Few who know me well would believe that I would voluntarily go to a car show, let alone suggest the outing to my husband, but that's just what Wes and I did on President's Day a week and a half ago. The Chicago Auto Show is the largest auto show in the US based on number of visitors. It's held at the gi-normous (yeah, yeah, I know it's not a word) McCormick Place about two blocks from my school, and it's very well advertised. Had I not seen the many, many signs lining the street my bus follows on my way to work each morning, I still would have seen the many, many news stories aired by the local station about the auto show.
At any other time in my life, I would have scorned going to an auto show. I really, really don't care about cars. I want a car to be safe, affordable, and as environmentally friendly as possible -- in that order. I can't identify makes, models, years, and sometimes I even have a hard time describing the paint color. I can't drive a stick shift, don't know what I'd even look at under the hood, and wish more people would take public transportation. I am not a car person.
This year, however, we're shopping for cars -- two, in fact, to be purchased between late March and late June. And so rather than follow Wes from dealer to dealer, test driving car after car, I suggested the auto show. Whereas some auto shows feature primarily concept cars, the Chicago show is basically a bunch of dealer's showrooms. Most of the dealer's let you get in cars, open the trunk, look under the hood (seriously, though, at what?), kick the tires... The really high-end ones, like Lexus, just let you look.
So we took Oliver is his big stroller and sat in cars and looked at costs and compared trunk space and all those kinds of things. We stayed for about 2 hours, made the rounds. The highlight was when we were sitting in one of the crossover SUV types, appreciating the comfy seats, theorizing about how many children we could haul in the back. Wes looked at me, we sort of had a moment of understanding that we were going to get a bigger car than we'd set out to find, when Wes turned and said -- in a moment that could only otherwise be ascribed to my father -- "Dang. This just cost me like $3,000."
For now, we've settled on a crossover SUV for the "family car" -- a Toyota RAV4 or Nissan Rogue -- and something small, stripped down, and maybe used for the second car -- a Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, or Mazda 3. Which leaves me to think about the more important decisions -- like which color to get.
