I was fortunate as a teenager when my parents bought my first car. Actually, it was a truck—a 1996 Ford F-250 with the 7.3-liter Power Stroke. But when I eventually moved on from that rig and decided to buy a ratty VW Corrado with the VR6, I made a horrible mistake. That’s just one reason why this new graphic novel, “How to (Not) Buy a Car,” really hits home for me.
This handy-dandy resource was written and illustrated by Wynton Redmond. If you don’t know him, he’s an animation storyboard artist who’s worked on some projects you might have heard of, like “Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse” and that awesome Initial D Toyota commercial. Redmond also owns a stellar NA Miata that we featured on our YouTube channel a while back.
Anywho, he and I spoke on the phone about his latest project here that was prompted by a friend looking to buy their first car. After helping her through the process at a local dealer, Redmond realized just how much it sucked. She ended up buying one from a friend instead, since the dealer couldn’t offer anything better than sky-high interest rates and pointless add-ons.
“It inspired me to read some books about it,” Redmond told me. “There’s a book called ‘Cars and Jails’ that was pretty much about the car industry trapping people—like, desperate people—because you need a car to get around, [and then you get] into debt and stuff like that.
“I was so mad. I was like, ‘Why is it like this?’ Let me write this book so hopefully people know a little bit more before they buy a bad car. It was all written out of being annoyed.”
The book follows a light-hearted (and momentarily serious) storyline of a first-time car buyer who’s assisted by Carmy, an anthropomorphic roadster who apparently majored in American history. I say that because Carmy knows a ton about the construction of the U.S. interstate system, as well as the Civil Rights Movement and how public transit was affected by it. Pair that with some keen insight into how dealers deploy predatory practices on newbies, and you have a guide that can help you avoid all the nonsense.
Redmond wrote the book with car people in mind, though it’s mainly for people who don’t know diddly-squat about automobiles. “If you have a friend who doesn’t know anything, you can give them this book as their primer so they don’t end up leasing an M3 for thousands of dollars a month or something,” he laughed.
Jokes aside, it’s a genuinely helpful guide that can save you or someone you know from making a major mistake. Buyers have to be informed; otherwise, they’re likely to be taken advantage of. Not all dealers are bad, but a lot of them are, and it’s just not worth risking so much money. Remember the average transaction price for a new car has sailed beyond $50,000 for the first time ever.
You can buy a physical copy of “How to (Not) Buy a Car” for just $7.99 here. A PDF is also available for $4.99. Nobody’s getting rich off of this—including dealers, if Carmy has anything to say about it.
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