Life, the universe, and lunch

Rant: Car shopping on the web

Let's ignore for a minute the fact that I'm at the office and should be working, and discuss the matter of car shopping and automotive web sites. A friend asked if I'd checked out the Civic 2-door coupe and in fact, I hadn't. (Sunday was only my first day of what will probably be a lengthy car shopping process.) So I opened a browser window for a quick surf on over to honda.ca to see what it was like.

It didn't take me long to select Automotive, Civic> 2007 Civic Coupe, but that leads me to this stupid page: http://www.honda.ca/.... Okay, a forced perspective shot of the car from behind that gives me no idea if it tingles my senses or not and a bunch of marketo-blab. Fine fine fine... so I click on photos. More fricking forced perspective shots that don't reveal the roof line so that I can tell if it might have a decent back seat... Are these people even trying to sell me a car, or are they trying to sell me their marketing department? Ugh.

So I take a look at the interior shots... just like the Buick there is no standard DIN hole for the radio, just a stupid molded-in thing like I hate so much on the inherited Allure. How the fuck am I supposed to replace this? I whined to my friend about this in chat and he countered with "Factory stereos are more theft resistant." Okay, straw poll, who the hell would want to steal a factory deck? Nobody, THEY SUCK! Why do you think I want to pull it out to put in my Alpine? Argggghhhh!

Edit: Okay fine, friend in chat also points out that there are kits that let you replace large portions of the factory dash to get a standard radio hole. But they cost extra and it shouldn't have to be this way! I see no consumer value in these ugly molded-in factory stereos, though I'm sure for the slimy car makers it encourages more customers to buy over-priced upgrades to equally poor equipment with more bells and whistles, instead of going with high quality after-market like Alpine or Pioneer for the same price. Today I hate capitalism...

Edit: Nissan.ca doesn't even show you what they fucking sell! Clicking Vehicles gives you a drop down menu where you can click Cars, then that gives you a submenu where you have to pick them out by name. I don't know what I want, that's why I'm going to your web site! Whatever happened to using the website as a fucking show room people? The web was more useful when I bought my Avenger in April of 96! Seriously people... are you even trying to sell me a car???

posted by ...K @ 4:52 PM