My son would love it. If anything he likes them older and more worn, but he likes working on and fixing up things. I never really retire cars, they just sort of move through the rotation and the secondary/tertiary ones have insurance that is basically free. But my son is not yours and neither is my family.
I figure there’s a prioritized list of questions:
The car has to be reasonably safe. If it can’t be, it needs replacing.
Is the poor reliability or threat of breakdown keeping you from doing things in life? Most of us can generally afford to be drivers and have a car in our lives; compromising our lives to prolong ownership of the current car is a penalty I’m not willing to pay. This item has always been the reason I’ve replaced cars. It seems to happen around 10 years.
Have we crossed the financial break-even point where repairs are averaging more than the cost of replacement? In my experience this criterion would have me continue to drive a car past the point where its unreliability is limiting my life, so I don’t get to this point. However, if I did something where relying on the car wasn’t important – say I always drove it close to home in good weather and my schedule accommodated unforeseen interruptions painlessly – then I can see this strategy. I do own a tractor, and would use this criterion for replacing it.
Finally, would it be fun to have a new car? This is what all the ads seem to be based on, but I’ve never used this criterion. Jeez, buying a car for fun would be pretty far down the list of stuff I would do if I had too much money.
That’s great news! It likely means the freon is low from a small leak and the compressor still works. An oil change place can do a freon refresh for around $100 which should last a while.
Second this hundred percent. In my family’s experiences in New England, rusty body and exhaust work has killed more cars than mechanical failure. A lot of inspection stations are very strict about the amount of rust you can have on your vehicle before they let it pass inspection.
Except, I think, they’re all born there!
Great list!
Safety: not a problem.
Reliability: Not an issue. It stranded us (near home) about 2 years back; a new starter and all was well.
Break-even: absolutely it’s past that point. The car is worth less than a thousand bucks, and we’ve spent more than that this year. HOWEVER - for that same money, let’s call it 2,000 dollars, it’s hard to imagine getting a better car.
Fun: Well of course it would. The kid would probably enjoy something with a few more bells and whistles. On the other hand, we think not having a payment, and having relatively cheap insurance, is pretty darned fun.
Wait, I think you are saying it is NOT past that point. The issue isn’t whether repair costs more than the estimated sale value of the car. The issue is whether repair costs more than replacement, if we take “repair” to mean “all the likely repairs in the next year or two” and not just whatever broke yesterday. If your car’s worth $500 and you can expect $2000 per year to keep it running, you have to compare $2000 with the cost for a replacement on a yearly basis.
Of course, you have to allow some cost for the uncertainty in all this. It’s possible to spend way more than $2000 per year to keep a car fixed. Coping with uncertainty has its own cost.
Remember, there is a huge pig-in-a-poke factor in evaluating the value of the car you have and the car you’d replace it with.
You know your car, what’s good and what’s bad about it. Other people don’t know for sure what it’s actually worth. *It could easily have far greater value than it’s book value. *
In terms of replacement, it goes the other way. You have no idea whether that used car is really worth the asking price. So it could easily be very overpriced.
In short, the “value” of the car vs. replacement is a mirage.
Focus on amortized costs. How much longer am I going to be driving this vehicle for the expected costs of repair over that time? Compare that to the amortized cost of buying a reliable replacement. In most cases the “keep it going” amount is going to be an order of magnitude less.
Very true.
With the Caravan (that our 12-year-old CRV replaced), I’d spent about a thousand bucks over two months trying to figure out its electrical system - and I still didn’t trust it. The payment on the CRV was less than that. Even allowing for the increased tax and insurance, the peace of mind was worth it.
The Civic… well, the insurance (liability only at this point) isn’t cheap because we have a new(ish) driver, though I’d expect that to drop when he hits 25 next year. If the taxes were any lower the county would be paying us to keep it going. We don’t have any reason to expect anything major to break down. though once the struts and A/C are sorted out (or we decide to ignore them) we don’t anticipate anything major happening. If it does, we’ll have to rethink it then.
