I didn't truly understand what a rust bucket was until I tried buying a used car in Northern Virginia (I had just moved from California). Everything below $2000 USD was a rust covered death trap that couldn't pass a vehicle inspection. I test drove a $1500 car and cut myself on the rust as I got into the vehicle. Another $1900 car was kind of low rust, but it couldn't pass the vehicle safety check.

Snow & road salt is not nice to cars.

Yeah. It used to be a lot worse believe it or not. But, still, anything over about 10 years old in the Northeast and other snowy regions are pretty much at EOL. I made the mistake with a prior vehicle (which I bought used) of doing a couple fairly major repairs when it was about 12 years old and it ended up being just a cascading set of failures due to rust.

Uhm ... I drive a -98 Volvo V70, 300 000 km, in central Sweden. It's no way where near EOL and it's snow and salt on the roads. If I change the brakes it's good for maybe 2-8 years more before the gearbox might give up.

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.

Isn't that what the "under body" coating supposed to help with?

Think of an under coating like underwear you never take off. It's not going to protect you for long if refuse to wash your underside.

"Help" is the operative work. Modern auto manufacturers do a lot of things to help vehicles resist rusting out both in terms of the structure and in the various brake lines and so forth. So now they rust out in maybe 10+ years rather than 5 or less.

no, its cosmetic, water ingress between the layers and eats the car in a way you cant see

@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...

Having two cars isn’t quite realistic in the US for that context. Someone buying cars like that likely lives in an apartment in a city with limited parking. I’m sure it happens, but it’s not scaleable. Granted, that applies to many things in US life.

I suppose it's hard for me to conceptualise because here in the UK, anywhere with restricted parking also has public transport.

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.

My experience has been more and more highly dense real estate is built with exactly the number of parking spaces as needed and no more. Developers extract the most revenue that way - to the detriment of people who actually wind up living there. That was my experience in LV anyway. It looked to be the case in SV as well.

Is on-street parking generally restricted in suburbs in the US or something?

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.

It can be, especially in the winter in areas that are prone to snow. Also a lot of "suburbs" don't consist of developments but are just houses along roads. In many cases, those roads don't have anywhere for cars to park.

The roads that you can parallel park at in the Southwest are the vast exception in my experience. If you did that just about anywhere in my town you’d be towed, as a nicer option for the authorities to choose.

That's a shame!

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

Yep, cheap cars are possible and they can work. My last car while still in the US was an old Kia, which I bought off Craigslist for $500. It was a beater but lasted me several years, during which time I might have spent another $500 to fix one thing or another.

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.

> Are they substantially more dangerous than other things I do in my life? Probably not

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.

Aren't insurance costs way higher than the amortized cost of the car itself? Especially in the UK?

> 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.

Depends where you are - with 11 years no claims, I paid around £500 a year in London on a Volvo v70 2.4 litre, currently paying £230 a year (out of London) for a huge people carrier that also has my wife as a named driver who has only just learnt to drive.

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.

This is the case, yes, but generally insurance companies are aware that you can only drive one car at once and adjust premiums appropriately.

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.

"generally insurance companies are aware that you can only drive one car at once and adjust premiums appropriately."

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.

I don't know why, but used cars in the UK and Australia are way cheaper than in the US.