i sold my beloved mazda 3.

it was a fabulous, wonderful, amazing, fun car, but i wanted something bigger (and a few more features).

i bought a 2007 nissan murano SE all wheel drive. it’s white with tan leather interior. it has heated seats, bi-xenon headlights, sunroof, xm radio, navigation, memory seats, and intelligent key (i don’t have to take the key out of my purse to unlock/lock or start the car). it had 7.3 miles on it when i picked it up at the dealership.

it rides great and handles great, especially considering it’s an SUV. and it’s supposed to get 20/24 mpg, but we’ll see how well it does with my driving.

we bought it at modern nissan in huntersville. while our salesperson was totally worthless (we knew way more about the car than he did), the sales manager and the finance manager were awesome.

we test drove a gray murano on friday night, then on saturday we test drove a bmw x3 (i’d already test driven an acura mdx, acura rdx, mitsubishi outlander, and infiniti fx35). after the bmw test drive i knew i wanted the murano because it had the nicest ride and good handling. the bmw had better handling by far, but the ride was so stiff you could feel every bump in the road.

so we went home and josh called modern nissan and asked for the sales manager. josh told him we were interested in buying a white murano on their lot. there was no back and forth — the sales manager told us what he could sell it for, which was already way lower than other quotes we’d gotten from the internet and another dealership. so we talked about it and ran all the numbers, then called him back and accepted the offer.

it was a totally different experience than the other dealerships we’d visited so far. at the infiniti place, we sat there through three rounds of back and forth, completely fed up and still $1000 off from where we wanted to be. and it was only a 2006 fx35. at a different nissan dealership, they didn’t have a murano with navigation and yet they swore they could locate one for us. so they did, but they wanted $400 to drive it to us (drive it, not trailer it). and the offer they gave us was basically MSRP. we got up and walked out and they chased us to our car asking why we were leaving. ugh.

anyway, at modern nissan, we did everything by phone. they didn’t bat an eye when we said we were financing with our credit union. they admitted that they couldn’t match the CU rates and so they didn’t try to upsell us. the sales manager called us when the paperwork was ready to sign and we drove down there. we were at the dealership for all of 30 minutes, and most of that was waiting for our worthless salesperson to find a screwdriver so he could switch the tag from my mazda to the murano.

of course it’s raining today so i haven’t driven it that much. but it is beautiful and i love it so far. and there’s plenty of room for the dogs and their cages, so we’re going to take more trips with them.

i’ll take some pics when the sun comes back out (hopefully tomorrow).