We live up in the Santa Cruz Mountains (Northern California), and as a result we were stuck with dial up access until a few months ago. My daughter, who is 16 ‘, has been on the “Quest for a Car” for some time now, but prior to our getting broadband, her search pretty much consisted of calling me from her cell phone whenever she came across a car with a For Sale sign. Also, not wanting to waste any time, she would have already called the owner and would have full details to relay to me when she called. Now, of course, this always took place while I was at work, and in the middle of trying to get something done.

Then, about 3 months ago, DSL made its way into our neck of the woods, and it wasn’t just our Internet access that went into high speed, so did her car search. Suddenly I’m getting emails about cars listed on craigslist (often followed by a phone call to make sure I got the email) — things like convertibles, 4×4s, old trucks, and other vehicles designed to make a parent groan inwardly.

Somewhere along the line, I pointed out to her that there were other websites that listed used cars. Over the next few weeks she taught herself how to use the search refinement tools on the used auto sites. It was quite entertaining from my end to watch as she slowly came to terms with the kinds of cars that would actually be in her price range (yes, evil parents that we are, we made her come up with a fair percentage of the cost). Eventually she had it narrowed down to a handful of makes from a certain range of years that were most likely to come up with a car that she could afford.

One of the most interesting parts of the experience for me as a parent, was seeing how different the process of finding a car was for her compared to me when I was her age. I either looked at the classifieds in the newspaper or kept an eye out when passing by the unofficial used car lots in the small town I grew up in. For my daughter, her first instinct was to go online. No used car dealers — that would take too much time. No newspapers — what good is three lines of text? She wanted details — does it have a CD player, is it an automatic, etc., etc. Most of all, she wanted pictures. Was it a good color, did it look like it was in good shape, did the insides look okay? All of those things were checked out before ever giving the owner a call to set up a time to actually look at the car.

In the end, she found a car by searching on Yahoo! Autos (tell me you didn’t see *that* coming!). It is now sitting in our driveway, and next we get to go through “The Driving Test.”

Jerry Welch
Lead Surfer