FeedsI want a car. I ordered a car.
I want to live in London, so I can spend less time travelling to work, and spend less money travelling to work.
I don’t have enough money to do both.
So I cancelled my car last week. Having done hours of research on the car I want, had refresher driving lessons, and having waited a very long 10 weeks after ordering it I told the dealer I don’t want it anymore.
Except I do want it. I just want a flat in London even more. Sigh.
So on the off-chance that Ford updated their website to show the new colours available on Foci, I had a look tonight. And found nothing on the UK website, but then I decided to check the website of Ford Germany. Assuming that ‘Ocean’ for Germany is the same as ‘Ocean’ for the UK I now know what colour my car is going to be!
From left in the picture below: 3D rendering of Focus in ‘Jeans Blue’ (the colour I ordered) from ford.co.uk, low-quality graphic from the dealer to show me what ‘Ocean Blue’ would look like, 3D rendering of Focus in ‘Ocean Blue’ from ford.de.
I’m still trying to decide if I like it or not - the 3D model is in a completely different shade of blue than the dealer graphic!
Apparently I should be able to take delivery on September 23rd.
Me Happy 
Add your parents as named drivers. I read this tip online, and tried it out. Despite ticking the boxes that said ‘they drive other cars regularly’, I still managed to reduce my quote by £95!
Because I’ve had about 2hrs driving experience in the last 4 years, I’m having some ‘refresher’ lessons whilst I wait for my car to be built.
Today I had a lesson booked for 9.45. I woke up to the sound of the doorbell @ 9.44, and was in the instructor’s car @ 9.47. I then drove around Chelmsford’s horrible one-way system complete with myriad roundabouts etc for 2 hours.
2 hours in busy roads, having woken up 3 minutes beforehand. And I didn’t even have a near-miss.
It’s nice to know that I am capable of doing that, although I don’t think I want to do it again…
Just realised I never mentioned where I found the massive discount. It was at drivethedeal.com.
Basically they find you an official dealer with a really low price and simply pass them your details - the actual transaction takes place with the official franchised dealer (would you rather hand over several grand to a well-established dealer, or a website you’ve never heard of before?). They make their money from dealer’s commission for the sale, the dealer makes a sale he wouldn’t have before, and the customer gets a bargain price car (with delivery included). Everyone goes away happy. Yay!
This is different to most internet brokers, who buy the cars themselves using fleet discounts, and then pass them on ‘untouched’ to you. Because of fleet discount restrictions, that means that the cars must legally remain ‘theirs’ for 3-6 months, which means that most insurance companies won’t touch you if that’s to be your primary car.
When specifying my car, I picked ‘Jeans Blue’ for the paint colour. It’s a kind of dark blue, and looked a lot better than red, black, white, dark grey, or green (both my parents cars are silver, so I’ve ruled that out). I got a phone call today from the dealer, which had some bad news - my car won’t be built until after the ’summer shutdown’ (I believe it’s where the factory doesn’t make any cars for a few weeks, so workers can go on holiday and the factory can be upgraded for new models). After the shutdown, Ford aren’t selling Focuses (Foci?) in that colour anymore - it’s been replaced with ‘Ocean Blue’. Although I think that ‘Ocean Blue’ still looks better than the other colours on offer it’s not as nice as ‘Jeans Blue’.
The picture below shows the difference - the car is in my preferred shade of blue, and the inset picture (which was the best the dealer had) shows Ford’s replacement. Bah.
Oh, and ‘a few weeks’ actually turns out to be mid-September 
I just bought my first car. Well, it’s not bought yet because it’ll take several weeks to arrive, but that’s not the point.
It’s my 1st car (even though I’ve had my license for over 4 years).
It’s a brand spanking new Ford Focus Titanium (1.6 Diesel).
Combined with the options I want Ford’s MSRP is £19,420.00. I’m paying £14,714.53 for the car (the rest is 1st years insurance for someone without a no-claims bonus built up). That’s a 24% discount, which means I’m a very happy person. I’m also a very scared person, because the most I’ve ever spent on anything before was about £900.
Note to Allen Ford (Brentwood). One of your salesmen offered me £1,000 off a car (Focus Zetec Climate) last month and then insisted that
I can’t give you a bigger discount - there’s no more money in the car
when it was pointed out that discounts of £3,500+ are available from just about every car supermarket out there. Since one of Ford’s standard offers last month was £1,000 off a Zetec Climate he was either very stupid, or has a policy of treating your customers as stupid. For the record my purchase (complete with £4705.47 discount) is from an official Ford dealer.