Of interest: when you do something like a CarFax search, the results are not to be trusted. When we sold that Caravan, I pulled a search on it myself. It did not list an accident the car had been in (we were rear-ended and pushed into the car in front of us), but it did list an accident the car could NOT have been in - a different part of the state, at a time when I knew for sure the car had not been there.
Because jesus!!!
With the new tax laws, there is a higher standard deduction ($12K per person) that is better than itemizing for many people, especially with that $10K limit on deductions for state & local taxes, so many people who used to take charitable deductions will no longer do so.
Hah - good point. Maybe we’d better rush to do this soonest if we’re gonna do it!
We’re actually going to be able to take a medical deduction this year, for the second time ever (kid is in a very very spendy residental therapeutic program)… so I suspect we’d do better itemizing.
A bumpdate here: we had the struts and A/C fixed over the course of 2019. It’s muggy enough here (mid-Atlantic) that we really need A/C in the summertime, and I gather it drives a LOT better now that the struts are dealt with.
At Christmastime, I drove it once (he was home from college) and noticed it hesitated to start - as in, battery was a little run down. It hadn’t been driven for a few days at that point so I figured that was a sign the battery needed to be replaced; it was about due for that and while that isn’t trivial, its just routine maintenance, not something that would make me think “time to go”.
Then about 2 weeks later, we got a call from him: he was driving somewhere near home and it DIED. He had it towed, and the issue was the alternator, so we were mulling over how to figure out the finances to replace it. Unfortunately he authorized the repair before we could make the final go/no-go decision. Ouch!!
The repairs are still less than a payment on a new car, though just… I just ran a Quicken report to see what we’d spent on it and the aount was a bit, um, educational. We’ve told him that the next big one is it. I don’t count things like tires, battery and similar somewhat-spendy maintenance in that bucket, of course.
But I think it’s likely that in a few months he’ll be driving a new-to-him car (our “new” car is a 13 year old CRV with only 180K miles, LOL) while we treat ourselves to what may well be our last new car ever. Right now it’s non-urgent even if it DID die, since he’s home from college and not working due to COVID.
The value of a vehicle is more than just how much you’d get if you sold it.
The vehicle is transportation. No matter how old it is, if it’s reliable it has worth.
It’s not just how much you’d get from selling it or trading it in - how much would it cost you to replace it with a reliable vehicle?
I have an 18 and a 21 year old vehicle. Both required major repairs last year but otherwise are in good enough shape I could very likely get not just 1 more year of them but several. It would cost me more to replace them than to repair them, so I continue to repair them.
I view air conditioning as optional. It’s nice, but it’s not necessary where I live (if you frequently drive through Death Valley that might be a different story). So when the air conditioning crapped out in the car I did not bother to repair/replace it.
On the other hand, struts are not optional. The pickup got new ones a few years ago. And last year the car got new bearings in the back wheels. I think both repairs will be worth it given the additional years of use it will give the vehicle.
I actually calculated once that getting a new engine for the pickup would be more cost-effective than replacing the truck, although an engine plus a bunch of other stuff at the same time would be more problematic.
How much would it cost to replace it?
How many more years could you expect to get out of it after those repairs? (This does require either you or someone else to look at and evaluate the rest of the vehicle).
I put a total of $3,000 into my two vehicles last year, which was the first time in about 4-5 years I needed to make major repairs, and I expect to drive both of them several more years. That was my choice. I did take some time to think it over, though, and consider the two factors I mentioned above.
On the other hand, at some point that equation is going to equal “retire this vehicle”. I’m thinking that’s going to happen 3-5 years from now. We’ll see.
Ever see signs or advertising from [del]junkyards[/del] auto “pick-a-part” businesses? You know, where they’ll buy/tow your car whether it’s working or not? That’s who you go to. You probably won’t get much for it, but that’s where you go to turn your vehicle into an organ donor instead of a potential problem on the road.
And that’s yet another factor for your equation…
And… it seems I already replied to this 2 years ago! And my two posts were pretty similar.
