Fourteen years. My wife and I were proud minivan owners for 14 years until this month. Once you have three children, practicality takes immediate priority over self-image, so I was never fundamentally against owning a minivan. I was never like, “Oh my God, they’ll take away my man card now!” I was too busy changing diapers and cleaning up barf for that kind of shit to matter. As my old friend and fellow dad Steve Czaban once told me, a minivan is the right tool for the job. It’s affordable, it’s spacious, and you won’t freak out if its paint job gets a scratch. A minivan is built for its owner to treat it like shit. And folks, my family and I did just that. We left metric tons of Goldfish crumbs in between the seat cushions. We got sunscreen stains on the plastic interior that wouldn’t come out. And we tossed all manner of dirty items—wet towels, pungent soccer cleats, sand-covered beach chairs, the dog—into the back. We used every part of the animal when we owned our minivan.
This spring, the van suddenly wasn’t the right tool for the job. Our youngest son, now 14, had grown so large that he audibly complained about not having enough legroom on our last road trip. And he was barely ever riding in the van by that point. We have one kid already in college, and another not far off. With a partially empty nest, we now had fewer bodies to transport regularly, with less baggage accompanying them. My wife often drove the van all by her lonesome, which made no practical sense.
She and I always knew that we’d outgrow minivans eventually, both physically and aesthetically. We’d always talked about what we’d buy in the post-minivan phase of our marriage. It was a fun little daydream: “Maybe we’ll get a convertible hahahaha.” So the second she openly mused about trading in our Honda Odyssey for something new, the die was cast. Once my wife has an idea, it will become a reality. I learned to accept this fact well before we’d even gotten hitched. As such, the Odyssey’s days were now numbered. It was time to downsize, and perhaps upgrade. We were both cautiously excited.
But first we had to shop for the car, which fucking blows.
The last time my wife and I bought a new car was five years ago. Even in that relatively short timespan, the car-buying process has become, somehow, even more dehumanizing than it once was. Most local car dealerships exist more to sell you a shitty loan than a quality automobile, while the rest of the car-buying ecosystem remains designed to exhaust and frustrate you until you just settle for whatever vehicle happens to be around. Sites like Cars.com give you listings on your phone, but no physical inventory to peruse. Meanwhile, dealerships never have enough inventory of their own, and what good cars they have on the lot are often already spoken for. That’s especially true where I live, where demand for cars is so high that dealerships barely have to lift a finger to sell them.
And the ones we visited, by and large, did not. We visited a Honda dealership and they didn’t give a shit. We visited a Toyota dealership and they didn’t give a shit. We visited a Carvana for the first time, only to learn—far later than most of you have—that Carvana’s entire business model is centered around not giving a shit. A Carvana dealership is nothing more than a pretty tower of used cars and iPad ordering kiosk. You don’t get to test-drive anything. You don’t even get besieged by a greasy Pete Hegseth–type the moment you walk in the door. When we walked into a Carvana near our house, there wasn’t even anyone in the lobby. No sales rep. No other customers. No randos. The place may as well have been fucking haunted. What happened to the courtship in buying a car, I ask you?
Carvana operates on the assumption that you only need to see a used car online before purchasing it, which enables them to hire the barest minimum of staff. But the awful truth is that people like me NEED car dealers, even the ones who insist on coming along on the test drive. I have questions for car dealers that need answering, questions that go beyond, “Hey, can you give me a couple grand off the sticker price just so I can pretend you didn’t fuck me?” I need to know the brass tacks. Is this car as low-maintenance as the Kelley Blue Book says it is? Does it have good pickup? Why is the display annoying like that? Can I change it? I’m gonna live with this car every day for years, so I need someone who can tell me what life inside that car will be like.
For the most part, my wife and I had to answer those questions on our own. We got in one pre-owned model and it smelled funny. We tested out another model and despised its iPad-style touchscreen display. We test-drove a slightly used Honda SUV, and the interior felt cheap to the touch. I cosplayed as the youngest of our children and sat in the back of every car, seeing if I had enough legroom when the driver’s seat was positioned all the way back. Often, I didn’t. We were looking for a midsize SUV, preferably a hybrid, and preferably lightly used, with a decent amount of legroom in the second row. Nothing on sale seemed to tick off those boxes, and when we recited our wish list to nearly every local dealer, they reacted as if we’d asked them to solve a quantum physics proof. Many of them knew less about their cars on the lot than we did, which should never happen.
Just about the only somewhat humane dealership my wife and I visited during this exercise was a local Carmax. At a Carmax, you can roam the lot and every car on sale is unlocked. Great setting for an action film sequence, imo. Also, you get a trade-in offer on the spot that’s good for seven days. Carmax provides basic service to customers in the market, which makes them my JD Power/Motor Trend seven-star service award winner.
