A day off

We contemplated the bright car with gloom in our eyes. "Ah, um," I said hopefully, 'do you have any other colours?"

"We've got a black one we can let you have for the same price."

Outside the summer sun blazed down upon Canberra, slowly baking the unlucky occupants of dark coloured cars.

"No, this one's fine. Err. It's a good safe colour. High visibility."

My daughter's eyes were expressionless behind her light-adaptive glasses, still dark despite several minutes in the car showroom. "It's OK, Dad. We'll be on the inside."

We were reaching the end of my day off, and I was beginning to feel the stress of a hot day spent grappling with sweaty salesmen in tacky car yards. I'd much rather have been sitting in a comfy chair at home, turning the pages of a thriller, a cold jug of juice beside me, ice cubes bobbling gently.

School's back in, here in Canberra, and apart from having to slow down for schoolzones, I'm also forced to face the fact that my family has a serious transport problem. My wife works office hours in a semi-rural location poorly served by public transport, and my two children spend their days at university and college respectively, their hours dictated by classes and tutorials, never the same two days in a row. They have better access to buses, but it's still a change of buses and the way the timetables work (or don't work) nowadays, it's at least an hour, sometimes two.

And me, well four days a week I need to get to the other side of the city by three in the afternoon and return after three in the morning. Public transport is a possibility one way, but there's no buses running in the early morning.

Last year we tried various solutions in the few weeks before school broke up, and nothing was really satisfactory. No matter how you cut it, we needed another car.

And not just any car. It had to be small enough to fit into a tiny triangular patch of driveway. Something reliable, especially if I was going to use it at three AM on a frozen Canberra morning. Something relatively cheap, because although I'm making good money nowadays, I don't make enough that I can lash out and buy a Porsche, much as I'd like to.

Of course, if I was the day shift driver, I'd keep the cab at my house, but then I'd have to find room for it. And the night driver's car. And I'd miss out on the extra income of the night shift, which is enough to buy a new cr.

So what I was looking for was a small car, cheap (luckily these two factors pretty much go hand in hand), new or only a few years old. And preferably something with a bit of style about it.

Which is why our first stop of the day was the Smartcar lot. You've probably seen the displays of Smartcars, stacked up four or five high. Tiny little things they are, but as cute and stylish as you could hope for. Here in Canberra, they are sold by the Mercedes franchise, and you could almost feel the noses turning up as I walked into the gleaming showroom, clad in cargo pants and holding a coffee jar full of small change.

"I need a cheap car I can fit in a pocket," I announced to the "Diplomatic Sales Manager", looking around at the gleaming limousines. It took him a while, but the penny dropped as I shifted my jar of coins from one hand to another.

"Ah, perhaps you want a Smartcar. And just how much were you planning to spend, sir?"

He didn't audibly snicker when I told him, but there was a whole lot of guffawing going on somewhere inside. It turned out that the really tiny cars were priced several thousand dollars over my limit, but they had a few of the four-person cars on sale as ex-demonstrators, and they were just on the cusp of my budget.

We piled into one, and the salesman manouvred us out of the showroom and onto the street. When he began by turning on the wipers, I was puzzled, but light dawned when we swapped places and I indicated to pull away from the kerb. The lights and wiper controls were on stalks, and they were reversed from the usual Australian arrangement. If we bought this car we'd be forever indicating with our wipers and scaring away raindrops with high-beam headlights, no matter which of our cars we drove. Worse, the semi-automatic transmission had noticable gaps in the gearchange. Small factors, and not enough to rule the car out completely, but we assured the salesman we were still looking, and did he have a card?

I tucked the card away in the top of the coffee jar.

Next stop was Fyshwick, which as well as housing half of Canberra's sex industry, is also home to the motor trade. Here we found several used car lots lined up in a row, and we spent a torrid half-hour discovering that small cars and automatic transmissions don't usually go together, let alone in a convenient, stylish and cheap package.

But I looked with interest at a Mazda MX-5, which the rest of the world knows as the Miata. Cute as a button, cheap as chips. And fifteen years old with a manual transmission. A car that I could love and hate alternately between zooming along with my top down and waiting for the repirman at four in thm morning.

There was a small Peugeot that I also liked. But it was solid black and likewise had a manual transmission. Not that I can't drive a manual, you understand. But I prefer not to, and my two kids have never learnt. If this car was to be our convenience car, available for use by whoever needed it at the time, it had to be an automatic.

We gained a few more cards, and they clustered together in my coin jar. I'm not sure how effective the jar was in throwing salesmen off balance, but at least each new one could see the cards of those who had gone before.

We got a good piece of advice. "Most of these tiny cars are gutless," one salesman said, attempting to steer us in the direction of a bulkier brute. "Get one and take it up Hindmarsh Drive, or better yet, Mount Ainslie. It'll struggle all the way, and like as not the temperature warning light will come on."

So we took our old Mitsubishi and headed over the hump of Hindmarsh Drive to Phillip, where we could find more caryards, and my secret goal - the Peugeot showroom. I'd done my homework, you see, and I knew that Peugeot made a 206 automatic that came in under my top budget. Cute as a button, it was the car I wanted, but I knew I couldn't buy it without first taking a good look at the opposition.

We looked at the ex-Government caryard. Full of recycled public service and fleet vehicles just one or two years old, this was one place where I could find a good car at a good price. I wandered over to a white Ford Falcon that proclaimed LPG fuel. I was almost certain that it was an ex-taxi, and I had my head inside the door, looking for the tell-tale signs, when a salesman came up. I held up my coin jar and told him I needed a small car at a small price.

"That's a full-size car," he said, indicating the taxi, "but it costs as much as a small car to run."

Good try, I thought, but I had to be pretty tightly focused. He showed us a couple of small automatics, and we took one for a test run over Hindmarsh. It struggled. And the stalks were on the wrong side.

Next step was the Peugeot showroom, and I had a spring in my stride as we threaded our way through a collection of stylish French cars. How I had loved my old Peugeot 505! Nothing I'd driven since had gone around corners and over speed bumps with quite so much grace.

I found the car I was looking for. A tiny three door 206 in bright silver. Inside, I confirmed, leaning my head in the window, was an automatic transmission. The salesman came up, and the sale was equally automatic.

Until he mentioned the price. This car was one model up from the one I'd researched, and I couldn't justify an extra four thousand dollars for even the most chic of French sweeties. They didn't have the model I wanted in stock, not even in their second-hand range.

Tiens. I was devastated. I wanted, needed, a new car today. I wouldn't have enough time to go looking further until next week.

"Why don't you try next door?" the salesman said. "You'll find all the small, cheap cars you want there."

The adjacent showroom held a selection of vehicles from Malaysia and Korea, none with the cachet I craved, but all able to fit within my pocket.

We were directed to a tiny, bright yellow car, and once we'd got over the colour and taken it for a test drive, there was no reason not to buy it. So we did.

It's a Hyundai Getz, a sweet little car in BookCrossing yellow. Great for zipping around town, light on the juice, big on essential features like beverage holders and MP3 disc player. I don't think I'll be able to prize my daughter out of it.