As mentioned last week, the kids’ 2008 Scion xB consumed it’s own motor and has become a subcompact, boxy-yet-attractive, towable paperweight in my driveway. Work is underway to obtain some measure of value back in salvage, though it won’t be nearly what we’ve put into it over the last couple of months since we bought it.

Indeed, it sucks.

The plan hatched, also described last week, was to step up the replacement of my 2016 by a couple of years, and just pass mine back to the kids, and I start working the system to find a new car in a land of empty-due-to-supply-chain-issues car lots.

Figuing it’d take a little while to make things happen, I popped by the Toyota dealer I’ve been dealing with for the last decade with the intent to get myself on their radar as someone who’s looking for a new vehicle.

Twenty minutes later I’d put a deposit down to reserve a fresh 2022 Corolla Hatch, currently housed in a container ship making its way across the Pacific, of which I’ll take delivery of in a couple of weeks.

Turns out they’ve got several coming in, and manual transmissions scare your average American, so this one was still not spoken for (though it is now).

The transaction was, to be honest, pretty easy. Given current market conditions, paying MSRP is the best deal anyone’s going to get (rare and desirable models are getting crazy markup right now), so it was simply a matter of walking in and ordering the damned thing.

And the price is basically right, and five grand less than the two year old one-trim-level-up-but-effectively-the-same used version sitting on the lot with 20k miles and road-rashed rims.

Like I said, I don’t want another car payment at the moment, but this solves a problem I wasn’t expecting, I’m in a position to put a huge down payment on it, so it won’t be an unmanageable payment.

Now, I’ll just have to get used to all the new safety features and a big iPad sticking out of the dash…