I’m a strong advocate for having a second/backup car. I have one and recently had to rely on it for 5 weeks while my daily driver was in the shop. Of course, I have a ~35 mile commute and no option for Uber or similar alternatives and I know that a lot other people are not as car-dependent as I am.
If you haven’t already, I would have them do a bumper-bumper inspection and look for any and all problems before you make the final decision to sell. A Toyota with 134k miles on it is basically middle-aged; most Toyotas built since the early 80’s or so can happily go 250k miles without needing major engine, transmission, or electrical repairs. You aren’t dealing with a Vega so unless something very expensive like the transmission is actively failing (you indicated this isn’t the case), I would keep the car and repair it.
Further, you note that replacing the car would cost much more than the repair would cost so it’s basically down to a question of convenience: is it worth $1800 to have two reliable vehicles? For me, the answer is unequivocally Yes.
Your mechanic sounds very honest. I would trust them to tell you what is wrong with it, what is good, and what will likely fail in the next ~50k miles. That may help influence your decision. Asking what may fail tomorrow is often more valuable than asking what is failing today.
Then the “check engine” light came on in the truck… of course. It’s always something. But it’s a Ford and Rangers are common as dirt so I anticipate fewer problems with that one (and still hoping it’s a minor and easy fix).
As a bonus, the final bill was about $15 below estimated cost.
Hell, ISTM half the vehicles the poor part of town have had that light on for years. On an older vehicle it’s far more likely to be a nuisance than to be something that actually matters to the owner / operator.
I know I’ve certainly owned & driven vehicles with ~permanent check engine lights for quite a while. The biggest obstacles I encountered was finding a shop willing to fake the emissions test; in most states light on = fail even before you probe the tailpipe as they did back in the day.
Last repair (the car) the cost was 2/3 parts and only 1/3 labor. And the one before that (truck) they didn’t charge me for (it was a dirty sensor). Have no idea what the next one will be.
I’ve gotten to the point there are a few repairs I can do myself (replacing taillights, for example) but I still would not consider myself a mechanic.
Yes, well, in my state you have to go to state-operated testing centers. You can’t get a mechanic to fake the test for you. Sure, there was the time the car went nearly two years with the engine light on for a problem I knew didn’t affect safety, but when the every-other-year test came up again it was either fix or I couldn’t legally drive the car any more.
A vehicle more than 20 years old can be excused from the test… IF it has more than 100,000 miles on it. Which, remarkably, my truck does not, despite being 24 this year. So I kinda have to get this fixed before May.
That shocks me. One would think old machines would be the ones that need to be tested. In Illinois, new cars have to be tested after 4 or 5 years. Mine have always passed with no problem, which is kind of what one would expect.
Very old very high mileage cars are often beaters owned by someone who can’t afford better. And which may need significant investment, like a rebuilt engine, to fix. They are such a tiny fraction of the total vehicle fleet that giving them (their owners really) a pass is a collectively reasonable decision that produces rather little incremental pollution when compared to the entire vehicle fleet.
Back in the late 70s / early 80s when I was a gearhead in California, the laws were such that if your car didn’t pass, you only had to spend IIRC $100 trying to get it fixed. If that much money couldn’t fix it, it was given a pass anyhow. Precisely so people with beaters could keep driving rather than lose their job.
Now in those days a beater car could be had for $400; so they were still asking the poorest of the poor to spend almost 25% of the price of another car on their current car before it could pass under the “we tried our best but it wasn’t good enough” feature of the law.
Separately to the above …
Sometime back around 1990-2000 (? might have been earlier), there was an effort to get polluting old beaters off the road by having the government buy them for some fixed price. Some government accountant figured out that the cheapest way to improve air quality was to get rid of the oldest cars from the pre-pollution control days and from the very early primitive pollution control days.
That program quickly fell apart and was terminated because in effect it put a floor price under used cars. An unaffordably high floor price. Instead of helping the poorer folks have better cars, the government priced those folks right out of the market for any car.
It almost doesn’t matter what sort of do-goodery we try to do in this country, our monster economic inequality rears its vile head to foul things up.
When I moved to California in 2005, if your car didn’t pass, you could apply for a state program to help pay for repairs. IIRC you paid the first $100, and then the state would pay up to an additional $500 directly to the mechanic for repair costs above that amount. There were two ways to qualify: 1) based on income.* 2) having a car the state deemed likely to fail.
I’m not sure how they determined a car was likely to fail, but my old Saturn qualified, so I took advantage of the program several times. That car almost always failed on its first attempt. So I guess they were right, it was likely to fail. I’m not sure if that program’s still around; now that I have newer cars that pass without an issue I haven’t looked into it since then.
*Actually, I think if you qualified based on your income the amount you had to pay out of pocket was less than $100.
