Ehsan Nourbakhsh’s Blog » Web

My Experience Buying A New Car

Ehsan — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 23:56:50 +0000

Recently I spent some time shopping for a new car. A dear friend of mine, Ahmad, recommended some good internet resources. These helped me find out how good was each deal that I got. He also helped me with some different issues in financing and mechanical/design things.

I will try to briefly explain the steps that I took, and how they were useful. As usual, it is just my experience. Verify everything and decide for your own. Here is a summary of links if you are in a hurry:

Read more about my experience using these links below…

Find out the price range

You need to decide: (a) how much down payment you can afford (b) how much you can pay each month, if you are looking for auto loan. Please note that buying a new car will change amount of monthly insurance and gas payment from what you spend now.

Once these two are decided for, you can estimate the final price of the car you are looking for. Some companies have reverse calculators. You enter monthly payment and down payment and they tell you what car and what total price you can buy. Honda has a simple tool here.

Later in the process I used software like Annual Percentage Rate Calculation Program. Better than that was a Excel sheet auto loan calculator. I used it to calculate some different prices that I guessed. I had these prints with me, and was able to catch an unannounced change in price in one dealership. Saved me $1000!

This step helped me narrow my search to a smaller number of models.

What make and models are close to my price range? Which of them have good reviews?

I looked at Consumer Reports annual special issue for new cars. They have classified cars based on price, quality, consumer satisfaction and other factors. I don’t know much about cars and their reviews were consistent with what my know-about-cars friend told me. I also asked a couple of friends who had recently bought cars. This narrowed my search to base model of Honda Fit and Nissan Versa 1.8S.

One important thing is to check which cars are going to be redesigned. If a car is redesigned next year, your new car will look “old” from the moment the new design comes out.

What options these model have that are useful for me?

Again, I consulted friends who had driven the same car before as well as online resources and Consumer Reports. Specially I liked the Edmunds’ Long-Term Road Tests Blog. Also, Edmunds has a step by step price estimator, during which you can select options and see the prices. In this step I decided I liked to have ABS and cruise control options in the Versa. Honda Fit did not have any option for the base model.

Also note that some options are always installed on cars. For instance most Nissan Versas that I saw have splash guard installed by default. I realized this when I checked inventories of Nissan dealerships in my area. You can either check their inventories from Nissan’s main website or local inventories. Also you can search third party sites like AutoTrader.com or Cars.com. My experience was the inventory of Nissan’s main website was not up-to-date. Also, the third party websites did not have all the details of options installed on the cars sometimes.

Talking with dealers and finding good deals

I tried getting online quotes from dealers through Nissan’s main website. The result was not so interesting. Then I tried using the third party websites and Edmunds.com. The ones I contacted using Edmunds.com were the ones I got good price quotes from.

After the initial quote, I had around 10 emails passed back and forth, negotiating the price. They made “mistakes” sometimes and quoted me the MSRP. I would remind them the fact that I have a better quote, and then they would correct their quote. Ahmad just reminded me that there is no need to mention you are getting financing from them before going to their dealership. In fact what I did was I would let them convince me that I needed the financing from them. This makes negotiating easier, as you still have the “upper hand” somehow.

I noticed, with Ahmad’s help, that Nissan had an incentive choice of either $1000 cash back or a %1.9 APR. Most dealers would give a price quote with the $1000 reduced. So when I mentioned I am getting the APR in the dealership, they would jump $1000 up. When getting quotes, ask them for quotes “before reducing any incentives applied”.

One good website to see the price quotes others get is the Edmunds forums. I usually searched Versa+paid+price in Google to reach the forum. The first result is usually the answer: http://townhall-talk.edmunds.com/WebX/.ef17997/ You can check the prices and see what is the good prices people get. This should be way lower than the MSRP unless the car is in high demand. In my case the MSRP was $1350 higher than the final price I paid. Worth the time, isn’t it?

Test drive, negotiate and buy

Test Drive: During the test drive I only tested how was the visibility and how I liked the shape of the car. Also I asked a friend to come with me, and before the test drive when the dealer was driving I would seat in the back seat and see how was the back of the car. After the drive I would write down the VIN number of the car.

Price: I usually would almost finalize a price over email with the dealer. Telephone price quotes are hard to prove and the dealer may claim there was a “mistake”. I would ask every detail, i.e. the VIN and the options and price before incentives, to be sent to me with email. Then I would take prints of the emails from all dealers when going to see a dealer. The prints are very useful for negotiating. I got a lower price from a dealer to “match the price” of another dealer, just by showing their printed quote. Also if you are trying to get an incentive that the main company provides, print that page and have it with you.

