New Car Joy

After almost a year of shopping, dithering, shopping, finding reasons not to buy, shopping some more, flirting with Cash for Clunkers, backing off, brooding, and finally buying (well, leasing), we got a new car last week. Now, in addition to pinching pennies, I am pinching myself...

Suddenly, the trusty (if noisy and ragged) 20-year-old BMW with 194,000 miles sits under the white pine in the driveway, awaiting its disposition. Save it for our son, the newly minted Manhattanite? Put an ad on the BMW Car Club of New Jersey website, where some carhead will appreciate the fact that it was one of just 50 7-series cars brought into the US in 1989 with stickshifts?

While these questions braise in my brain, I am giddy with new car joy. The quiet! The comfort! The handling, acceleration, sexy lines, terrific gas mileage (23 city, 31 highway), the built-in Bluetooth, iPod adapter, and satellite radio with 6-month prepaid subscription (and auto-mute in case the phone rings)! To say nothing of auto-hold.

Yes, auto-hold, a little button that, when you push it, allows you to take your foot off the brake when you come to a stop in stop-and-go traffic--and the car stays put until you press the accelerator again. Think about that. Thank you Volkswagen.

A long-time BMW fanatic, I have now migrated from Goliath to David in leasing this sleek, smooth, slick-handling VW CC four-door sedan (though VW insists on calling it a Comfort Coupe, hence CC).

I picked it up on Thursday morning--or, rather, the salesman, an extremely nice, cheerful, and helpful young man named Michael Sclafani, picked me up and drove me to the dealership (Bernardsville Volkswagen) to pick up the car.

In the shower, I kept thinking, it feels unreal. Yes, I signed a bunch of papers and wrote a check and all, but that seemed feathery, insubstantial compared to what they were about to "give" me--a ton and a half of automotive prowess, with four doors (that seal like a bank vault), four wheels (plus a full-sized spare), four cylinders (turbocharged!), heated seats (and heated mirrors), and, oh, you get the idea. And when I put the monthly payment on auto-repeat, it will all feel as painless as possible, provided I keep the bank balance in the black.

Over a span of many months, I had been to the dealership several times, first test driving a Jetta, then, after a lapse of a few months, the CC, which I fell in love with. The CC comes in four different versions, and I think I test-drove them all, my senses cranked up to 11 on a scale of 1 to 10. And each time I dutifully followed the salesman's instructions to turn left here and right there and so on.

After awhile, each test drive felt like Groundhog Day. I yearned to discover what the car felt like, how it responded to, the roads I travel every day in my 30-minute commute from Montclair to NJM's offices in Morristown.

Stepping out of the shower on Thursday morning, I felt a surge of ecstasy. They're going to hand me the keys and let me drive it wherever I want, for as long as I want (or for three years and 36,000 miles). Liberated, at last, from the strictures of the test drive route, I could, my God, go ANYWHERE! At any time, day or night, even just for the hell of driving the thing.

It felt magical, too good to be true...until I remembered the monthly payments. Oh well, the old Bimmer needs a new driveshaft, a $1,200 parts-and-labor transplantation, so look on the bright side--the VDub comes with free maintenance and, yup, free tires if they wear out, for the life of the lease.

But with a new car comes new car anxiety--I have to park in a lot where the spaces on either side of my pristine new machine are going to be occupied by vehicles with people flinging open doors willy-nilly and maybe scathing my unscathed bumper as they obliviously maneuver in and out of the space.

See, there is no such thing as unalloyed happiness. Though I have to admit, a brand new car comes close.

Tags: Bernardsville | photography | cars | Bernardsville Volkswagen