″ tires/wheels.

And can I just say how hard it is to negotiate a price when you didn’t do any prior research on the model you suddenly want? Fortunately, after being stubborn that I wasn’t going to just pull a non-researched price out of my ass to make a counter to his “the lowest I can go is MSRP” statement, the sales manager let me use his computer to surf over to edmunds.com (after making me listen to a 10 minute speech about how wrong those “What other people pay” prices on edmunds.com were). Ugh. I thought my position (wanting to negotiate at all) was rather weak — these Unlimited Wranglers are in very high demand, and every dealer will sell out of them months before the ’08s start rolling in — but in the end, we made a deal that both of us liked.