If you're going to take out a loan, why not take out the maximum and wait one month for it to hit your credit and drop it down to the amount that you would rather have it at. Of course this may push your due date further ahead, but at least you have the inital loan amount recorded permanently. Just manually make your payments if it happens to put your due date too far away.
My car loan is not affecting my credit much as far as utilization is concerned. Originally 12k but now down to 6k. It's almost as if the reduction of that balance has minimal effect on my score. Same goes for an installment personal signature loan I did as I paid it down from 5k to $240 over 5 months. In both cases of getting the signature loan and having it at 100% utilization to now almost 4% the score has not changed much. But I do expect both installment loans to strengthen my score for years to come when new inquiries hit. Most installments are typically helping the profile type, and in my case have minimal effect if the utilization is high or low. It's good to get installments in sooner to benefit from them years later. It's also equally important to confirm that the loan reports correctly as a true installment (I think it's called Non-CFL or something like that - Penfed does this correctly). Again, installment lines are usually calculated differently and separately on your report from card lines. It's like throwing a few oranges in with the apples.