When do you give up on a car?

[Darcy03231]

We drive them until it's no longer economical to fix them. I had a 2009 Dodge Caliber that I finally got rid of when it hit almost 175,000 miles, was 10 years old and needed close to $4000 in work to pass inspection. Up until that point all I did was regular maintenance, tires, etc. Only "bigger" fix was about 2 years before I traded it in, and that was only about a $500 repair.

Currently we have a 2007 Jeep Commander and 2018 Jeep Renegade. The Commander just got $1500 in repairs to pass inspection, but it's in great shape and DH is retired so doesn't do a lot of driving. Last 5 years it's only been regular maintenance for it.

 

[Laugh O. Grams]

When the lease term is up

 

[kdonnel]

It appears the airbag light was related to the 12v battery being low. The light has not come back on in some time.

So the car continues to live. Hopefully for the 2 additional years we want before buying a new car to replace it with.

 

[donaldbuzz&minnie]

We buy a new car when we get to the point that it begins to make us nervous to think about driving it on a long trip.

 

[DLgal]

Existing cars don't magically turn into death traps when newer "safety" options are created.

Sometimes they do. We sold our original 1990s era Honda CRV for a 2007 one because the original was both a rollover risk and only had a driver's airbag. When our second child was born in 2006, we decided safety was more important.

I still drive that 2007, but the insurance premium on it is MORE than the insurance premium on our 2017 Civic because the Civic has ALL the safety bells and whistles and is "less likely to be in a collision" as a result, to quote the insurance company.

 

[monsterkitty]

DH bought a 2021 Tacoma. A week after we got it, our puppy chewed about a quarter of the way through the seat. When he got the oil changed, he asked about replacing the seat belt.

$1,900 because they have to take the seat out. No one will sit in that seat

 

[Jimmy Mouse]

You can't just magically add on collision avoidance, blind spot monitoring, lane departure and adaptive cruise control. You need to buy a newer car for that.

Yes you can. I debated on trading my 2012 GMC 2500HD in on the new 2022 Denali but we already have a new Yukon Denali with all the bells and whistles as our vacation / family ride. My wife has an Audi S-line premium plus that also has all the safety features. My truck is very low mileage and paid for many years ago so instead of going into more debt I decided to install the new Alpine radio (iLX-F509) and dash / rear camera for recording (DVR-C320R) with gives my older truck all the "new" safety features. This is just part of what it does:

Built-in safety features allow you to keep your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road with audible alerts heard through your vehicle’s sound system. The DVR-C320R includes a front collision warning that alerts you when you’re near the vehicle in front of you. Lane departure warnings alert you when you veer too far from the lane. Finally, a front car movement warning alerts you when you’re stopped in traffic and the car in front of you has started to move again.

It also shows on my radio screen with a banner that pops up for a few seconds in addition to the audible alert. I own an Alpine Style Center car audio shop and we install a lot of these systems.

 

[Snowflakey]

Had my Toyota Camry, 2007 for about 12 years. Drove 8 years payment free and traded it in with 325,000 miles.

We tend to keep our vehicles for about 10 years. Just traded in our 2010 Toyota Tundra, drove about 7 years payment free and still got $8,000 for a trade in! Truck had about 200K miles

 

[mrodgers]

Between 150 and 200k miles being in the salty winter road north. Anywhere in that amount of time I am tired of breaking corroded hardware to work on the car. I never took cars to the shop, fixed them myself. So there's no monetary amount because repairs would never cost equal to the value of the car. Aside from that, I have never had to repair cars because of the cars I purchase, except for the mistake of buying a Ford. I was under that one more than I drove it. Near 1 million miles driven and I've only had to replace a distributer in a Nissan Altima and rebuild a clutch slave cylinder and a starter in a Toyota 4Runner. Everything else had been maintenance items including the single head gasket in a high mileage Civic (normal maintenance repair in that car) and a single clutch in my 4Runner (again, normal maintenance replacement and the only clutch replacement of near million miles and 30+ years of driving only manual.)

I was more on a time schedule, buy my car and pay for it, drive her car paid off. When mine was paid off, her car got replaced and I drove my car paid off. 10 year turnaround on 2-5 year old used cars.

 

[Jml813]

Unfortunately, I live in Atlanta. Home of the drivers that don't know how to drive. My cars get replaced when they get totaled by irresponsible drivers. It's happened twice in the 7 years I've lived here.