My cars generally cost about 300-500 quid. If it breaks I buy another one. I can buy 5 or more of them for your quoted 3K.
Are they as safe as a Model S? No. Are they substantially more dangerous than other things I do in my life? Probably not.
Once things start to break you scrap it and get another one. Done.
I bought a Civic for 325 GBP, changed the tyres for ~150, and drove it around half of Europe, putting 10K miles on it before selling it because I moved in to a city for a while. I basically just treat cars as a 'subscription cost' model rather than any form of capital.
In the US you have the issue that a car might be a hard requirement to get to work. In that case I'd probably just buy two and drive them on alternate days so there's always a backup. You guys seem to have enough land for this to be viable. Still cheap as chips.
Snow & road salt is not nice to cars.
The secret is to to preemptive rust measures. Just paint it like you would on a boat and change rusty parts on the underbelly before the rust spreads to the car body.
Preemptive measures are cheap and not that much work. When it's too late though ... I wonder how much greater the average car life span would be if the drivers just took a oil dispenser every third month and oiled the parts.
@19:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INNMrAGl0Bg
@4:15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn-cqoVYQR0
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZJS6Md1UOg2Wsc48Hr7x...
Here, generally restricted parking exists within 10-15 minutes walk of a train station (to stop people blocking up residential streets when they commute in to town).
So if there's restricted parking, you can get by with one car (or no cars), for the most part.
It's confusing me that you refer to 'parking spaces', that's what I mean by restricted parking - generally anywhere outside of public transport range in the UK is free-for-all - you park at the side of the road. There are no 'spaces', aside from the physical restriction of the length of the road.
We do have problems with inner city parking reducing roads to single lane in London. But in more rural areas, you can just leave your car anywhere. The concern is thef, vandalism, collision, not enforcement action.
Which is nullified for the most part with a crappy old car. :P
Otherwise I had several cars when I was younger, all used, and all of them costing below $6000, without having to spend a fortune on maintenance.
Depends on the other things you do in your life, but statistically, I would say: probably. Rock climbing, assuming you use a proper harness and rope, is significantly less dangerous.
> In the US you have the issue that a car might be a hard requirement to get to work. In that case I'd probably just buy two and drive them on alternate days so there's always a backup.
As long as you're not paying almost double insurance, this sounds like a good option. You could even rent the other car out on the C2C rental exchange.
Though yes - insuring 2 cars could be costly - some places offer a multi car discount, some with a device that only charges you when you drive.
That said, in the UK it's hard for me to think of a circumstance in which two cars would be a hard requirement for someone who can't 'afford' a decent car.
Here, you probably live in or close to a city. You might not want to cycle in or get a taxi/bus to work every day, but if your car fails you could probably do that whilst getting another one.
So the second car is only necessary if you live in the country, which is a minority, it's nowhere near as common as the sort of "live 30 miles outside of work with no train station" stuff that happens in the US.
If my car breaks it doesn't really even matter. I use it because it's easier to do big supermarket runs and saves a bit of time here and there; the cost equation works out roughly equivalent to using public transport.
I'm in the US and that's not my experience. My insurance is fairly cheap, but it did indeed nearly double when I got a second vehicle despite there not being any additional people to drive it.
So if I purchase a car for $3000, I expect to own it for 5 years with minimal problems. There is room for a bad alternator or a starter. But not too many of those over that 5 years. Of course, if I can sell it for $1500 after the 5 years, that's another $1500 I can sink into maintenance and still justify that it cost me < $1000/year.
If I spend $10K, I have to think the car will be reliable for 15 years with ~$5K of repairs along the way.
In the past five years or so I have thought I might need to raise that $1000/year figure to reflect modern practicality. But, surprisingly, I haven't really needed to. Cars are becoming amazingly more durable, and prices in the used car market aren't sky-rocketing the same as in the new car market.
Still, it is time to make the transition to electric. The used electric market is still very immature. I don't want a used Prius. I'm ignorant of how to value used batteries, so I'm not sure what the maintenance costs will be on an 8-year-old Honda hybrid with original batteries. A 10-year-old Tesla is still way beyond $1000/year. To step into this brave new world will probably require me to suspend my $1000 rule until the water settles a bit.
Or I can pick up one more ICE car and stretch it out for 10 more years while things sort... Or compromise and just get a series of 3-4 year clunkers until I'm ready to dive into electric.
Or just bite the bullet and take the plunge now... Or...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/01/electric...
Most cheap used cars are pretty junky. That is fine if you want a beater to drive to work and back or if you have mechanic know-how. It's a lot sketchier if you want a car to drive your kids around in or if you want to drive on longer trips where you need reliability.
I'd never waste my money on a new car. My current car is 10 years old and it feels so uncomfortable new. I felt like I was spoiling myself when I bought it.
