Smart Consumer

I recently read this article on CNBC about a company called Beepi.  It’s middleman company that helps you buy a used car from across the country.  It will inspect and take photos of the car you want to buy, and help with delivering it directly to your home.  We recently purchased a vehicle from Alabama (from Pennsylvania) without the use of a 3rd party service like Beepi, and I had a great experience with it, so I figured I would write an article to share my experience and provide some pointers.

These steps and ideas are relevant whether you’re buying from a dealer, or from a private party.  For our purchase, we were looking for a full-size pickup truck; our requirements were a diesel motor, no rust, manual transmission, extended cab, and 8 foot bed.  (Good luck finding a rust-free truck up north.)  We found one on AutoTrader or Cars.com but it was down in Alabama.  Not exactly close enough to go test drive it!

  • "I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.

    And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

    ~ Steve Jobs

More Inspirational Quotes

precision beats power