Buying: During the final buying step, I just made sure nothing other than what was agreed was there in the price break down, of course by mistake. Also, the accompanying friend told me that the “finance” person that I was supposed to talk after the dealer was in fact a sales person for the extended warranty stuff. “Just say no!”., he recommended. Go through the documents that you sign, take your time and check this is what you want. I also wrote the VIN number on the check for down payment, just in case.

This is my experience and I hope to update here in near future if I remember something more. Hope it helps you get a better price. Again, verify everything. I don’t share your car with you, and I don’t share the trouble either Good luck with your new car!

Google Maps Mobile “My Location” feature, how does it work

Ehsan — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 06:13:32 +0000

Google Maps mobile has been one of my favorite applications from Google. Recently they added one beta feature to it which is a milestone for the Google Maps Mobile (GMM). They have added the ability to find your approximate geographical location solely based on the data that your cell phone receives from base stations. This is really nice since once you know the approximate location, you can guess the details yourself. Also, each time you don’t need to enter your own address before searching for the destination address.

It has been an interesting case to find out how they do it, and by how I mean the general implementation idea and not the theoretical foundations. I post here my current understanding of the implementation, which may be lacking some parts. I hope I can update this as I gather more information.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires that antenna structures with height over 200ft, or close to airport or with some specific slope requirements, register themselves. FCC publishes information gathered from these registrations on their website here. One can search these based on file number, location, address or many other criteria. For instance the tower inside UTD is shown here. The FCC File Registration Number (FRN) shown here is posted in front of the facility too.

Still one problem remains unsolved. FCC only registers the antenna structures, and not the Cell ID broadcasted by the radis on the tower. The only thing that your cell phone receives when it is connected to the radio is the Cell ID (CID) and Location Area Code (LAC), and not the FRN of tower. Although the LAC indicates an area location, the exact location and its boundaries are not broadcasted. If users wish to map the LAC to latitude and longtitude, they should find the mapping themselves. And to make things worse, phone companies do not publish these datasets of CID/LAC.

There have been multiple attempts by different parties to collect information from users of how a CID/LAC pair is related to geographical location. For instance the GSMLoc.org , CellSpotting.com and many similar projects try to gather this information from their users. Unfortunately I have not been able to find such project with enough data for users inside United States, while most of these projects cover good pars of Europe.

Google seem to have a database of the to location mapping, and seems to be completing it based on the data it receives from users. When you press the 0 button, your cell phone sends the pair(s) that it sees to Google’s server. The server comes up with an approximate location(the blue dot) and the possible error (the blue circular area). Obviously you need a data connection for the location info and the map images being sent and received. I don’t know if they have been able to buy parts of the database from phone companies, or how they use user queries to update the database, but whatever it is their final software rocks.

One final note, there are some software that can show the Cell ID and Location Area Code on your cell phone. I am using NiceTrack on Windows Mobile 2005 on my HTC Wizard. It also shows the signal strength as a graph. There are also similar software for different platforms. If you want to try the GSMLoc and CellSpotting projects, these can give you the pair.

Links for more information and resources:

Internet Privacy: fact or fiction?

Ehsan — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 06:28:25 +0000

Reading a news article on Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) being forced to take down University Toolkit for violation of GPL license, I started to think how deep our privacy is being violated. As Brian Kerb of Washington post describes in his article, the University Toolkit is essentially a monitoring software, just identifying people with highest amount of network traffic with the file name, port address and traffic volume.

Beyond the irony of a copyright enforcing institution having to take down a software because of copyright violation, the software itself really annoys me. Imagine such observation shows some illegal activity going on the university network. Can this observation be used in a court of law? If not, why should such observation be done then. If yes, is it not a violation of “reasonable expectation of privacy”? If tapping someone’s internet activity is considered legal without a court order, same would hold for phone wire tapping. I am sure there is a problem in here, a huge problem!

BoingBoing on Drunk Astronauts

Ehsan — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 23:19:42 +0000

My favorite website, BoingBoing, has made a big mistake by naming Homer Simpson “Drunk Astronaut Pioneer”. That is a big mistake, since the pioneer of them all is nobody except Captain Archibald Haddock.

