Tideland or Seaside #9 or #7; May 15, 2004; Austin, TX

Yeah, the 2005 #6 = 2004 #9. So I was turning it down based on color (white was the bottom of my list) and I considered my ordered "filled" last week by Beaman. Plus, I felt that Beaman treated me way better than the Maund dealership. Though Maund never did ask me for extra money to get my car sooner (as was rumored, although I guess all the extra option packages are an easy way to inflate the price of the car).

Matt, I think you should get a car in the next allocation. Kevin said (and maybe he was just saying this) that part of the reason I got my car with this allocation was because of the color I chose, so maybe they don't have too many Tideland orders.

 

I got the fax today with the invoice and the VIN. The car should arrive anywhere from Oct 4-11, and I'll be picking it up Oct 15 (moved my pick up date to the end of the week so I could drive back over the weekend).

So Matt, Kevin should be well prepared when you get the call and are constantly pestering him for information .

 

Ack Matt, sorry to hear about your head injury. Hopefully you recover quickly. Let us know if you get the call next weekend .

 

Well, I got another call from Kevin today (hope you did too, Matt). My Prius is at the dealership already! That was pretty fast. We're going to do the paperwork by overnight mail so he can count the car as sold, even though I won't be in Nashville to pick it up until the 15th. Kevin offered to pick me up at the airport even though I get in pretty late Thursday night, which was quite nice of him, but my boyfriend will already be there. I'll let you know how the actual exchange goes, but I'm guessing it will be pretty fast and painless (well, except for the money part ).

 

Plus one for the Austin Prius community.

I picked up my Tideland BC from Beaman Toyota in Nashville on Friday. The transaction was very easy. First thing, we went out for a little spin and Kevin gave a quick overview of all the features. He seemed relatively knowlegable, though he didn't really seem to know about any of the TSBs or updates I mentioned (possibly because he's in sales rather than service). Then we went inside to see the guy who does the sales agreement and do the paperwork. They had me re-sign the purchase agreement (which I had already done by overnight mail) with the current date. I was afraid they were going to try to push the extended warranty at that point since I had declined it with the original purchase agreement, but when the guy asked if we had discussed the extended warranty, I said I wasn't interested and that was the end of the conversation. Kevin had a service tech take off the Beaman decal that they had put on the car (he offered to do it, probably because the advertising isn't really going to help them in Austin) and while we waited for that to be done, we took a look under the hood.

The drive back from Nashville was about 1100 miles. We took the slightly longer southern route (Birmingham to New Orleans to Houston to Austin) rather than the northern route (Memphis to Little Rock to Dallas to Austin) to visit a friend in New Orleans and played with almost every feature on the drive (except the VSC and side curtain airbags, which I'd rather never have to "play" with). S.O. found the disabling of Nav features when in motion very annoying, but we did use it to figure out how to meet up with our friend in LA and find restaurants along the drive. I found it to be a bit susceptible to cross winds while driving on the interstate, but I don't know if it's more so than my Civic was. I had one instance where I turned off the car without my foot on the brake (we had pulled in and I had applied the parking brake, and then we started fooling with the Nav and I was distracted) at which point the car beeped angrily at me when I opened the door. I cycled through ACC-IgOn and the park light was on and powered down and all was fine. But after that, every time I wasn't driving, I worried about why the car was beeping until I remembered about the reverse beeper. We averaged about 45 mpg on the trip, but we were driving around 75 mph (so the trip wouldn't take forever) and the tires may have been a bit underinflated (I forgot to bring a tire pressue gauge with me to Nashville). I should average better than on my daily commute, it's very MPG friendly (all local roads, with lots of coasting). I didn't see a single Prius on our drive (though they're difficult to spot in the dark or while sleeping), but a classic passed me on the way to work this morning in Austin.

I'll be driving around with temp plates for a while (so I'm the Tideland with a temp tag in the upper window and a Beaman rear license plate). The certificate of origin is coming from Toyota and Beaman is sending me the completed Texas application for title. I kind of expected them to just fill in the seller info on the title application when I was there and hand it to me, but it seems that every detail has to be handled by a different person at a car dealership. I'm not concerned because I need the certificate of origin before I can register anyhow. And Kevin said he'd send me new temp tags if the expiration date was close and I still hadn't gotten all the paperwork I needed.

Oh, a side note for anyone waiting for a Prius in middle TN... Beaman is getting nearly 100% of the allocation in the area. They've also stopped charing a $1k premium for out of region orders (they never really did, though it was policy for a short period of time).