they are great fun little cars. But they last exactly ten years and then they start to fall apart, one piece at a time.

The newest car I own is eight years old now. The oldest car is going on 32 years. (That one is a 1969 Toyota Land Cruiser that has spent its whole life as a plow truck.) My daily driver is 15 years old.

Every one of my cars costs me more in maintenance than a brand new car under warranty would cost, but my total cost of operation is only a tiny fraction of that of a new car. When I am not paying $250 a month for car payments, and maybe $60 a month for collision insurance (I carry liability and comprehensive insurance only) and am not losing another $200 a month in depreciation and am not paying interest on a car loan... y'know, I can afford to do a hell of a lot of maintenance. I recently paid nearly $1000 for head gasket repair (ironically on my newest car!) and smiled when I wrote the check.

I figure it costs me less than $2000 a year to own and drive my newest car. That's for car payments and interest ($0.00), repairs (being generous with a $100 per month average), insurance, gasoline, oil (synthetic oil and filter every 5,000 miles, filter only every 2500 miles), and tires, and depreciation. That works out to about 10 cents per mile. Check on the statistics of what it costs to buy and drive a new car (say one in the $30,000 category) and most estimates I have seen come in between $1.10 and $1.50 per mile.

And of course, my 1993 Ford Taurus Station Wagon is far superior to one of those upstart BMWs or Mercedes, right? (Actually, it is a nice car -- comfortable, very quiet, reasonably fast, and soon to be very fast with a complete SHO powertrain transplant!)

So let it fall apart piece by piece -- those pieces are dirt cheap compared to what it costs to run a car that doesn't fall apart. The only things that count in my book are (a) How satisfied am I with the car itself; and (b) how much does it cost to operate.

tanstaafl.


"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"