
Update: Click here to read post #2.
The day our beloved 1999 Mazda Miata MX-5 10th Anniversary Edition was stricken ill was a dark day for my wife and me. From the day they b
rought it home, that car had been the pride and joy of my wife's parents and she had set her sights on it becoming the first car that she would own, which did eventually happen in 2006. When we relocated from the suburbs into the city, we consolidated down into a single car, and the Miata was the car we kept. As you can imagine, there were many years of sentimental value attached to the little blue convertible.
So when it came time to find a replacement, we had a long list of requirements and a lot of compromises to make. We knew we needed something more practical than the Miata (a criteria which just about any car would satisfy) and be able to carry our friends and luggage and potentially a pet. That meant that something with 4 seats would be required, at a minimum. My wife, who is very environmentally minded, wanted a car that put up decent fuel economy numbers. I wanted a manual transmission, which narrowed the available options to a tiny handful of cars. Fun to drive, comfortable, relatively maintenance free, and moderately well equipped with modern necessities such as Bluetooth hands-free calling were all a given. Pricing needed to be reasonable as we were losing an income for a couple of years and knew we wanted to keep our expenses under control.
At first, we looked at a variety of relatively low cost new car options, including several small hatchbacks such as the Ford Focus and Hyundai Veloster. The only problem was that finding a model optioned the way we wanted, especially the manual transmission, made the search nigh impossible as it seemed that no dealer within 250 miles had cars with manual transmissions available. Since we were on a compressed timeline, we shifted our criteria and started to look at lightly used late model cars, but quickly bumped up against the same issue, with none of the cars we were interested in having the right collection of equipment, performance, manual transmission, fuel economy, and price. This eliminated pre-owned models from the selection process as well. With time running out, I proposed that we look at leasing a vehicle again for the short-term which would give us a vehicle that we could use for the time being, not lock us into a long-term loan, and buy us sufficient time to evaluate vehicles over the next few years to find the perfect replacement for our needs.

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The TSX buried by winter storm Nemo. That little black dot is the tip of the raised windshield wiper. |
During the first year of ownership, we have taken a number of trips in this car, including relocating from the DC area to the Boston area. The car has performed flawlessly, without a single hiccup. It has suffered through our first New England winter, buried at times under many feet of snow. While the TSX was not our first choice, it has definitely been an excellent choice to meet our needs at the current time. Over the course of our long-term updates, I will be sharing more about my ownership experience including maintenance, fuel economy, and overall impressions of the car.
Click here to read post #2.
The TSX is AWESOME,I also have one,and LOVE it,
ReplyDeleteThat's great! Hope you continue to enjoy yours and please return and stay abreast of our long-term updates.
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