Car Situations

[englishteacha]

I drive a 97 Chevy Malibu. I love my car. We bought it used in 2008 but it only had 47K miles on it. It replaced the 1998 Neon that had 110K on it. We would have kept the Neon if it hadn't been totaled in an accident. (Note: Neon+Sedan=totaled Neon). My DH drives a 1999 Dodge Dakota that has 150K on it. It's running OK, but we need to start thinking about replacing it. It's getting more and more expensive to fix and the transmission has been acting up a bit. People give me a hard time about driving old vehicles, but it's not their business. As long as my car is reliable and gets me where I want to go, it's up to me how long I drive it!

 

[NVDisMom]

We are the type that will drive it until the wheels fall off of it too! Then we will go out and buy the best used vehicle we can for the lowest reasonable cost and repeat. We have bought one new car our entire lives. Granted its still going strong even with 125,000 miles on it, but we won't do it again. The outlay of cash plus interest didn't make it worth while. We could have bought the same car two years later for less than half the cost and come out ahead that same amount of money.

Our big things when we are looking for a new car is reliabilty, safety, family needs (we keep one suv and one econo car), and then cost (including gas mileage and repairs for the expected life of the car).

 

[ceecee]

We like to keep our cars for at least 10 years. I hate car payments, so we save $ into a car fund so it's ready when we need it. I had a 99 Windstar that needed a part that they no longer could get and was told it would take 4months (Ford finally realized that the plastic part was warping so they changed it to metal) that was not acceptable at all! After four calls to Ford they found a part, but I was without a car for 3 weeks.
I did buy a new car and my insurance hardly went up at all, when I questioned it, our agent said it's easier to fix the newer cars in regards to parts so it only went up a little, I was surprised.

 

[BridgetBordeaux]

Been gone for a while. Just caught up on the more recent comments.

Just wanted to add that we have a deluxe AAA membership that covers towing up to 100 miles. That way if we break down on a trip (worst case scenario) we know we can most likely get it taken to a decent sized town that will have multiple repair businesses.

I think it is 100-125 per year for both of our cars.