If you are like me, you’ll hold on to your car or truck as long as possible, till you’re faced with the decision - is it worth fixing, should I just trade it in, or should I sell it to a junk yard? I had an Aerostar that had 235K miles on it when I sold it for cheap to a guy who hoped to fix it up for his daughter. My current car is a 2012 Hyundai Sonata with almost 220K miles, and I’m hoping to get it to at least 250K (which could take years, since I’m retired and drive it very little.) It’s been maintained meticulously and my car guy assures me my goal is reasonable, barring an accident or some hidden issue springing forth.
But I know one day I’ll be faced with a big repair and it’ll be decision time. Fortunately, I don’t need the car - we have 2 other vehicles and both of us are retired. At that point, I’ll sell it to a cash-for-cars place or a junk yard. The question will be - How much am I willing to put in an older, high-miles car? $1000, maybe. $5000, nope. But until the time comes, I can’t make a firm declaration of intent.
Do you have a rule of thumb for dealing with an older vehicle? Do you base it on the blue book estimate or its usefulness to you? How much does the cost of replacing it play into your calculations? Have you even thought about this? Am I making myself crazy playing “What if…?” Do tell.
I hold on to it during the length of the loan. After that I get rid of it when repairs start nickel and diming me to death. I don’t have a plan. It’s always well below 200,000. Or maybe sometimes I’m just sick of the car.
I have a 2012 Jeep Grand Cherokee with well north of 200K miles on it. Maybe 230K. I was recently faced with that choice. I took it in for a checkup before a long road trip this summer and it turned out to need around $4800 for various fixes. I bit the bullet and paid, but that may be the last significant repair $$$ I put into it.
My wife and I have always had two cars (until relatively recently, see below). I don’t know that I have (or had) rules of thumb on this, but a few things that have factored into the decision to get rid of a car.
Were we currently making car payments, either on the car in question, or (more likely) on the other car in the household? We usually tried to stagger things, so that we we were only making one car payment at any given time.
How often are we having to put money into repairs on the car? Older cars generally do require more maintenance and repairs, but we had one car (a PT Cruiser) which got to the point where I was having to have significant repairs done a couple of times a year. That spelled the end for that car.
Is there a recurring issue with the car, which has had to be addressed repeatedly? One of the issues with that PT Cruiser is that Chrysler’s computer chips are crap; we had gotten to the point where a chip would fail regularly, which would often lead to the car just stalling and needing to be towed.
Our situation has now changed a bit: we now have three cars, as we inherited a car from my late father-in-law, five years ago. So, we now have:
2007 Mazda CX-7
2012 Ford Mustang
2015 Chevrolet Corvette (the inherited car)
For the moment, the CX-7 (~125K miles) and the Mustang (~140K miles) are doing OK, but we did have to invest several thousand dollars into each of them this year, for some repairs. My wife is retired, and doesn’t have to drive often anymore; I am still working, but can work from home a good portion of the time. We’ve agreed that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we’re going to get rid of both of those cars, and buy a car for everyday use (probably a Subaru), while keeping the Vette for fun.
We replaced my wife’s 2008 Prius with 200K miles on it with a 2024 Chevy Equinox EV in the top trim level. We were out the door (including tax, tags, and paperwork) for $34K, jumping 16 years and several generations of technology forward. We also replaced my 2010 Subaru Outback with busted power steering for a used 2021 Ford Escape Hybrid for under $30K. You can find quite good deals out there.
We ran our cars into the ground and replaced them because we wanted newer technology and more features. We could have kept them running and saved money, but it was time to get something from this decade.
Other than my Sonata, we have a 2009 Silverado absolutely bottom-of-the-line trim with under 80K miles - we bought it in 2010 with about 10K miles for $13K. It’s for when we buy big stuff or have to haul stuff to the dump. It’s also been used for several moves. If it dies, it’s gone, as my husband just bought a 2024 Hyundai Santa Fe. It has a trailer hitch and we have a trailer, so it can be used in place of the truck.So in the worst possible case, both old vehicles go tits-up and we survive with the Santa Fe, possibly keeping an eye out for a used car. Or not. My eyes are starting to get bad so I don’t know how much longer I can drive.
I bought new a Toyota Scion xB in 2006. It’s been incredibly reliable ever since, with mostly oil changes and occasional new tires rather than any major repairs so far, and has about 120,000 miles on it. Given I’m in my mid-70s and drive almost exclusively locally, I’m hoping I’ll never have to buy another car. It helps that it lives inside a garage.
My general policy is to keep a vehicle as long as practicable. I have about a 50-page presentation given by an auto-repair chain that was given to me by one of the store managers which seeks to demonstrate the significant cost savings of “repair vs. replace”. Obviously they have a vested interest in promoting this viewpoint, but it’s one that I share based on experience.
I don’t really have a solid guideline on the right time to get rid of a vehicle, but my general rule of thumb is simply when it needs a major repair and it’s essentially worthless. I absolutely don’t care about being trendy or fashionable or impressing anyone – what I want in a vehicle is that it works, and works reliably. I enjoy a new car as much as anyone, but the newness wears off very quickly and after that it’s strictly utilitarian.
When I think back to my last three vehicles, the first two of the three were driveable and limped to the wrecking yard to be sold for scrap. The third had to be towed there. The water pump went bust and left me stranded on the highway, so I had it towed to my mechanic. He was trustworthy and experienced and said he’s seen this sort of thing before, and that the corroded bolts would likely shatter if he tried to remove them, and in combination with the severe underbody rust and some of the exterior corrosion, it was his opinion that it just wasn’t worth it. And that’s more or less how I make those decisions.
