We have a 1998 Honda Civic - purchased in late December 1998, so it’s just about 20 years old. About 220,000 miles. It’s served us quite well.
Per Edmunds etc., it’s worth less than a thousand dollars, probably less than 500. The insurance on the thing (and yeah, we dropped collision coverage on it years ago) is more than the value of the car.
It’s quite reliable - though it needs some spendy repairs such as struts and air conditioning - totaling 1500 bucks. This is after other repairs totalling about that same amount in the past few months. All in all, about what a payment would be on a newer car. On the other hand, there’s a valid argument that we know this car’s history, while we do NOT know the history of any used vehicle we buy.
If anything else major happened, the decision would be made: time to trash it. If nothing else happens: is it worth sinking that 1500 bucks into it?
If we get rid of it, it’s not worth selling. I’d hate dumping a car I felt too unreliable to keep on someone else. Dunno if we could get anything tax-wise out of donating it somewhere (and that way lies madness, as we hear horror stories of titles not being transferred correctly etc.). “They say” an old car is worth more as parts: how would we go about doing that??
Complicating the “get a replacement” is that it’s my husband’s car, soon to be our son’s, so we’d need to get two cars (one for husband, one for son). Bleh. Of course, the kid would be getting a 20 year old car that is worlds better than my first “car” (a 1976 Fiat 128) or my husband’s (a 6 year old AMC Hornet). So the cash flow would be painful.
Personally I wouldn’t put any big money into it. I wouldn’t put my teen in it either. OTOH, if you put your son in it I can pretty much guarantee it will break for the final time, hopefully not too far from home.
Mr.Wrekker has a 1964 Chevy farm truck that’s still running good. He does work on it from time to time. I guess age is relative.
ETA good luck with your teen driver.
The general advice I’ve operated by is for every $1000 in repairs you put into a car you should get another year of use out of it. I started driving in 2010/2011 and drove a 1994 Toyota Tercel. That car got retired in 2015 when it started burning a litre of oil for every 100km driven (roughly a day’s worth of driving, I burned through 3 liters of oil in that car’s last day, shopping for its replacement). My mechanic evaluated and eliminated the inexpensive possibilities and I was going to be looking at a rebuilt engine.
I bought a newer used car (2008 model G5) instead, as the projected lifespan of the rest of the vehicle would not have outlasted the cost of the repair.
I got rid of my old Saturn when the cost of a repair it needed would be greater than its value. If you knew that this would be the last repair it would be one thing, but it surely won’t be.
You should also consider that a new car will be much safer than your old one - how much safer depending on the model year you get.
I donated mine to public radio, no problems - but it might or might not help you on your taxes these days. It was very easy for me.
From a purely financial point of view, I don’t think the current value of the car is the most relevant factor. The financial crossover point is when your per-year cost is greater than the average per-year-cost since you had the car. So, for instance, if you got it 20 years ago, spent $20k on it, and have spent a cumulative total of $10k in repairs since then, your average cost per year is $1.5k. Financially, spending another $1k to keep it on the road another year is perfectly sensible.
Safety-wise though, I wouldn’t put a new driver in it (especially after having watched all those crash videos in the other thread). When my daughter’s old enough to start driving, next year, we’ll want to do the same thing - retire the '95 station wagon which takes about $1k a year to keep on the road, and replace it with a little modern car
I drive cars to they (literally) can’t be driven anymore.
My daily driver is a 2002 Saturn with 273K miles. Just last week one of the straps that holds up the gas tank rusted & broke. I removed the remnants of the strap and I continue to drive it.
When I get in my vehicle I want to know, with some degree of certainty, that it’s going to start and get me where I’m going, then home again. I trade for new before things begin going wrong.
I know that what I’m doing costs me money, but to me it’s worth the security.
My rule of thumb was when repairs started to cost more than car payments, it was time. A $1500 repair wouldn’t bother me if I knew I could get another year or so out of the car, but in a very old car, you just never know what else will fail.
Adding the young driver totally changes the equation. Sounds like it’s time to bite the bullet…
Pretty much this. Tho, depending on your comfort level, you could trade for somewhat less than new.
My concern is that you’re talking about $3k in repairs over the past year, on a car w/ negligible cash value. For me, the wager would be how much add’l time/miles I thought those repairs would get me. At 220k and 20 yrs - you could get another 50k and 2-3 yrs, but you DEFINITELY got your money’s worth out of it.
You don’t say where you live. If in Arizona, AC is more important than in Illinois. But I’d tend to forego repairing it. Both my and my wife’s first cars had no AC. Noot that big of a deal in Illinois. The ONLY money I would put into the car would be aimed at safety and reliability.
