'Choice Anxiety' is down to animal nature.
In the wild the most dominant dogs are the most stressed whilslt the dog at the 'bottom' of the pecking order is the happiest.
The thing it is the for humans as well. I have heard a story of a very rich woman getting stressed about chosing real pearls - stressed about the quality, color, getting to see them all in diffrent locations. If you give humans no choice they are happy though.
The solution is to ban thinking, or have a government mandate that only one car model can be produced. - bring on communisim!
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Torque means nothing without RPM
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Cars are such an emotive subject and there is always somebody who will try to convince you that their choice is better than yours, or they got a better deal, or you could have got it cheaper from xyz etc.
My attitude is if you're happy with the car and the deal, that's all that matters.
On the subject of decisions, every decision is the right one at the time it was made based on the facts that were available at the time. Don't ever regret a decision, life's too short, move forward.
Hindsight is a wonderful gift that none of us have, if I had it, I would have won the Euromillions a few weks ago!
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I think alot of blokes feel a sense of "achievement" in many aspects of their car eg what the car is, What deal they got, the extent to which they got one over on the dealer/market by getting something extra.
It's the sort of attitude that crops up in other areas eg airlines. The number of times going on trips with people they start banging on about "oh I got an upgrade" or I got XYZ to get me a better deal...
Just straight one up man ship and blokey competitiveness.
What tends to floor them is to not play the game eg not own a car then they can't do the "size you up routine" by asking what you drive...
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>>Hindsight is a wonderful gift that none of us have,<<
Hmm!! we all have it, just not before the event! - then it would be called "foresight" which only few of us have, if we had sufficient foresight we could look back with hindsight and not regret anything we had done previously.
Billy
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if we had sufficient foresight we could look back with hindsight and not regret anything we >>had done previously.
er, yes - I think!
A friend of mine would often refer to a 'retrospectoscope' when musing over similar philosophical points :-)
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I think that people stress out over car deals because in many cases they are not used to negotiating and it is the second highest price purchase they will make .
If they then see that they have paid a grand more than you should have it can be stressing.
I make deals all the time in my job , I'm buying and selling every day and enjoy it so if I am happy with the deal at the time and then find I could have done better elsewhere I don't get stressed, put it down to experience and do better next time.....
Talking of retrospectoscopes... do you remember those 'seebackroscopes ' that used to be advertised in comics.Amaze your friends when you can see whats going on behind you.
It was a mirror....
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This is my brother-in-law to a tee. He stresses over whether he could have saved fifty quid (and I'm not making that up) elsewhere, or whether the other car might have 1000 less miles on the clock for the same money. He then spends the first 6 weeks of ownership thinking he could have done better and beating himself up over it.
I'm the total opposite. If I got the car I was after, for what I wanted to pay for it, anything else is irrelevant. I do my research carefully, but once I've made my decision, that's it. Why worry about it?
Cheers
DP
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04 Grand Scenic 1.9 dCi Dynamique
00 Mondeo 1.8TD LX
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Another aspect can be other people who think they know what one wanted better than one did oneself. | have not a huge circle of relatives and friends, but since I got the Hyundai Coupe at least two of them have asked "Did you not think of the RX8?" Since the local showrooms are adjacent and you can walk straight through from one to the other it would have been a little hard not to!
I decline to be upset.
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>>Cars are such an emotive subject
Eh? Cars are a means of transport. Girlfriends; death; pestilence; famine; war; politics; religion are emotive subjects. Cars are lumps of tin.
>>Cars are the second most expensive thing you buy
I've spent more on a suit than on a car. Regularly.
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You buy cheap cars, but new suits befiting a rolls or maybach brand then (their equvilant in suits).
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Torque means nothing without RPM
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Agree it's never productive to get post purchase stress disorder, but plenty of 'anxiety' pre-purchase can save lots of money. I never used to get to the 'how many angels can stand on a pinhead' type of analysis stage before, but these days i figure 'Why should that guy have my £100,£200,£500 etc?' - much better in my pocket I think. Over a lifetime(!) all those bits saved, add up.
It's funny how people have different priorities though, for example: someone may fret about finding the final decimal point advantage in saving rates, but buy a car without pressuring the local dealer to compete with a broker price - often several £100's difference , sometimes a £1000 or more, when the the saving gain means only a hundred or so on £10K over a year (all terms/conditions being comparable etc)
Another aspect, I think not so far mentioned, is that it's easier to discern relative advantage/disadvantage in a deal when all aspects are directly comparable, i.e. dealer 'A' 5 miles away has car at £X, dealer 'B' has car at £X+200 - easy. More often than not though, minute differences in dealer 'quality' or finance deals, distance from home, precise specification availability etc. etc. can cloud a direct comparison in this way - hence 'anxious' weighing of pros & cons of each.
(just noticed my pound sign has appeared with a careted A in preview - not sure why )
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I'm certainly guilty of post ordering anxiety, but in my case it's been when I've spent too little.
I never had a moments hestitation about my MB (I went for the bigger engine) or my wife's Jazz (not really much to choose apart from the colour), but I really ought to have bought my older daughter a 1.4SE Ibiza instead of the horrible 1.2S and my younger daughter probably should have had a Yaris T3 1.3 instead of her Colt CZ1 (I mainly worry about the Colt's lack of airbags).
If there was a 7 day cooling off period, I bet a huge number of ordered cars would be cancelled!
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This is a well known and understood condition referred to as "cognitive dissonance", the internal stress that arises around a significant decision. Significance is a factor of "involvement", the degree to which the person is emotionally engaged in the purchase. This has been the subject of much research in the area of consumer and branded goods. Clearly what any brand owner wants is a high degree of loyalty, however it has been established that products vary in their degree of involvement. Baked beans are typically low involvement products but for women, for example, cosmetics and personal care products such as hair shampoo can be very high involvement. The level of involvement is not necessarily related to cost, although it is easy to see how it can be. Hence we can see some posters in anguish over their intended or recent purchase as they prevaricate and then maybe later beat themselves up over their purchase (the long running post about the merits of buying a Mercedes by Cattleman (I think) is a classic example of this). Others see no problem and a car is just a means to an end, but they will almost certainly have other higher involvement products in their buying portfolio - brand of newspaper, favourite drink etc etc. Much of the advertising for high involvement products can be aimed at this post-purchase dissonance, reassuring buyers that they really have made a smart decision. Of course there are those who dismiss all this as just psycho-babble, all their decisions are rational and objective. Such (post) rationalisation can be a large part of a purchasing decision, but for consumer purchases there are often more expressed preferences that can be found - so even if you think you are not influenced by advertising you often are!
MGs
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"
Talking of retrospectoscopes... do you remember those 'seebackroscopes ' that used to be advertised in comics.Amaze your friends when you can see whats going on behind you.
It was a mirror...."
I expect they got taken over by a BMW management team who wanted to turn the company around.
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