The most expensive new car in the world, a Saleen S7 Twin Turbo, looks wicked and futuristic, costs $555,000 and has doors on each side that open skyward, giving the vehicle the look of a winged creature about to take flight. However, for $545,000 less, you can get that new car smell in America's least expensive new car, the Chevrolet Aveo.

We spent the weekend car shopping for my eldest son, and he didn't have to worry about getting either of those two vehicles; whatever we bought him, it sure as heck wasn't going to be NEW.

I hate shopping for used cars. There's something about walking onto a used car lot that immediately puts me on the defensive. I don't blame the car salesmen; I blame the old tape of my first used car buying experience that plays in my head every time I even think about buying a used car.

It was a few decades back, and I was about to go off to college. My father told me that I could have any used car that I wanted, but somehow whenever Dad was with me, we always ended up in the same place: the used Ford Pinto lot. For those of you too young to remember, the Ford Pinto was a squat little hatchback, very strongly resembling a broadened, indistinct piece of metal that looked like it had spent too much time under someone's shoe. The Pinto appealed to my dad's German sensibility; it was practical, economical and unassuming.

I thought it was the most hideously ugly thing I had ever seen, and my eyes would well up with tears whenever I would notice Dad veering toward another used Pinto lot.

After repeated car-buying expeditions that always ended up with one of my weeping/whining fests, my father finally threw in the towel. He gave me $2,000, left for a weekend vacation with my mother and told me to buy whatever I wanted.

It didn't take me long to find a sporty little used Toyota Celica. Even my stoic father was wildly impressed when he heard about my purchase. Impressed, that is, until he sat inside the car. The only words I know in German are curse words, and I could hear him murmuring the entire dictionary of German improprieties under his breath from inside the car. When I picked out the car, as an 18-year-old girl, I had closely examined its aesthetic appeal. I never once examined its odometer. I had purchased a car with 128,000 miles on it.

To my credit (or Toyota's) I drove the Celica for nearly three years, and it never had a mechanical problem.

On the other hand, the Ford Pinto was eventually exposed as a potential death trap. It apparently had a nasty little habit of exploding into a ball of fire if someone happened to hit it at just the right point near the gas tank. As an adult, when I not-so-subtly pointed this little factoid out to my father, he gave a noncommittal grunt and made a point of not bothering to look up from his newspaper.

We haven't made the final decision as to which car we will buy for my son yet. My husband and my tastes lean toward anything that rates as a "best used car value" in the Consumer Guide. My son's tastes run more toward something barely legal from the movie "Too Fast, Too Furious."

My husband and I repeat one simple saying often enough that my son need have little doubt as to what the likely outcome of our used car buying adventures will be: He who holdeth the wallet, ruleth the universe.

Michelle Groh-Gordy is the owner of InterActive! Traffic School Online at www.trafficinteractive.com, and writes a syndicated weekly column on driving for the publications of the Los Angeles Newspaper Group.