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The auto industry is a nauseating enigma. Decades roll by and the experience of buying a car in this country is still as abominable as ever. The newest rub I’ve discovered is that many sales people use fake names. I’ve visited five dealerships within the last week. All five salespeople I’ve met have one-syllable surnames that consist of four letters and are common, easy-to-remember English words. Here are the surnames: Bell, Ball, Blue, Lane, Rush. What are the odds?

I’ve seen the Saturn commercials. Perhaps they are different, but Saturn does not make a car that I’m interested in buying.

A few years ago I visited a  “no-haggle” place called CarSense. Indeed there was no haggling, but there were two televisions blasting Fox News and a magazine rack featuring Soldier of Fortune, American Spectator and their ilk. Look, if you own a car dealership and you’re a right-wing lunatic, that’s fine by me. But please don’t subject me to all that noise. After 25 minutes of Sean Hannity, the appraiser came back and gave me the most insulting, back-stabbing, $5000 below KBB value offer for my trade-in. I donned a courtesy gas mask and crawled to the exit. I think I was bleeding out of my ears.

Last week I visited a Mazda dealership to look at a 2006 Mazda 5. The salesman showed me the car, then we went into the showroom where he offered to “look at some numbers” with me.  The first number I asked to look at was the price. He appeared to be taken by surprise. He went into a back room and emerged with a sheet of paper. He asked for my name, address and phone number. He disappeared again. When he returned, I again asked the price. He said he had to talk to his manager. The manager was in  a booth about ten feet away. I overheard their conversation:

Salesman: “He wants a quote.”

Manager: “Where does he live?” (Thought: they’re geo-profiling me?)

Salesman: “Philly.” (NOTE: The dealership is in Philly also).

The salesman then went away again. He appeared with a “quote sheet” with lots of numbers on it. I scanned it and still wasn’t sure what the price was.  Mind you, this was a used car, so there wasn’t the issue of ordering options and packages like you would with a new car.  Anyway the car had smelled like it was smoked in for two years and I could feel that the alignment was off (tire slapping sound), so I reciprocated their vagueness with my own wishy-washy reason for leaving and promptly fled.

My first car was a 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit Diesel that got 60mpg. Today the highest mileage car in the USA is the Toyota Prius at 48mpg. In terms of fuel economy, the auto industry has regressed.  There have been a lot of jokes about what would happen if Microsoft were a car company; the jokes center on the idea of computers “crashing” and suggest that cars are more reliable than computers. However, if car companies were running Microsoft, we would probably be carrying around 17-pound laptops with Intel 286 processors and bragging about how we have a whopping 1 megabyte of RAM and a “huge” 40 megabyte hard-drive. The auto industry stinks on ice. They are absolutely blind to the responsibility they have to create a product that can be fueled sustainably.

One improvement is in vehicle financing. You can apply for a loan at Capital One’s web site and get a response in 30-seconds. If you’re approved, you get a FedEx the next day with a blank check that you can use to pay for your new car. But here’s the catch. The check is only good at a franchise dealer. Go back to the beginning of this article and review the consistent, persistent putrefaction that is the auto dealership customer experience.

I still have to somehow buy a minivan to haul my kids around in. I hope when they grow up they’ll be able to laugh at this story. I hope they’ll have truly sustainable transportation options. Ethanol, Biodiesel and Hydrogen Fuel Cells are not sustainable options. We need to snap out of those delusions. I’m afraid that my kids will only see improvements if climate changes cause catastrophes that cannot be denied. I’m guessing the best they’ll be able to do 30 years from now is find a 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit Diesel that runs.