In the hopes of not derailing my own thread, here's one of my car buying peeves, although probably my smallest peeve in car buying. I remember a time if you wanted a clock on your dash panel, they would put one in. If you wanted a radio, they put it in. This or that, they put it in. Now, taking their cue from TV cable companies, cars come with choices from the manufacturer that come in packages. The Mazda 3 and 6 had these various option models that were given non descriptive names like the Sport, Touring i, Touring e, Grand Touring i and e, and on and on, Each model had a package of options. If you wanted a certain option you had to buy the right model. As you climb the 1k rung of the ladder upwards, the options from the lower models were included. I wanted built in navigation, and in fact, navigation might be the only option the Mazda dealer could install like in the old days, but you had to buy the model with the touch screen big enough to handle it, and it was somewhere up the chain. Had I gone farther up, navigation would have been included. I think the cost for dealer installation was $550.
But the weird thing was that I didn't know that the model with the right sized screen had the technology already in place, I assume I had already paid for that. The dealer said it might take a couple of days to install the navigation, but what this meant was that he would have to slide a little SD card like the one in your digital camera into a slot on the dashboard. He called me the next day to tell me it was now installed and ready to pickup. So it cost $550 for him to insert the SD card.
On the Mazda 3, I was also supposed to get a month's free satellite radio, as the salesman told me, but that was actually an honest mistake (I think), because that never showed up on my system after I bought the car. I asked the salesman about it and after he researched it a bit more, he told me that was only available if I bought the "technology package," and I wouldn't have bought that anyway because the technology package came with a sun roof, and I absolutely didn't want that. But a sun roof? Why is that considered technology? They've been making them for 50 years. I didn't really care about the satellite radio, but I wanted to at least get the included 1 month free trial, so it wasn't a big deal.
A couple of years later I was test driving a 2017 Miata, the premium Grand Touring model that came with navigation. I wanted to try it, but the salesman told me they don't put the card in for a test drive because people were swiping them when no one was looking. LOL
As it turns out, satellite radio was on the Miata that I eventually bought, and I did indeed get the months free trial, but it turned out to be just advertising that told all about the wonders of their product. I never heard a tune or 5 minutes of talk radio. Just a continuous ad that played over and over. Now I get email from Sirrus Radio all the time with special sign up offers, which I ignore.
Good God Almighty. What a bunch of nonsense.
