The third big task we needed to accomplish in Auckland was to buy a car. We had had a Nissan Rogue back in Colorado, which we had really liked. It’s a crossover SUV, so a fairly small footprint and decent gas mileage but also enough space inside for a long weekend camping or travelling with the little one. Because we knew we already liked it and didnt want to spend our entire time in Auckland test driving cars, we decided to simplify things and look for the same car here in NZ.
There is a website called Trademe which is the equivalent of Craigslist but nicer and easier to use, so I headed to that to look up listings for used cars in the Auckland area. The other nice thing about it is that dealers also list their used cars to it, so all I had to do was search for Nissan Rogue by year (we wanted to newish used one, so a 2014 or 15). Except it turns out you can’t search for Nissan Rogues on Trademe. With a little detective work we figured out that it’s called the X-Trail here and found quite a few used ones available at dealers around Auckland.
We identified two dealers to visit. One of them had four listed that looked good so first thing on thursday morning we set out into the rain and wind. The dealer was similar to any dealer you’d go to in the US, though with less land. We met with a salesman and explained what we were looking for, so he grabbed one and brought it around for us to look at. We already knew the car but let him go through his spiel since there were actually a few differences between the US and Kiwi version other than the side of the steering wheel.
We headed back to his desk to talk price and he indicated he could maybe, possibly knock a little off it , but it was up to his manager. Strangely (for us) instead of a back and forth about what he could do, we ended up surfing his competitor’s websites so he could show us how good their prices already were. We tried a couple of times to get him to check with his manager, but he wasn’t available at the moment. He promised to talk with him as soon as possible and would email me his findings, so Kelly and I just looked at each other like “ok…” as he let us walk out of the showroom.
We had one other dealer to look at, so we drove in that direction, but it was about lunch time so we stopped for a bite to eat. The other dealer’s used car selection wasn’t as good, and we liked the one at the first dealer, but we were a little dumbfounded that he just let us walk out when we were clearly ready to buy. We gave him a call after lunch to see if he had talked to his manager yet, and lo and behold his manager had said they could come down on the price for us, so we headed back to the first dealer and bought the car.
It was going to take a couple of days to get the car ready. It was new to the lot so they needed to clean and polish it, do their 100 point inspection and so on, so we put down a deposit and headed back to Auckland. In the end we got exactly the car we were looking for: a low kilometerage, late model Rogue / X-Trail. In fact, it’s even the color (metallic blue) that Kelly had wanted when we bought ours in Colorado, but was unavailable!
Saturday morning we returned to pick up the car. To our surprise the dealer had found it was in their system wrong and was a 2016, not 15, so bonus. One difference between here and the US is that the dealer registered it and included the first year’s registration in the deal. That meant that unlike in the US, it came with license plates already and there was nothing more for us to do but drive it off the lot.
Kiwi Bound 