Why you should follow your heart, not your brain when buying your first car

So you are buying your first car, but can’t decide whom to listen to?

You have your parents on one end telling you to buy a low mileage Yaris, your heart telling you to buy a “sleeper” car and your non car-guy friends telling you to buy a BMW.

Why not the low mileage Yaris?

So you bought the low mileage yaris. As a car guy, you can find redeeming things about this small, cheap car. You might be proud of owning a car. You might find the lawnmower engine funny. But at the end of the day you will regret yourself to bits for not buying the car of your heart. We’ll get back to why later.

Why not the BMW that your friends want you to buy?

You bought the BMW from the newspaper ad. It was just around the corner, little rust but the smallest engine (1.6 liter). Your friends think you’re so cool and expect you to do donuts at the closest parking lot. They all want to ride with you to school, telling you every day that you need to get a bigger stereo. And some christmas-trees to hang from the windshield mirror.
There is some smelly gunk in the ash-tray and the car smells of cigarettes. You could not avoid finding the pubic hair stuck in the seam of your leather steering wheel.
This car has some “soul”, but it has been mistreated by the previous owner, and you’re starting to regret buying this car afterall. In time you realize the 1.6 is no fun and that you can’t do donuts with it despite it being RWD. With no donuts your “reason” for buying this car to show off for your friends is gone. The smelly interior has no charm either and girls don’t want to ride with you.
Let’s not forget that the insurance company is slaughtering your wallet since you drive such a “high risk” car!

Why follow your heart?

As a car guy (or girl for that matter), you have an interest in the special features a car can offer you. If you only want to do donuts, you could buy any RWD car and wait for winter. If you only want a commuters car, you could buy a prius. If you only want something to get from A to B, you could get the yaris.
Most people buy cars on these kind of premises. It needs to fulfill their need, whether it be doing donuts or saving the earth.

If you don’t follow your heart when buying your first car, chances are your car will bore your every day. It will become a chore spending money on it. You won’t feel proud of your car and won’t treat it too well.

• Need to get new springs? Let’s spend some money getting this POS running again…
• Oh, so you’re saying I need a new exhaust? Oh noes, there goes my drinking budget

This is how the same examples look if you love your car, no matter what:

• New springs? No problem, just an insentive to get me some lowering springs.
• Exhaust gone bad? Finally a good reason to change it to a high flow exhaust. I’ll take this from my car mod budget.

Why am I writing this?

I’m the kind of guy who had “pressure” coming from different sides to which car I should buy. My father is the reasonable kind of guy advising me to buy a horribly boring commuters car with great fuel economy. My car guy friend wanted me to buy a RWD car. My budget was limited, so any high horsepower RWD car was out of question. None of the ones affordable appealed to me either. Through my line of work and people I know, I’ve driven a load of different cars at an age of only 21 (probably 20+), so I had a feel for different cars and how they handle and feel.

I went to test drive a 2001 Saab 9-3 I had found online. It felt good, but this was a 2.0 turbo version with apparently 185 hp chipped to 230. The power was more like 80 HP. I took it to a guy I know who worked as a techinician in a Saab workshop. He adviced me not to buy it. There was a load of stuff that could be wrong with it.

Problem was, I had already fell in love with this weird, Swedish, FWD car. I had this feeling that this was just right for me. The leather seats, the dashboard being faced to the driver, the manual gearbox, the potential of the engine, the design of the car.

I bought the car, and didn’t tell my dad that it had all these issues. I told my car guy friend about all the issues and now we just laugh when something goes wrong on the car. My car has a load of issues, but it runs. I love the car, it has regained a lot of horses through money spent on the car, and I have not regretted once buying this car and spending a lot of cash fixing it. It has horrible fuel economy at 1.1 liter/10km and the paint sucks. But these cars are not being made anymore as Saab went bankrupt, and who doesn’t love an underdog that can take on “any” car on Norwegian roads and beat it?