Overview

We share a couple car stories and then delve into the current status of buying cars. What should we look for in a car? New, used, or lease?

Recommendations

https://carvana.com

https://autotrader.com

YouTube

Transcript

[00:00:02] Stephen: oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So go ahead. No, go finish your thought. We started talking some tech stuff, so let’s, we were gonna talk cars and tech anyway, and exactly travels. So go ahead. Continue your time. Yeah.

[00:00:13] Alan: So a little bit All the transitions that we’re going through.

Like we, one of the things we talked about in your talk today was things have changed drastically. So you, whatever skills I learned when I was a computer guy back in the late seventies, and then going to today, how much of that is just, I learned the underpinning of how to write a good programming and I learned enough computer languages so that I can write in Cobal and Fortran and P PL one and PLC and C plus, and C sharpen, all that stuff.

Expecting your Coball skills to come in handy nowadays is ridiculous unless you’re exactly in that situation where a big bank, big iron is still running Coball and their last good Coball programmer just got hit by the bus and they need someone to come in and [00:01:00] A lot of that is happening.

Not only in the computer field, so about cars, it used to be that mechanics were really good at, Hey, let’s listen to the car. Ooh. That is sounds like a carburetor or not now there’s no carburetors. There’s no, there’s nothing to hear. It’s all solid state. And yet there still has to be some.

Skill that you gain over the course of time. So that we’ve talked about troubleshooting before, you want to be like, I can make a good guess relatively quickly instead of just starting at a and going through to Z and every time that it’s a T problem, it’s man, I had to go through a, to S to get there.

Not if you’re better, not if you’re smarter at how to divide the solution space in half and do things, that’ll give you the most information quickly. You’ve been having car issues lately. Yeah. And are they diagnosable or is it like so many things are becoming, Hey, it’s broken, I’m gonna get a new one.

[00:01:51] Stephen: What I mean? Here, so here and we’ve all been. In this situation, probably most [00:02:00] of the people I know haven’t been fortunate enough to start at age 16 and buy a $40,000 new car every four years. That’s

[00:02:07] Alan: dependable

[00:02:08] Stephen: and yeah, exactly. We’ve all had the key. Yeah. And due to some circumstances, not.

My choice. I ended up with the worst car out of the whole family. Oh boy. Partly because I don’t drive it a lot, but partly be for other reasons, other people ended up with different cars. Yeah. So a car that’s not super wasn’t super well maintained before I got it. And it’s slowly been disintegrating so let me give you the problems with the car.

And this is different. This is a PT cruiser and it is so difficult. My serpentine belt was screeching and rubbing and it broke. And I could not. Get a new serpentine belt on there. I couldn’t even find where it went at first. You basically have to pull the whole engine to get the serpentine belt on