Adventures in Car Buying

Our car is 22 years old, bought by my dad a few years before he passed. Now that he and Mom are both gone, it was up to me and Robin to visit our local dealer to see about either buying or renting a new one. The sales folks were nice but definitely leant towards the hard-sell side, particularly once they started steering us toward what they wanted to sell rather than what we wanted to buy. All talk of price came right at the end, after the test drive -- on a model I don't want to buy, as they didn't have a base model available and it never came in the entire time we were held hostage by them having my license (why did they need that if I wasn't buying yet?) and keys. Eventually the red flags built up to the point where we excused ourselves, said we had a lot to think about, and hightailed it out of there to do our food shopping and get home before the heavens opened. Now that we know what we're up against in terms of car dealers operate, we need to do a lot more research before heading out to New Jersey to try another dealer that perhaps actually has the model we want and, you know, an actual visitors' lot rather than a place you can't even drive into.