That sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? You never hear about honest used car salesmen. Mark and I encountered one this week. Here’s the story:
I’ve mentioned before that when we decided to begin this lifestyle, Mark reluctantly sold his Harley because we had no way to tow it as well as our car and he didn’t want to just leave it in storage. Now that Mark has bought another Harley, we still have the same problem…how to haul the Harley?
Several weeks ago we considered trading in my PriusV for a diesel truck and our RV for a toy hauler. We even went so far as to test drive a truck at the local Ford dealership, but then we realized that we couldn’t trade our RV in for a toy hauler. We’ve only had it for a year and haven’t really built any equity into it yet. We still thought we could trade in my car for the truck, but on the morning when we sat down to discuss it with the saleswoman who had been working with us, we ran into a glitch. The truck we were looking at wasn’t towable behind an RV. That was the end of the discussion and I figured that was the end of everything.
Earlier this week, Mark saw an interesting looking truck on a used car lot so we stopped to talk with a salesman named Dan Sether. As an interesting side note, Dan reminded me of my cousin, Dan Brim. He was softspoken and not a real hard-sell guy. He let us test drive a Dodge Ram and when we asked if it was towable with all wheels on the ground, he looked online to see if he could get an answer for us. The first thing he found indicated that it was towable, so we bought it. One of the benefits of the truck was that it was going to cut our car debt in half!
That night Dan called us at home. He said he hadn’t been real comfortable with the information he’d gotten about the Ram’s tow-ability, so he’d looked at several more sites online. Half of them said it was towable; half said it wasn’t. The next morning Mark took it to a Dodge dealer and they confirmed that it wasn’t towable, so we returned it and got our money back. It took an incredibly honest salesman to lose his commission because he was watching out for our good more than his own!
Mark and I continued to research the prospect of finding a towable truck with a long enough bed to carry the motorcycle. I came across some information that indicated that perhaps a Ford F-150 was towable, according to Motorhome magazine. I remembered that the used car lot where Dan worked had a 2008 F-150 on it, so I called Dan and asked if he knew whether it was towable. He said he’d get back to me on that. He found another website that said that the F-150 was towable, but this time he wasn’t going to be content with one source. He called a Ford dealership and asked them. When he called me back he said that his research indicated that the F-150 is towable as long as you stay around 55 mph. Would this be okay with us? Mark said he could live with that.
We went down and test drove the F-150, and when I say “we”, I mean I took a turn at driving it too. I would need to be able to drive it if I needed to go to the store alone or something. Other than being really high to climb into, it was easy to drive, so we bought it. It’s a little more expensive than the first truck we bought, but it still cut our car payments by about $5000.
The more we’ve driven the new truck around, the happier Mark is with it. He thinks we got a really good deal on this one; it has a lot of get-up-and-go! We aren’t completely ready to haul the motorcycle yet. We need a strong ramp that we can get the bike into the truck on, then we need a tow bar instead of the tow dolly we have. We’ve decided to hang around Kerrville for another week to try and resolve these issues.
Wanna see it?
They even match!