Age of vehicle

beetlemama

New member
We're going to be buying a second vehicle for the first time next spring/summer when we leave city life and are trying to decide between new and used and, if used, how old is too old for our purposes. There's a good chance my husband will be getting a job in a city 15 hours from our parents, so we would be driving "home" several times a year. Since we are looking at larger vehicles which are more expensive we may need to go used instead of new to stay in budget, but how old/high mileage will we be looking at expensive problems, worries about breaking down on long trips and essentially regretting not buying new?

Our current car will be going with us and is only 5.5 years old, but we're considering a third kid and a beetle only has four seatbelts, so we can't buy a larger beater for around town and count on the beetle for longer drives (plus we would like at least a little more space...).

Also, in case this changes opinions about age/mileage, we're looking at honda, toyota and loosely at hyundai or kia, as Asian cars seem to require the least expensive maintenance long-term in our experience.
 
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jess71903

Ambassador
I think it depends on your budget, your average miles per year, and the vehicle. We just bought used. I got an almost 7 year old Ford with 48000 miles on it. We put a lot of miles on a vehicle, but didn't have a lot in the way of budget, so I was looking at 2005-2006s with 40-75k miles. We bought a Ford because it met our needs and we can afford it. The other foreign cars we were interested in were out of our budget.

So, all that said, I really think mileage weighs heavier than car age.
 

livsmum

New member
How well it was looked after/how well you will look after it AND your budget are going to be huge factors when answering your question.

I bought an '09 Toyota Sienna LE last month, 17K miles on it. I didn't want to get anything over 30K miles. I also didn't want to go older than 3 years. However, if my budget had been lower than $20,000, I would've had to.

I think the Japanese cars are more reliable, better built. They certainly have better resale value a lot of the time.

We take care of our cars wonderfully, this one we will have for probably the next 6 years. We don't put a lot of miles on them, about 7K per year.

All the best looking, it can be very confusing.
 

livsmum

New member
How well it was looked after/how well you will look after it AND your budget are going to be huge factors when answering your question.

I bought an '09 Toyota Sienna LE last month, 17K miles on it. I didn't want to get anything over 30K miles. I also didn't want to go older than 3 years. However, if my budget had been lower than $20,000, I would've had to.

I think the Japanese cars are more reliable, better built. They certainly have better resale value a lot of the time.

We take care of our cars wonderfully, this one we will have for probably the next 6 years. We don't put a lot of miles on them, about 7K per year.

All the best looking, it can be very confusing.
 

beetlemama

New member
Thanks so much for the input! We're actually asking around about this to help determine whether we should budget for new or used and how old. I'm a stay home mom (daycare exceeds my income potential) and he's finishing his PhD it's likely we'll need a loan whatever we get (new or used) so we're trying to determine how much to build into our budget for a car payment when we look for housing and everything else. But, before determining the budget we're trying to sort out needs vs wants. Our biggest concern in that is the safety and repair concerns of older versus cost of newer. Once we buy a vehicle we drive it until it goes to the junkyard, so I would hate not to pick wisely!
 

QuassEE

Moderator - CPST Instructor
I think that if you buy old enough, you avoid a lot of the problems we see with modern vehicles--eg. bells and whistles going wrong, and transmission problems. This is especially the case if you can get an older vehicle with a stick. If you're remote enough, you're probably less concerned about any major crashes (less traffic = fewer crashes, but you could still be in a severe crash).. If you're comfortable with a compromise in safety, you really could look at some of the more reliable vehicles in the late 80s and early 90s.

I have a 1989 Toyota Landcruiser, for example. I can't imagine anything going wrong with it, but if something did it wouldn't be super expensive. It has manually locking hubs, so that really only leaves two critical things that could ever go wrong (and not be bypassed)--the engine and transmission. It has only 137,000mi on it, and both are running strong.

Works for us, and I'm not overly concerned about the reduction in safety. I can't quite explain it--I do seem to drive it slower (you feel more of the road) and it's quite large and visible (hard to miss a 1989 Landcruiser coming your way!)... I've even let my 15 year old drive it without worry!

Mind you, if you live in an area that salts the roads...you probably don't want to look at older imports, since they tended to rust out more than the older domestics.. I'm just not a domestics gal...

-Nicole.
 

beetlemama

New member
I think that if you buy old enough, you avoid a lot of the problems we see with modern vehicles--eg. bells and whistles going wrong, and transmission problems. This is especially the case if you can get an older vehicle with a stick. If you're remote enough, you're probably less concerned about any major crashes (less traffic = fewer crashes, but you could still be in a severe crash).. If you're comfortable with a compromise in safety, you really could look at some of the more reliable vehicles in the late 80s and early 90s.

I have a 1989 Toyota Landcruiser, for example. I can't imagine anything going wrong with it, but if something did it wouldn't be super expensive. It has manually locking hubs, so that really only leaves two critical things that could ever go wrong (and not be bypassed)--the engine and transmission. It has only 137,000mi on it, and both are running strong.

Works for us, and I'm not overly concerned about the reduction in safety. I can't quite explain it--I do seem to drive it slower (you feel more of the road) and it's quite large and visible (hard to miss a 1989 Landcruiser coming your way!)... I've even let my 15 year old drive it without worry!

Mind you, if you live in an area that salts the roads...you probably don't want to look at older imports, since they tended to rust out more than the older domestics.. I'm just not a domestics gal...

-Nicole.

Interesting thinking and I'm going to explore that idea further! Thank you! I prefer to drive stick (hate automatic, it makes me think I'm on autopilot and I'm more prone to get distracted!) and am less concerned about fancy accessories than about having a safe, reliable way to get where we need to go. I'm going to look into this idea!
 

beetlemama

New member
Do keep in mind that my other vehicle is less than a year old..:)

-N.
Hmm, that might actually change my opinion! Our current car is a 2006 beetle, so not old and running well. But as it's a 4 seater we're hoping that our whole family won't fit in it a year from now :)
 

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