When a $38,000 Car Costs $44,000 is a bit of a scary article. Not only are people paying more money for cars with more gadgets and lousy fuel mileage, now they’re financing them with 9 year loans and paying tons of interest. These must be the same people who whined about having to learn math in school.
It comes at a good time for me, though. I’ve had my Maxima for almost 7 years now after I bought it slightly used, and just hit 90,000 miles. I’m sure it’ll run for plenty more, but 100,000 miles is something of a psychological threshold after which you expect more problems and repairs.
Looking around, though, any new car would be a mostly cosmetic upgrade; I’d probably get something with similar size, power, and unfortunately gas mileage. For $20,000, driving an out of date car isn’t such a bad deal.
Stagnant fuel economy isn’t much of an incentive, either. Foreign and domestic automakers and Congress have given people exactly what the people want: more weight, more horsepower, same gas mileage. You didn’t even see an ad mention miles per gallon until those gallons hit $3.
That makes a hybrid tempting (but still expensive), along with a pure electric. There’s a trade off there, too: decent range will cost you, or you take on the work of building your own.
Given all that, it seems like the best solution is just to drive what you’ve already paid off.