Also, re: the past repairs - don’t chase sunk costs.
Don’t know what your son’s driving is expected to be. Or why you are giving him a car. But it sounds as tho you are intending to get your H a new car in any event. What is the cost of the struts alone? I’d lean towards do the struts, keeping the old car, and getting hubby a new one. If the old car craps out, son can borrow one of the 2 other cars.
My advice is to give the car to your son and offer to buy new struts (maybe 200 bucks for a set), but have him replace them if he wants the car. Replacing struts is easily done with hand tools that you’d have around the house. It’s ‘advanced’ enough to actually teach you about cars, but simple enough for even a novice. It’s basically jacking up the car, stick it on some jack stands, remove five or six bolts and swap out the old part for the new one. There are some tricks like using penetrating fluid and cleaning the surfaces afterwards, but basically, you just need a breaker bar and a socket set and a sledge hammer. Not too difficult. Have him take pictures of the assembly beforehand so that he remembers where the parts go. I just looked and there are plenty of youtube videos that explain the process pretty thoroughly. They make it look easier than it is, because I guarantee he’ll end up with at least one frozen bolt, but learning how to unstick a frozen bolt is itself a valuable experience.) An experienced mechanic could probably replace a strut in half an hour, it might take him a whole Saturday, but he’ll get a car out of it. The upside is that if he screws it up completely and irrevocably, you have a car destined for the scrapyard anyway, so you’re in the same boat you’re in now.
The air conditioning, I would leave up to him to fix or not fix as he sees fit. He might have so much fun replacing struts that he throws himself into it or he might just be too lazy to care and either is a fine option.
Do you need AC where you live? Struts are annoying but they fail slowly; the car is still driveable if you take it easy.
My approach is that if something necessary and costly goes bad on a high-mileage car, then other things of that magnitude are about to happen too. Since I almost never get rid of a car until that point, it means having a charity haul it away to a place where it will be auctioned for parts. You get a charitable-donation tax deduction of either the actual auction price or $500, whichever is more, so that helps if you’re itemizing.
I’m not a fan of “Dump it if the repairs are more than the value of the car.”
The “value” is the pig-in-a-poke value to someone else. The real issue is the value to you. You know better than a stranger how well your car is doing.
A $500 repair to car listed as being worth $400 is a good thing if you strongly suspect that this is the only big repair for a while. I.e., that $500 is going to give you car that’s likely to continue to work well for another 2-3 years. The amortized amount per year may look quite good.
OTOH, if you think the car is going to soon need X, Y, and Z done as well and you run the math and the amortization isn’t good, well, time to dump it.
Take my old Grey Ghost: 1987 Mazda 323. Once in a while I would put some biggish money into it. But generally it’s the odd usual stuff: tires, battery, brakes. Kept it going for well over 20 years. Just reaching 20 years on my Corolla. And it’s in even better shape than the Mazda was at this point. (And next year no emissions test!)
How can fixing the air conditioning cost that much?
I found a Craigslist mechanic. I bought a used compressor on ebay, a bunch of refrigerant at auto zone and paid the guy $25/hr to fix it. Total cost to me to fix my AC was only about $200.
They said struts too. Those are typically 500 dollar range, but depends on their per hour. Flat rate is usually 1.5 per strut, so if you’re doing 2, that’s 3 hours. Figure out your hourly. Some places are up in the 120 range, so 360 in labor and jacked up strut costs can put you at 700 really easily. They’ll almost always do an alignment as well so there’s another 100 bucks. You can very easily see 800 bucks for a strut job.
When the cost of repair for six months operation exceeds the value or when parts become just too tough to find. The latter was the death-blow for my Saturn Vue in the end.
It’s entirely anecdotal and rule-of-thumbish, but in my experience with older, junkier cars, there comes a time when they seem to start going to pot in an accelerated fashion. All sorts of random stuff starts to crap out- transmissions, axles, suspensions, speedometers, etc… That’s the point when I usually choose to replace the vehicle- it starts being a serious inconvenience to keep getting it repaired, as well as costing serious money. Usually it’s somewhere in the 15-20 year range, and between 150-250k miles in my experience.
So my vote is to trash that junker and get something newer. If you put $1500 into the struts, there’s no guarantee that the other parts that have 220k miles on them won’t start breaking as well.
You are not insuring the car. You are insuring your liability as a driver, against injuring someone else or their property. You shouldn’t look at liability insurance vs. the value of the car you are driving.
