Car Dealers of the World Unite!

It seems that car dealers in America all went to the same training school. Friday afternoon and Saturday morning we spent at Stevens Creek, which is where all the local car dealers seem to have congregated. We've only got the rental car for a couple of weeks, so we needed to quickly get a car - and we need to get something that can take us safely up to Lake Tahoe during the snow (which is several months every year). We had two criteria: 4 wheel drive (for the snow), and less than $10,000. We'd looked on sites like cars.com and SF Chronicle to find out what we should expect. So why did every car dealer try to sell us something for more than $15,000? They even said things like "this is around your price range"... No... It ISN'T. We'd spent quite a time in the Mitsubishi dealer, because they seemed to have a few that might meet our criteria. In the end - and after a non-starter where they tried to sell us a car with a $18,000 ticket price but didn't tell us the price until after we'd test driven it - we bought a cheaper (and smaller) Montero Sport. We still ended up spending a little more than our budget. My, but it's big. Still, we'll feel safe driving in the snow. After we'd signed the paperwork to buy the car, we had to arrange insurance and get a cashier's check (bankers draft) before we could drive it away. We got insurance sorted out and had proof faxed to the dealer, but we didn't get to the bank until 1:15pm, only to find that all CitiBank branches close at 1:00pm. Surprisingly, when we went back to the dealer to tell them that we wouldn't have the money until Monday morning, they let us drive it away anyway, on the promise that we'd come back on Monday morning with the check. That's very trusting of them.