Hi everyone, I'm new to the group ..
well anyway, since I've been thinking about this for a few weeks now I thought I'd toss my thoughts in here and see whether anybody wants to comment on them.
I am right now in the process of thinking about buying a car, what with not being so young any more (28 now), just having gotten married and having moved to some place away from the old hometown and maybe wanting to go back and forth between here and there and the trains being a pain and so on ..
So a few weeks ago I wandered by this used car dealership and there was a Saab 9-3 on display, 2 years old, black, not the classic hatchback but a sedan shape. Loved it. Asked for a test-drive. Test-drove. Loved it even more. In the end I had to admit that my wife was right and that it was too expensive (16000 EUR).
So what I'm looking for is a car for around 10000 EUR max that will mostly be used for driving long Autobahn-stretches (mainly in Germany), that should be comfortable, bigger than you average small car and that should last me for at least five years without being too much hassle. Plus I definitely want it to be a diesel, what with mileage when driving these long stretches and so on.
Since test-driving that one particular Saab (which has been sold to somebody else by now) I have been looking around for others and have a few questions rolling around my head.
On the one hand, the shape I prefer is the sedan, not the hatchback. The
9-3 sedan-model seems to be a bit hard to find, almost any car I find is a hatchback. So the 9-5 might be a better choice over all, since it's bigger anyway (might come in handy in the next few years, who knows) and since it has that lovely shape.On the other hand, since I have a fixed budget, I might get a nicer 9-3 for the same money than a 9-5.
So I'm undecided re that.
And of course the biggest question that remains is: How good is a Saab in terms of long-term reliability, anyway? I mean one sees quite a few of the old 900 models driving around, but as Mercedes has shown in recent years, reliability in the olden days doesn't necessarily translate into reliability in the modern models. So the newish models, how would one of those compare to, say, a Toyota or Honda in terms of un-kill-ability and service costs? Is there any experience on that sort of thing?
Sorry for going on so long, but there's lots of thoughts colliding in this head here, and it's not like it's all that big, and it has to hold quite a bit of quantum physics as well.
Thanks for reading so far if you have, and thanks even more for commenting if you do.