In the Explorers on the Moon (On a marché sur la Lune) book of series The Adventures of Tintin, Captain Haddock sneaks some bottles of Whisky and gets drunk in space. Since this book was published in 1954, there would be no doubt that Homer Simpson is not even in the game.

ip info greasemonkey script

Ehsan — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 21:03:47 +0000

It usually happens that while I am reading an e-mail or viewing a stat report online, I want to quickly check the IP address information of sender. For instance just to see if the IP of sender is actually from the city the claimed person is in. This is not a big deal, I can copy and paste the IP too. But well that would not be me

For this I had written a greasemonkey script at least a year and half ago, which surprisingly still works! It converts the IP format numbers in the page to links to www.dnsstuff.com IP information page. Only install greasemonkey using link #1, and then click on the link #2. Firefox will prompt to install this.

diggy night

Ehsan — Wed, 02 May 2007 03:52:18 +0000

I can’t resist writing it. Takes 5 minutes of my qualifier exam time, but is worth it.

A digg user posted an item about a HD-DVD code, and the fact it was taken down because of a takedown notice. Digg removed that. People noticed that and informed each other of Digg’s removing the dugg story. But Digg removed those too. People dugg all of this again, Digg un-dugged. People dugg, ….

The result? Look at this:

You think it is over? NO! The same is happening with Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDDVD_Night. People [write in] wiki, Wiki removes. People (write in) wiki, ….

bug or feature?

Ehsan — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 16:56:29 +0000

I just figured out that our web portal Galaxy, a uPortal in fact, and also our courseware WebCT both only use first eight characters of our passwords! This is interesting, since when choosing a password we are “forced” to use a password between 8 and 20, containing special characters and numbers.

Is it only me who thinks so, or is it kind of silly?

firefox crashes, too often

Ehsan — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 19:34:09 +0000

Just to quickly say: at this very moment FireFox 2.0.0.2 sucks!

It dies when a page has too many elements, like Wikipedia pages. Also, it does not like more than 1 or 2 YouTube videos in one page. It simply crashes, even in safe mode with no plug-in running. Sometimes it does not crash, but it sort of “stalls” while loading a tab, and you cannot click a link or change tabs with mouse. Honestly I am using Internet Explorer more and more each day. It works fine on all those pages and in same conditions.

Update: I did the following:

un-installed Firefox
removed any folder remaining from it
restarted my laptop and
then installed Firefox again

The first page I visited: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number and guess what? It crashed! It used to crash on the same page before too. Internet Explorer works fine in that page, and I am using IE for all my surfing now.

Update2: Pooya just directed me to the right IRC [ irc.mozilla.org #firefox], where we figured out what was the problem: a font! Yes, one font named Xerxes [see it here] could not render CTRL+L character correctly. So, I removed the font and all the pain was gone. I posted it here as a comment to a bug report in 2006. Thanks Pooya!

what does google suggest about iran?

ehsan — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 18:19:28 +0000

I just read Philipp Lenssen’s post on “What We Ask Google“. He has typed some generic questions for Google’s suggesting feature, and posted the replies. They are very funny:

Does God …
… exist?
… play dice?
… love me?
… change his mind?
… answer prayers?

I just localized the idea and asked for suggestions about Iran. See the results:

does iran …
…have nuclear weapons …have nukes …have oil

is iran …
…next …a democracy …a threat …a nuclear threat …arab …the next target …an islamic state …an arab country …arabic …a thecracy

why iran …
…hates israel …hates us …is next …next …wants nuclear weapons

how iran …
…will fight back

will iran …
…be next …be next fallows …be attacked

I don’t know if to consider these funny, or sad?

YouTube, Cell Phones and UCLA campus police

ehsan — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 21:36:10 +0000

Read this:
Video Shows UCLA Police Using Stun Gun On Student
and this:
A third incident, a new video
A cellphone camera captures UCLA police using a Taser on a student who allegedly refused to leave the library Tuesday night.
and if had time, this:
LAPD, FBI probe arrest on videotape
And, you might want to watch this:

It seems that YouTube is playing a very interesting role in LA this year:

“Californians are entitled to more transparency than a chance video,” said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California. “YouTube is not an acceptable substitute for accountability.”

Morals of the story:
1-Students are very likely to do very very stupid things, like not showing an ID or whatever. Reason? They are young and have not much experience. But responding that with something like Tasing them is far more stupid and meaningless.
2-Combination of YouTube and Cell phone camera means real media.

PS: A witness says in NBC4 article:

I can just say that he was willing to leave. He had his backpack on his shoulder and he was walking out when the cops approached him. It was unnecessary.