Yesterday, I brought my wife's car in, for an alignment. The dealership had tried twice already, but still couldn't get it right. A year later (now) we bring it in, and the guy says: you need new tires! $600 (my wife, too frustrated with the whole thing said "fine, go ahead", so we'll have a brand new set of Dunlops today
)
Well, no s**t Sherlock!
So we got a rental car for the day: a Geo Metro. At first I thought it was a POS, but I was more used to it this morning. It feels pretty solid, it's not as noisy as I thought it would be, for a 3 cylinder engine, but if there are any students out there looking at this car, I'd recommend getting it with a standard transmission, if it's available, 'cause that automatic tranny just sucks the life out of that engine.
And if you are considering a Nissan, make sure that you have a good service shop around: ours is the absolute pits, and being 10 miles from home, I'd rather not go back there any more than I have to. They've scratched the inside, messed up the alignment, didn't stock the right parts, etc...
The funny thing is that we got a Customer Satisfaction Survey card in the mail, for each visit, so they know that we're not happy with them, they're just not doing anything about it... Never mind the fact that the dealership sold us the car for $600 more than what Carmax can do, they let us have a car that had 500+ miles on it (another one of my wife's impulses).
I miss my old Nissan 240 ZX, RWD...