The loyal car you’ve had for years is rapidly rusting its charm away, and if the squished bugs on the windshield and outer body ever stop holding hands, it’ll likely collapse in a heap of scrap metal. You slap the dash and steering wheel trying to dislodge the gunk that is making the motor hack and wheeze, and you often call on the Lord as your divine mechanic. Nuns on Sunday take notes on the piety of used car owners. So, you want a new, or at least better, car, but have neither the time nor the desire to waste a weekend dealing with slick salespeople, choosing from a limited selection, and feeling like you may not have gotten the best deal? What other way is there? The Internet may be the answer.

We’re almost in the ’00s so you’ll have to drop the apprehension of shopping from the Internet. The car business is dedicated to the customer’s complete privacy and satisfaction and there are entire law firms waiting for a fraud charge: jilting you would be suicide for their company. Just put on a pair of comfy shorts, the shirt you slept in, and get a hot cup of coffee. Let’s find you a car.

Start broad. Hit some of the “builder sites,” those which permit you to choose from every type of make and model at their base price and then check off whatever extras you’d like. These sites provide you with a good idea of the cost of your car choice. Carprices.com and Carsdirect.com provide easy formats for any user. The menus in Carprices.com are more precise than most shoppers would expect. Choices begin simply with either a new or used car and splinter off into make, body type (SUV, sedan, wagon), price range, and more. For fun, I built myself a 2000 Porsche with everything from heated seats to $450 speaker covers with leather trim. The price was obnoxious, but the Internet never once said condescendingly, “Maybe you’d like to see something more in your price range.” Carsdirect.com is geared toward providing a more pristine environment for shoppers. The site is dapper and tailored with features instilling confidence in its visitors. Carsdirect.com supplies high quality images of the make and model of the car you build, too. It even provides recent articles in leading newspapers and magazines lauding its superb services. It gently follows steps in finding the car you want, what it may cost, what your current vehicle’s value is, lets you buy it, and removes the overwhelming feeling of too much to choose from. If you still aren’t sure which car is best for you, it allows you to compare two or more cars to weigh the advantages of each vehicle. See the list of sites listed in the sidebar for more choices.

After winnowing out your ultimate transportation, find out how available it is. Most of the builder sites invariably asked what state I was interested in shopping in. Pennsylvania was quite broad, and I was permitted to taper my search to dealerships in Central PA by entering a zip code. It seems that every dealer in the area is on the Internet now, each one all too ready to accept your business. I was furnished with a list of about 20 local dealers when I requested a late model Saturn LS2. Of course I expected to see Saturn dealers, but there were also Honda, BMW, and Chrysler/Dodge sellers in the mix.

I called Bill Miller at Cumberland Valley Motors Subaru, cvmsubaru.com, to ask why his lot would be able to help me get a Saturn. “With our other lots in the area,” explained Miller, “we can find just about any car or have it brought in for you within days.” Miller said that nearly 5 –10% of current auto sales come from their web site. That seems to be the consensus with the other dealers, also. Bob Lawson sees the Internet shopping trend increasing the client traffic at Mechanicsburg’s LB Smith Jaguar, lbsmithjaguar.com. “We get a number of hits on our site every day, which gets bigger as the weeks go on,” said Lawson.

Echoing Lawson’s thoughts was Ken Reiner of Brenner Dodge, brennerdodge.com. “We’re getting more and more people from the Internet everyday,” he said, emphasizing the fact that “more and more people have been on our site.” In fact, it seemed that all of the dealerships I talked to or visited on the web included aspects that feature, quote, and/or list used as well as new car inventories — including the folks at Freysinger Pontiac, Freysinger.com. Owner Tom Freysinger admits that having a website has slowly, but surely been very beneficial to the interested customer. Consumers use the Internet “not to a large degree, but they have,” he says, adding, “whether it’s to get an idea for inventory or as far as pricing before they step onto the lot.”

Trust me when I say that there is no dealer that won’t do everything possible to meet the needs of the customer. Enjoy.

Now that you have an idea of where to get your perfect car, how do you take care of the details like kicking the tires, haggling over price, financing, insurance and getting rid of the current automotive thorn in your side? Believe it or not, you can have everything taken care of without even moving. Carprices.com, a builder site I mentioned earlier, has links to each of the following: Carfax.com — a vehicle history checker (for those tire kickers), Carfinance.com — a site to banks and financiers, Insweb.com — a site linking to the country’s leading insurance companies, and Donateacar.com — a site which will take your car off your hands as a donation (great tax write-off!). At a site called Autopark.com you can virtually haggle your price by starting a bidding war between different dealers! Everything in shopping for a car via the Internet is arranged around the consumer’s desire to have a comfortable, worry-free experience doing a normally stressful activity. Maybe income tax audits will soon be performed this way.