Alas, none of the cars on our Carmax lot were just right. But we hadn’t wasted our time entirely. On that Carmax lot, we checked out a wide enough variety of makes and models and picked up a stronger scent for what we wanted. Many brand dealerships in our area had similarly disparate used inventories, and our Carmax venture gave up just us enough energy to take one more trip around Dealer Strip USA to see if we could hit paydirt.
We walked into a nearby luxury car dealership whose name I won’t divulge, because this post is not an ad. One of the salesmen warmly greeted us at the door, and then entreated us to look around the showroom on our own. My wife and I, neither of us having ever purchased a luxury car before, were astounded by his genteel approach. So this is how the other half lives. They even had good coffee at this dealership. I damn near asked if they rented out office space for me to work in.
We sat down with the salesman and told him what we were looking for. While he spoke, I, being both enervated and hungry, saw a dish of Cadbury mini-eggs sitting on his desk. Behind that was a bespoke wire box with a horde of Lindt truffles in it. I couldn’t partake in these delights with my wife present, because she would have disapproved. So while the dealer talked about what model could potentially work best for us, I focused on the candy. We may not find a car during this trip, I thought, but I WILL get some free chocolate of this fucking ordeal.
When my wife got up to check out some of the new cars in the showroom, I waited until she was fully obscured by some big rhino SUV on the floor, and then quickly shoved a few of the Cadbury eggs into my eager mouth. Mmmm… candy.
She sat back down. “You didn’t have any of that candy, did you?”
“No.”
“OK.”
When she got back up again, I went for the truffles. They even had pistachio ones. I sampled those ones, and the double chocolate ones, and the fondant one. We are going to buy a car here, I thought. Carmax didn’t have free candy like these guys do. I did not tell my wife any of this.
It was wise of me to bite my tongue, because we soon realized we’d come up empty at yet another dealership. Every car in this location either didn’t fit our needs or was too expensive. Perhaps the car we wanted had ceased to exist at all. Maybe, after years of living the minivan life, we were stuck with one until the grave.
But then, on our walk back to the old car, I spotted a sleek blue electric vehicle in the inventory lot. We had never owned an EV, but this one was spacious. Best of all, it was lightly used: a high-end 2024 model discounted by nearly half its price all because it was no longer in production, and because it had 5,000 miles on it.
“What about that one?” I asked the dealer. “That one still for sale?”
“I think so.”
We sat in it, her in front and me in the back. I fit in this car. I even fit in the dreaded middle back seat. The front was, as you might expect, even more luxurious. Unlike a lot of e-cars, this one also had an assortment of buttons and switches on the dash, instead of relegating every control to a touchscreen. I need doodads in my car, and so does my wife. When she pulled the car out of the lot during our test drive, I knew this was the one. But I said nothing because A) this was to be my wife’s primary car, not mine, and B) the dealer was on the drive with us, and I didn’t care to tip my hand.
When we pulled back into the lot, the salesman, who by now we were on a first-name basis with, asked how we liked the ride.
“My wife and I have to discuss that privately, if you don’t mind,” I told him. I liked this man, and his candy, but I wanted it firmly established that I was no sucker. Before he went back to his desk, I asked him if he could knock a grand off its price. He said he’d—say it with me—talk to his manager. Once alone with my wife, I let her go first.
“It’s very nice,” she said. From a German woman, this counts as a rave. She had a number of lingering questions, particularly with regards to charging the fucker, but she didn’t hate it. And it didn’t smell. We went back to our salesman friend and he said he could give us $500 off, but no more than that. This was the only 2024 EV they had on the lot, and they already (allegedly) had more customers coming to test it. I believed him on both counts. There is a coming wave of affordable used EVs hitting the market, and we had found this car right as the wave was gathering. Even with the meager pity discount, we would still be paying an excellent price for this thing when the van’s trade-in value factored in. We test-drove the new car back to our house so that our sons could ride in it (they fit), and then turned right back around to the dealership so we could finalize the purchase. A few hours later, we were the proud, and now extremely cautious, owners of a fancy EV. Plus I could tell everyone, you included, that I got a deal on it.
We have not adjusted to post-minivan life instantly. We’re still sorting out how this thing works, and my wife is deeply concerned about damaging her new baby, much like Sam Malone worried about anyone touching his ‘Vette. For years, we had a family car that we could treat like shit. Now we have one that we have to, like, care about. But we only found that car after navigating an ecosystem that, as a whole, treated us like shit. We had to do the grunt work. We had get out there to barnstorm dealerships, test out dozens of cars, sit in dozens more, pore over sticker price breakdowns, and search, often in vain, for good car people we could talk to. People who knew about the product they were selling. People who gave a shit. It’s no coincidence that we ended up buying our car from the one place around that dared to employ such people. It's also no coincidence that, in 2026 America, the most trustworthy car salesman I could hope to meet would be a stranger with candy.
