After I got my hair cut last night, I decided to drive by the Mazda dealer. I've seen an other B-series truck there a few times that's lowered and has the sweetest rims ever, I wanted to take a look at it. The truck wasn't there, so I decided to check out a nearby Mazda 6. Beautiful!

Black, sport package with the 17"s, black leather heated seats, moonroof, traction control, everything pretty much except for the bose audio. Oh yea, it was a 6cyl 5 spd

So I'm checking it out, and a brand new MSP parked along side it, and a salesperson comes out to greet me. We start BSing, I was just checking stuff out, she's really trying to convince me that I should have a new car

Anyway, I play along, tell her I may be interested if I get a test drive. So she gets the keys, and off we go... She brings up "numbers", so for instance I said I'd probably put around $2k down, and pay NO more than $400/month. And that was more than I wanted to pay. OK, on to the good stuff:

The car drives like a dream. Going from torqueless wonders like my 323 and protege, the 6 rocks! They low end torque (under 3k) was especially great... The engine was incredibly smooth, no vibrations through the shifter or pedals. The car had 44 miles on it, so I didn't want to beat it, especially since I wouldn't be buying it. I only ran it up to around 4k a few times, but it was silky smooth regardless. I was doing around 50 in 5th on the highway, and gave it some gas to get around a couple of cars, a few seconds later we were cruising quite nicely at 80. Very smooth and stable.

On the offramp, I went a little faster than usual, although still not noticiably fast. The car handeled the turns superbly. Much less body roll than my protege, a lot more stable. Handleing was great.

They brakes were also fabulous. On both of my cars, they suck hard, so it was a bit jerky ride at first trying to modulate brake pressure properly.

The interior was great. Excellent fit and finish. The controls were a bit odd, with all the fancy push buttons and dials, but I just wasn't used to them at all.

Anyway, so we go back into the shop to 'talk numbers'... The girl filled out the paper saying what we were talking about before (2k down, etc.), and took the paper back to her sales manager. She came back a few minutes later, and the fun began...

If instead I decided to put $3000 down, they would make my payments... Dun dun dun...... $475/mo... They're kidding right? On the contrary... I figured it out, that's like over $28k for just the monthly payments, not including the $3k down payment. We're up to $31k.... **** that.

I have good credit, never a late payment on anything, almost no debt ($5k worth of student loans, nothing else), and they're going to rape me for about $7k of financing? I don't think so. Nice car or not, I'm not a dumb sack of ****.

So then they proceed to sell me a lower-end 4cyl model, which I also have no interest in, blah blah blah... Then Mr. Cool comes over, he's the Mazdaspeed rep for the dealer. He says that I should look into an MSP, because they're so great. Being a part of this board, I've picked up quite a bit of MSP knowledge, so he's wasting his sales pitch on me. I tell him I already know a lot about the car, probably more than he does. We get into a pissing match about who knows more about the car, and I eventually win because I can tell him how I know the two MSPs he has are 2003.5s, aside from the color or the car.

To make a long story short, sorry if you read the whole thing, they insulted me by charging me like a million and a half APR interest on a $24k car... I'm not going to pay almost a third EXTRA just for financing... If fact, I wouldn't take anything more than 0% apr... Bastards. I'm supposed to go back tomorrow to test drive the MSP, so they can try and sell me one of those