Never go to a garage

So yesterday we had a couple of hours in between work, pregnant sister-in-laws, eating and chatting to the police about violent and over excitable bouncers (I'll probably write more about that later) so given I'm without car, and unlikely to get it back anytime soon, we hit a couple of garages just to take a look (more for delivery times than test driving, coz I think I've got my mind made up on what I'm going to get in my different price categories - the difficult bit will be deciding how much I'm going to spend).

So the VW garage was first on the list (actually, the only one on the list for me as I had sort of decided on a new GTi) and I just wanted to work out whether or not I could get any discounts, and how long it would take me to get the car I wanted. Now this might be a little hard for you to believer, but I couldn't find a salesman to talk to. Normally those guys are the worst - they hover around, follow you, hassle you and are such a pain that you're desperate to turn and run. So, the one time I actually want to talk to one, no-where. We looked at the cars in the lot (and they had a couple, which was a good sign), and then frustrated, headed inside to talk to someone. There was a line - can you believe that, a line to talk to a sales guy!! So we obviously turned around and headed back to the car. The thing that worried me about this wasn't the fact that I didn't get the info that I need - I've got the web and the phone for that - but if they can't even have enough sales guy to sell the cars, what's the service going to be like if I bought a car from them? Is it a 4 week wait to get booked for a service?

So, frustrated, we ended up in the BMW garage - this probably wasn't a good thing. Service was great, guy was friendly, knowledgable and in no way pushy. We discussed the merits of certain cars versus others (my favourite topic these days, ended with a "have you considered the M5?", "yes, but if I'm spending 100k, it's going to the Porsche garage" conversation), and all in all it was pretty great. I say unfortunately, because there is now in my head the knowledge that I can get a spot in the production line of the BMW factory for a shiny new M3 in Argos Blue (or some other name that I can't quite remember), with the Competition option pack, 19inch wheels and a very large smile on my face. Weird though it is, one of the cool things is the fact that automatically get 4 years of free service with the car, so you never have to pay anything extra apart from your loan payments and the insurance (which I'm sure isn't cheap). So another few sleepless nights are ahead before I make my decision I guess (and I haven't even been to see the second hand Porsches or the Audi garage...).