Autistic and Guileless

I recently bought a car. From a dealership. It was one of the worst experiences of my life.

Buying a car is hard for everyone, I suspect, but for an autistic person, it is the worst. It is a combination of all the things I’m bad at and that the salesmen at the car dealership have been trained to be good at.

Car salesmen are there to make money. They make that money by charging me the most they possibly can for a car. They also have a series of other tried and true methods of making people sweat it out so that they are desperate enough to leave and will pay anything to just get the car they want and get out of there.

Put the buyer in a room with a listening device and wait for them to say what they’re really willing to pay for the car.

Make them wait before the actual signing process takes place. Make sure that they are starving and exhausted after hours of car shopping. Then add in fees that make no sense. If they catch one or two, there will be others.

I’m aware that there are members of my family who find car buying to be fun. They are people who don’t consider themselves autistic (we can agree to disagree on this). They have made a special interest out of looking up prices on the specific car/s they are interested in. They have practiced the game of “walking out” if the salesmen pulls a trick. They don’t get taken advantage of.

But I do. I always do.

I am totally and completely guileless. I say this not because I think it makes me a better person (although not taking advantage of other people who I purposely have made vulnerable does make me a better person than most car salesmen), but because it is simply true. I don’t guess that other people are trying to screw me over because I would never try to screw someone else over. I try to stop them from screwing me over, but I would never try to hurt them. That isn’t who I am. I’ve never been like that.

It is hard for me when I am in situation with someone who wants to hurt me because it helps them. I do not like zero sum games. I am bad at most games, actually. I often start playing them and then just end up having a different goal. I don’t care about winning, but I sometimes care about making someone lose whose game play I dislike. Or I play my own little game to try to get as many x tiles as possible, when no one else cares about x tiles.

So this is why I am bad at buying cars. At least when you buy a house, you have a realtor on your side. There are no car realtors. Neurotypical people, here’s a niche you can exploit. Earn money by helping guileless autistic people. You’ll thank me later.