Handling a car loan; trade-in/payoff, and new loan

[Jim B]

Hello,

My wife and I recently started using GNUCash for our finances and are
back-filling data to May of this year.

In June we traded in a vehicle and took out a new loan for a new
vehicle.  The car dealer paid off the remainder of the loan ($9200)
directly to the bank who issued the previous auto loan.  I've read
some of the archives and various articles on this topic but some
things still aren't clear to me.

I'd have to go back years in order to entirely represent the old loan,
and some of the detail just isn't available that far back for some of
our other accounts, which is why we are settling on starting in May.
So, I was thinking of creating the old auto loan with a starting
balance of $9200 and also opening the new loan with the full loan
amount as its starting balance.  We do need to have it represented
somehow since our bank account shows some payments against this loan
(right now they're categorized as Expenses:Miscellanous but I plan to
change them once the loan account is created).

How can I represent the dealer's payoff for the old loan?  Do I create
an Asset:Dealership account, and then transfer from it
into the old loan's Liability account?  Or do I create an Asset:OldCar
account (for the vehicle itself) and transfer from it into the Loan
account, so that they effectively cancel each other out?  Whatever I
end up doing, I'm trying to keep the reports useful.

And for the new loan, do I really need to have an Asset:NewCar (fixed
asset for the new car) or is it recommended to just show the loan and
bank accounts, ignoring the physical asset?  (I don't think I'd get
much out of tracking depreciation, etc., I'm trying to keep it as
simple as possible while still retaining the most important info
regarding where our money's going.)

Also, I feel like adding Assets and Liabilities doesn't tell the whole
story because this doesn't represent the fact that we made a purchase
(expense) in the form of a new vehicle.  With credit cards, you have
an expense as well as an increase in liability.  If I don't show the
expense somehow (such as with an Expense:Auto?) then this would not be
consistent with all other purchases.  At the same time, this large
expense would overshadow other expenses in reports so there doesn't
seem to be a perfect answer to this.  How are others handling this?
Do you create an expense and then specifically omit the car purchase
from expense reports when you want to see where else you're spending?

Thanks!