Let us start out by realizing something, and that something is that this is no longer 1955 and most cars do not break down all the time. The reliability of cars made from the 1980s onward is incredible compared to older models. A few memes got started a long time ago and unfortunately persist to this day, even though they are no longer true for modern vehicles. The first is that older cars break down all the time, and the second is that cars are pretty much finished at 100,000 miles.
But how reliable is reliable you might ask? Well, right now millions of people are driving cars 15 years old or more with scads of miles on them, and honestly those people do just fine. I myself have been driving older cars pretty much my entire life, and yes they do need repairs from time to time, but they do not just leave you stranded all the time. In almost 14 years of driving I have only been stuck on the side of the road one time, and that was in a late-model Honda. In general I have found about once a year I will have a vehicle that is disabled in some way. Usually this will be an unable to start situation when the vehicle is in front of my dwelling. About once more per year I will have something in need of immediate repair, but that will still be able to be limped home, or to the repair shop.
Being mildly put out twice a year might be worth $5000 in extra payments, insurance, and taxes to some people, but not to me. Yes I might have to be someplace, I could possibly even be late due to a horrible breakdown. But, once again this isn't 1955 anymore, cellular phones have reached almost full population saturation and a tow truck, taxi or friend is only minutes away. In practice I have been late to work because of a car problem perhaps twice in 14 years, and one of those car problems was because the car wasn't there when I went out to get in it. Also, one must remember that new cars can also break down as well.
Now, there do exist in the world cars that truly do break down all the time, most of these cars are continually failing due to the same exact problem that is never truly repaired. This was a lot more common back in the days before everything was using fuel injection. Now if you have a car like that then you have to either get rid of it, or have the problem actually repaired. A car with a carburetor in need of a rebuild cannot be faulted just because you can manage to get it started most of the time with starting fluid, curse words, and elbow grease. Most cars that do break down all the time do so because of a single (or multiple) problem that is not actually being repaired. Vehicles are not very likely to break down twice a week with continually unrelated problems. A vehicle only has so many components that can malfunction.
Auto repairs usually are not free, they cost money, and usually you will be the one paying for them. But statistically speaking, repairs over any longer period of time cannot even begin to match the costs of driving a newer vehicle. You would have to be daily driving a pre-war exotic like a 1937 Cord 810 to even begin to have longterm repair bills that would rival the costs of payments on a new car.
A lot of people do get bitten with repair bills they have trouble paying at one point or another and then get eternally scared away from older cars. Having talked to a lot of these people I have found two very common threads amongst these stories. The most common one involves people who finance a vehicle that is honestly too old and too high mileage to even consider making a monthly payment on. Very often they will be financing a vehicle with 80,000 miles (or much more), and then have a terrible time being able to pay for routine repairs because they could barely afford the payment in the first place. Even worse they will often be stuck in situations where they must make very high dollar repairs like replacing a transmission, or rebuilding an engine because they still owe thousands of dollars on the vehicle. That transmission or engine is going to come at a premium price as well, since the vehicle will likely still be far too new to simply be able to source a $125 used transmission or $500 used engine, instead you will be stuck with a $2000 repair bill.
Most vehicles have an absolutely terrible period where their value, mileage, age and service requirements all interact in an awful fashion to make them true money pits. This varies quite a bit from car to car, but an example might be a car that is 8 years old, has 90,000 miles on it, but that is still easily worth four to five thousand dollars USD on the dealer's lot. That particular vehicle will likely be financed by the purchaser, will plummet in value faster than the payments are made, and require as many repairs (at a higher cost), than a car five years older with many more miles. In fact such vehicles often need more repairs than something older because they are exactly at the point in their lives where stuff that has been wearing out for years starts going. That is all fine and good if the car is paid for, you have owned it for years and you know you kept the maintenance up, but it can be a disaster if you are still making payments on it. Unfortunately the first car that many young people finance are often one of these.
The second common thread is people who simply have no idea when to choose their battles when it comes to automotive repairs. They will spend $2000 sinking a brand new transmission into a $1500 car because it was shifting hard into 3rd, and that was the only way to fix it. I have had cars that had problems like that, problems that got no better and no worse for years, cars that took unrepaired $2000 problems like that all the way to the junkyard when they died of a different illness. When you own a car, or anything that depreciates and will eventually grace a landfill you have to evaluate what is worth fixing, and what isn't worth fixing. You don't want to plow $1200 worth of front suspension work into a 15 year old compact that would be acceptable with a set of ball joints and a front end alignment. You don't want to spent $2500 doing bodywork on a $900 car that someone ran into, and actually what I would do in a case like that was continue to drive the car if it was still drivable, and then junk it as soon as it needed another repair or the tags ran out.
Unless they are rusting out then that isn't really true. You might have a bad year or two, but for the vast majority of cars it is more economically viable to keep repairing them then it is to buy a brand new car.
What's being able to rely on your car worth?
What's not having to bum rides off of friends, coworkers, or paying for taxis worth?
What's not having to take time off work to deal with lazy, dishonest mechanics worth?
What's not having to spend every weekend replacing parts worth?
Get stranded a few times with a dead cell phone and get back to us, Paige. 
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Topic: My next new car? (Read 9201 times)
