12-06-04 - 11:36 p.m.

About a month and a half ago the temperature light in my minivan started coming on, so I took it to my mechanic and found out it needed about $700 of repair to my leaky cooling system. That is probably more than the car is worth at this point, so I knew it was time to look for a new (but used) car. In the meantime pouring a gallon of water in the radiator every other day seems to keep my engine happy for now. Unfortunately winter is also looming, which means spending a fortune in antifreeze. So I needed to find one soon.

As with everything I do, my process of used car buying has protracted to unreasonable lengths of time, which is somewhat excusable since I've never bought a car before and wanted to know what I was doing so things didn't go horribly wrong.

But finally this weekend I got desperate to get it over with and selected a car to go look at, a pretty, black 2000 Malibu. I set everything up with the salesperson to take a look at the next afternoon (Tuesday).

Well, tonight I was doing a little last minute reading so I'd remember how to inspect the car in case it was an obvious lemon, when I ran across a helpful little forum with a thread about Chevy Malibus. Specifically about how many problems these owners had with theirs. As I read through what seemed like dozens of posts, I got a little nervous. Had I just made an appointment with doom? Was I about to purchase a financial black hole? Glancing through the rest of the thread titles in the forum did not assuage my anxiety. The Malibu came up several times on every page! *shiver*

The pieces began to come together in my mind. No wonder there were so many Malibus available in the online used car listings. No wonder they had such good prices (i.e., prices I could afford). And from my VIN check on my chosen car, there sure did seem to be a lot of previous owners. Perhaps it wasn't coincidence that my friend, who also owns a Malibu, often has to get out of his car and rock it back and forth to get it to start.

Part of me, the psychotic part that wants to give everything a chance, thought maybe it would be okay to look this one over anyway. After all, not everyone in the forum hated their Malibu. But then the sensible part of me quietly panicked and reminded me that it would be much easier to extract myself from the situation now, before I was being stared down by the salesperson. So I e-mailed him and told him I had changed my mind. Then I deleted all the Malibus from my list of cars to look at.

Thank goodness for Cartrackers.com! That is the kind of site I've been looking for all this time, somewhere car owners can congregate and complain about their lemons ... or rave about their creampuffs. The professional car reviews I read all seemed to be derived from a single test drive on a new car. Well, what makes or breaks my decision on a particular car is how much I'm going to have to spend on repairs in the long run.

So now it's back to the drawing board ... again. This time I'll use Cartrackers and other such sites to narrow down my choices. I'll probably also wait till January to buy a car, since I'll only be here for two more weeks anyway. I'm going to Texas for Christmas to see my family! :) I think my poor minivan can survive till then.