My current vehicle is a 2005 model and still going beautifully. The last repair I can remember was to the exhaust system about a year ago, and I can’t really remember anything before that. The front brakes will need doing soon, though, just based on mileage.
So does mine. It really does make a big difference, at least to exterior appearance.
Indeed, especially if you live where the winters can be brutal, as I do. It also helps to have a trustworthy and skillful mechanic and do all necessary regular maintenance.
The very idea of having to go car shopping ever again gives me the collywobbles.
Our truck lives outside, but the other two live in the garage. When we bought this house, I insisted that we have an attached garage and that MY car at least would be parked in it. For all the years before, our garages became repositories for assorted crap. But except for a couple of times when we were doing major remodeling and we had lumber, sheetrock, and cabinetry in the garage, my car has always had its home on the left side, and spousal unit has kept the other side clear enough for his vehicle.
From a pure cashflow perspective, repairing a beater is almost always the way to go. If it can be repaired ref @wolfpup’s 3rd vehicle w the dead water pump.
From a net worth / assets & liabilities perspective the same is generally true, but if you have a real beater suffering repeated failures of just about everything (IOW currently dying of old age) you can often improve your next year-or-two financial picture by junking the run-out POS and replacing it with a well-worn 150K mile car that’s ugly but not yet a total beater/clunker. Replacing that dying POS with a new car, or a 3yo 30K mile car will not be financially advantageous on any timeline, but might work from a total money + satisfaction perspective.
Under both those rules, the thing that sometimes screws you is the expensive repair you do, followed shortly by the vehicle sincerely positively dying of something else. Whether the last thing you did was a water pump, a new tranny, or even new tires, if during the next year the engine seizes entire or it gets crashed, well, … You’d have done better to get rid of it before that prior repair. Lacking a time machine or a crystal ball, the best you can do is play the odds. And if cheap is the only consideration, then keep fixing it until it isn’t fixable, period.
As @kenobi_65 said, one of the services a car provides is trouble-free operation. You can save money (or at least cashflow) by repeatedly fixing a total clunker / lemon while it drives you nuts stranding you every 3 weeks for something. There is no formula to trade off between money and inconvenience. Each of us has our threshold for each. And if cash is really tight, we have no practical choice but to accept the unreliability as yet another way being poor is an expensive way to live.
Not much. Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, Kia, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes, VW, Tesla, Rivan, and others produce most or all of their vehicles here in the USA. The car tariff was election posturing and directed at Chinese EVs primarily. (China is a world leader in EVs with a substantial wage advantage).
During the last Canada-US-Mexico free trade negotiations with the Trump administration, Canadian negotiators got a lot of mileage (no pun intended) arguing against import tariffs for Canadian-built cars by asking rhetorically what exactly they meant by “Canadian-built”, since in most cases the majority of parts were imported from the US, assembled, and then sent right back in the form of an assembled car. Car manufacturing is basically a massively interconnected international enterprise that is at least continent-wide here and in many cases global. Protectionism just doesn’t work in that context. Chinese-built cars are of course a whole different situation.
If I needed to get a new car, I’d probably be looking at something in the 3 to 5 year old range with low mileage, partly from the “total money + satisfaction perspective” and partly because of my obsession with reliability. An older beater would just have statistically unacceptable odds of needing frequent repairs. A brand new car, which loses maybe 10% of its value as soon as you drive it out of the dealership, represents the kind of money-burning that is not appropriate in my retirement years.
My current car, old as it is, is the beneficiary of a combination of dumb luck (a good day at the assembly plant, apparently, when absenteeism and drunkenness/hangovers were low) and good care with proper maintenance.
When we traded in the wife’s 2009 Pilot, it had 215k miles and would need several thousand for repairs and we didn’t need something so big anymore.
I’m still driving, a couple thousand miles a year, a 2002 Saturn that just went over 190k. I just had to spend $250 to replace the alternator, serpentine belt and oil change. It’s the most work I’ve done in years since the last oil change and now I’m good for a few more years.
I told my kids that I’m going to drive it until I have to call them to come pick me up because the car exploded.
Wow, I think I spent more than twice that much just to replace the alternator! Which also reminds me that I had forgotten about that episode which happened earlier this summer when I said the last repair I could remember was a minor issue with the exhaust system more than a year ago. I don’t know how I could have forgotten when I ranted about it on this very board!
It was interesting. I went to start the car a few months after getting a new battery, and the battery was totally, completely dead. Not even the tiniest glow from the interior lights, and of course the starter wouldn’t even click, just … nothing. I got a jump start and drove it to the place I had got the battery from, which was still under warranty, and there followed the argument where they showed me a graph that indicated the alternator was intermittently misbehaving, while I was sure it was the battery because early battery failure is definitely a thing. Anyway, after I threatened hell and damnation if I paid to have the alternator replaced and still had a problem, they replaced both the alternator and the battery. So technically the source of the problem is still ambiguous, but the car has been fine and I’m happy.
Anyway, that said, this 20-year-old car is still going strong. It doesn’t have a lot of features beyond the basics – power windows, power locks, power trunk release, power driver’s seat adjustments, ABS, traction control, cruise control, and all that stuff still works (unlike my previous car in its old age). The smooth-running V6 purrs like a kitten. Always has. She’s a keeper!