I work further from home, with a higher paying job, and get home typically around 6:30 pm. Weekends are spent cramming in other household maintenance, recreational activities for the family, etc. So if having that new car (and spending $80 at the dealer every 3 - 4 months for basic maintenance) means having more free time to spend with my family, I feel it is a really good tradeoff.
And for tools, you don't need much more than the very basics for most jobs that I would want to deal with.
Now if your car of choice is a 69 chevelle or a Fiero then it's going to be a different story.
I have a 30 year old car, but it doesn't have an airbag.
The good news about the Takata recall is that 50 million airbags out there either have already been replaced (including mine) or are able to be replaced under the recall.
The Takata recalls indicate that what specific claims are made about airbag performance are not always accurate, and environmental circumstances and time factor into that.
Takata detonated 27,000 airbags and the highest failure rate vehicles had a failure rate of 2.16%. Those were at that time 12-14 year old vehicles with a faulty airbag detonator and still only 2% failure.
Either way, having no airbag in your car is demonstrably less safe than even a faulty, old Takata airbag.
My main point about the Takata recall though was that there are now 50 million used cars out there that have a new airbag system. So you can find a used car covered by the recall and check to see if the airbag has been replaced and if not then get it replaced for free, and then you have the best of both worlds: new airbag and relatively cheap, used car.
I don't think it makes sense to say that is a key, because the basics have to be done equally on newer and older cars and it's easy to find someone to do them for a reasonable price. The issue with an older car is that it is more likely to have non-routine repairs, which tend to both be expensive if done by a professional and hard to assess how much they should cost.
You can also buy a basket case for $3,000, so you do need to have a bit of an idea of what to look for (or what to avoid).
Where are the resources to learn what I 'need to look out for'?
...if your looking for something fun, reliable, and manual. Otherwise just get a Camry or a Matrix or something like that.
/r/justrolledintotheshop
It has lasted me 5.5 years now with no maintenance except oil changes.
I brought it to the mechanic once for a check engine light and I had it back by lunch with a trivial fix for like $150, and other than that am just doing normal maintenance.
I could buy a Tesla or whatever if I wanted to without it really noticeably effecting my immediate position, but from the perspective of my car being an appliance that does its job, I see no reason to spend more than I did, at least until I can get something that I can go to sleep in and wake up 100s of miles away at a beach or ski resort.
There are other ways to incinerate 50k that I'd get more joy out of than buying a car, but even beyond that I'd rather just leave it all in investments to get my capital gains above my expenses as fast as possible.
If you had enough in capital gains to buy the car from just those gains, or if you are a person that is really genuinely going to get $50k worth of joy out of it and make enough that the expense won't add any stress then I would start to not be able to argue with it financially, but I think both of those are very few people.
Having a cheap second hand car available is the result of someone buying an expensive new car. You need the latter to get the former.
And its not that I'm an outlier or anything, most of my friends have stories in the same ballpark. To be honest I even paid a bit too much due to my inexperience, if you're smart and know the right people you could get a better car at close to half the price.
Geographic variation in pricing not only fully explains the difference but actually leaves me mildly surprised that the difference is so small.
International movement of used cars is a big business, generally from more wealthy countries (where more people buy new cars) to less wealthy ones, but also to cover gaps in the market if there's a disbalance in some sector e.g. a surplus of used vans because of some large company selling them off, or a lack of a particular model that's randomly gotten in fashion somewhere.
But it's pretty well established that near end-of-life cars are cheaper on an annual basis than at other points in their lifespan. I don't know anything about cars myself. Never worked on one. By buying before I need to (mostly) negotiation is easier. I can wait for the right price.
My biggest mistake was buying a (probably) repaired-after-crash car for $2,000 and not reselling it soon enough—everything kind of went at once. Best buy was $100 for a non-running car that a mechanic had been puzzled by that needed only $450 to fix, and is still running, five years later. (It did have a windshield crack that was hit by a tree branch before I could pay to get it repaired, so additional luck there—insurance covered the branch situation, but not the pre-existing crack).
All this said, I'm considering buying a new Model 3.
If someone makes $250,000+ a year, it's not unreasonable.
"My 2005 Ford Focus sedan was $3,000 and should last me about 3 years before I need to make a decision about major repairs, so that's less than $100 a month in ammortized costs."
That's completely unrealistic. You have some sort of competitive advantage (REALLY know someone trustworthy), or you are delusional. $3000 cars are generally very high mileage, unreliable, in poor condition, etc. Timing belts, suspension components, drive belts, starters, ac compressors, minor electronics, etc tend to start going on these cars.
"Are there really hundreds of thousands of people who are making $5,000+ a month necessary to justify the purchase of such an expensive vehicle? I'm not far from that number and most of my money still goes to food and rent."
I believe a car should be 3 months income at most. So no, I can't justify anything past a $10,000 car.
What I can say for sure is that unless you are a decent mechanic with tools or have GOOD friends / relatives that are, you shouldn't walk around espousing 3k cars. They just cost way too much in time.