Anyhow - good luck with the car issues, whatever you decide.
I “retire” a car when the tires are worn out. :eek: (sorry, couldn’t resist)
Seriously though, I trade the car off when the warranty is about it expire. After my son had to put an engine in his Equinox a month after the warranty ran out, I’m not going to risk it.
We now have three, yr 2000 vehicles and one 2020. Recently sold a 2011 vehicle on FB marketplace for $2000, oil leak, turgid turbo, it went to a good home, a service mgr at a VW dealer who plans to flip it, kgood riddance polluter we said! Then yesterday helped my kid buy a 2000 New Beetle (not a turbo!) in maazing condition, though it needs some expected maintenance for 145K miles. Her first car, she’s beaming and it’s her favorite color - yellow. But with the lockdown can’t title and register it yet…
My three cars:
92 Dodge Colt: Scrapped by insurance company at 250,000 miles due to a crash
92 Jeep Cherokee: Sold off at 250,000 miles as body was completely rusting out
02 Jeep Grand Cherokee: Scrapped at 180,000 miles when the engine destroyed itself via rod knock when the transmission was already slipping.
The manager of a car repair place once gave me what purported to be a sort of car maintenance guide, though obviously it was really a subtle plug for their services disguised as a public service guide. That said, there was an interesting chart at the end that mostly seemed to be to be fairly realistic. It compared case “A” – a person who pays an average of $35,000 for a new car and keeps it for 5 years, versus case “B”, a person who pays the same amount and intends to keep it for 15 years. It then looks at total lifetime costs over 30 years, during which “A” has bought 6 new cars and “B” has bought only two.
There’s far too much detail to list here, but some of the highlights:
A has an average annual depreciation of $5,460, B has only $2,287.
A has a resale value for each car of $7,700, B has only $500.
A has a lifetime depreciation cost of $163,800, B only $68,600
A has spent an average of $37,500 on maintenance and repairs over 30 years, B has spent $52,500 (I’m a little suspicious of those numbers – they may be overestimated for the new car, and underestimated for the old).
The bottom line is that the 30-year cost of transportation for A is $162,800 and for B it’s $120,600, not counting fuel and insurance or investing the depreciation savings.
But then they throw in a weird zinger about “investing the depreciation” and “lost future value if depreciation is not invested” (at an assumed rate of 4%). This makes the rather dubious assumption that the guy with the old cars has all this extra cash and he dutifully invests it all in bonds or something, and probably assumes compound interest. This bit of magic yields a 30-year lifetime difference in cost between A and B of $220,176.
Take that for what it’s worth, which probably requires quite a few grains of salt, and also places no value on the enjoyment, comforts and safety of a new car or the costs and inconvenience of relatively more frequent repairs as a car ages. A relatively new car is not only far less likely to need repairs, but it’s likely to be taken to a dealership, either under warranty or just out of concern for the right expertise, and a dealership will typically give you a loaner or pay for a rental, or at the very least drive you home or to work. One of the repair places nearby that I sometimes used has discontinued their shuttle service. My trusted independent mechanic a little further away used to have a shitbox that he used as a loaner, but has discontinued even that because of the outrageous cost of insurance. Last time my car had some semi-major problems, it was there for two days and I paid for a rental for that time, which has to be accounted as part of the repair cost.
All of that said, I’m a cheapskate who does tend to keep cars for a long time. My previous one lasted over 13 years and I reluctantly gave it up when it developed a fairly serious problem on top of all the other minor things wrong with it. My current one is 15 years old and has been wonderful – everything still works: all the power windows, trunk release, power driver’s seat, cruise control, everything. I use synthetic oil in it that I change regularly and the engine purrs like a kitten. My only concern is it’s starting to develop body rust. Like the OP, I have some concerns about spending a 4-figure amount for body repairs, and then having some major mechanical thing fail.
I can’t do my own labor, so when I can’t afford the shop labor, I retire the car to someone who can do it himself. This has worked out well with several of my junkers.