Between my wife and I, we’ve owned 5 new vehicles over the last 15 years or so. When my wife returned from a year working overseas during which she’d managed to save quite a bit of money, her primary criteria was that she wanted “a green car with a CD player”. In 1993, not all that many cars had CD players as standard equipment, or were green, so she paid cash for a new 1993 Mazda 626 sedan. In 1995, when I had to have new transportation, I’d had such crappy luck with my last couple of used cars that I was determined to buy the best combination of new, cheap and reliable I could afford, which was a base model 1995 Honda Civic sedan with no options other than A/C (essential in Atlanta) and an AM/FM/cassette deck.
We kept the 626 until our second child was born, in 1999, when it had just over 100K miles on it. Still ran fine and was in very good condition, but we needed room for more than four passengers – the dreaded minivan. The used options at the time weren’t particularly inspiring – Chrysler products that were guaranteed to have transmission problems, or a host of other mediocre American vehicles that weren’t that much more reliable. We wanted sliding doors on both sides, which was a relatively recent innovation at the time, so the pool of used options got even smaller. Honda had just introduced the redesigned Odyssey, but the pricing was a bit high for us and there was an insane waitlist, as demand was far outstripping the very limited supply. At about that time, Mazda introduced the redesigned MPV. It had everything we wanted in the way of features, was a bit smaller than the Odyssey (which was actually a good thing, as my wife already had trouble getting the 626 in our garage), and was built on the 626 platform, which we knew from having had one for the previous six years. It was seriously underpowered, but we knew that going in and accepted it as a necessary compromise.
Five years later, in 2004, we were closing in on 100K miles on the MPV. As ours was one of the first of the redesigned models off the line, we were in uncharted waters as far as longer-term reliability, and while we were content with the vehicle, we knew we’d take a hit in trade-in value once it passed 100K. We just decided we’d rather go ahead and refresh. Of the options on the market, the MPV still seemed to be the best choice for us, particularly as they’d increased the horsepower somewhat and added a lot of new features, and with the end of the 04 model year coming on there were good deals to be had – we actually bought one trim level higher than our first one for a lower driveout price.
Meanwhile, I continued to drive my 1995 Honda Civic until December of 2005, when it succumbed to engine problems. Since I was traveling for work a lot, my car was spending most of its time parked in the North Daily Parking deck at Hartsfield airport, so my wife and I decided to see how long we could go without a second car.
We lasted until July of 2006, over six months, but at that point I changed jobs and my travel pattern changed from flying someplace different every week to driving to a customer site two hours away on Mondays and driving back on Thursdays, so I needed another vehicle. Along the way, we’d added a third kid, which meant we definitely needed something with plenty of interior seating. My wife had complained for years about not being able to switch off with me, since my Civic had a manual transmission, which she hates driving. We wanted to be able to load up all five of us in either car, which effectively meant we needed at least six-passenger capacity, since two of them are still in car seats or boosters, which take up some of the nominal seating capacity. We didn’t want another full-sized minivan (there’s only so much emasculation one can take), and we certainly didn’t want a large SUV. We did want something a little easier on gas and a bit nimbler and more fun to drive. We also didn’t want to spend vast amounts of money. We looked at all the used wagon options and so forth, but there were very few possibilities that fit all our needs, with the exception of the new Mazda 5: six passenger seating (though two of them better be kids), better gas mileage than most minivans, smaller footprint, sliding rear doors, flexible interior configuration, and actually sort of fun to drive (based as it is on the Mazda 3 platform).
In short, we’ve bought new cars on something like a five year schedule for my wife’s main vehicle, and when I needed a replacement for mine we bought new, but in each case it was because the available options on the used market just didn’t do it for us in terms of what we needed from a vehicle.