My life as a free-rider.
A 1973 VW Kombi (mine was mustard yellow)
The first car I ever owned was a 1973 VW Kombi camper, purchased in 1989. I don’t know how many owners it had before I got it.
My second car was a 1976 Kombi camper; again number of previous owners unknown.
My third car was a 1992 Honda Civic CX, purchased new.
Before we met my wife owned a second-hand Ford Taurus she called Boris.
My and my wife’s first real estate purchase was a one bedroom coop in a building nearly 100 years old.
Our second real estate purchase was a 1300 square foot ranch-style house built in 1966.
Our first car was a 1988 Ford Mustang convertible. My mom bought it second hand from the pastor of the Presbyterian church in the town where I graduated from high school, and in 2001 my wife drove from Ashland OR to Montauk NY. She got home the night of Sept 10, 2001.
Our first car was a one-owner 1990 Volvo station wagon, purchase in 2002 after my Honda was wrecked in a collision.
Our third car wasn’t a car at all. It was a 1974 Chevy Sportscoach RV; again, provenance unknown. It got an appalling 8 miles to the gallon, but the interior was about as voluminous as our New York apartment. It was great for road trips.
We owned the Chevy, Volvo, and Ford simultaneously for about 2 years.
My first boat large enough to require registration with the State was a 1979 Catalina 38, purchased in 2007. I was the sixth owner.
Our sixth car, and the only one we still own is a 2005 Toyota Sienna minivan, purchase in 2008 under Toyota’s certified pre-0wned marketing scheme. Presently this is the only car we own.
The Volvo had been a very very nice car, certainly the nicest driving car I had ever owned, and I don’t like driving or cars very much at all. My wife, who likes driving could easily put in 12 hours behind the wheel and emerge from the cockpit showing little wear.
With this in mind, as our Volvo hit the costs-too-much-to-repair tipping point, and before the purchase of the Toyota I stopped in the Mercedes dealership in Southampton. The thought was, if the Volvo was so nice, maybe a Mercedes would be nicer. I was looking at the Mercedes R class. But the Mercedes was disappointing on two counts.
First of all, the new Mercedes didn’t drive any better than the 17 year-old Volvo, at least not in a way that I could perceive; and the interior was no more sumptuous. It didn’t seem like a good value proposition.
More importantly I didn’t like the body shape. I guess they wanted to make it “sportier” but rounding/cutting the corners reduced the usable interior volume by a lot; and though it made the car look sleeker, it didn’t actually improve it’s fuel economy.
I expressed my frustrations to the salesman, who in turn gave me a wonderfully lucid reply.
“Mr. Ryan, how often do you buy a new car?”
“Almost never. I’ve only bought one new car in my whole life.”
“If cars were designed for people like you, people who buy a new car every twenty years, they’d cost $135,000 for the base model.” He didn’t say this with any condescension or snark. It was stated as a plain, non-judgmental fact. It was also obviously true.
“You’ve got a good point there…” What else could I say?
I do like the Sprinter (the five cylinder diesel gets excellent fuel economy for such a capacious vehicle), and had suggested it to my wife between the Honda and the Volvo. My wife was not interested.
Lately I’ve been seeing a little Ford work truck that appeals. I wonder what they go for used?
“If cars were designed for people like you, people who buy a new car every twenty years, they’d cost $135,000 for the base model.”
I find this unlikely. It sounds great if you’re a car salesman, though. Every car I’ve ever owned has lasted 10+ years without breaking the maintenance/replacement cost point. He’s saying that increasing the reliability range 10 years is going to quadruple the cost of production?
Somehow I doubt it. Now, they might try to *charge* as if they were $135K for the base model… but just because you have an $N billion dollar market today doesn’t mean that the “natural” size of said market is $N billion.
On the other hand, there would probably be fewer really large car companies.Report
That’s plainly not what he’s saying; nor what I’m saying.
When we bought our Volvo it was 12 years old, so clearly the 10 year barrier of reliability is not an issue. That we could get a reliable, luxurious car for $4,000 might be an issue.
What kind of issue that might be is the concern of this post.Report
OH, I get it.
Wait, maybe I don’t. Are you saying that if someone made a reliable, luxurious car that lasted for twenty years… that you’d therefore not be able to buy one on the used market for $4,000, because they wouldn’t be available?Report
Patrick,
I think the point is that so many fewer new cars would be made that the economies of scale in production would diminish substantially. The 4x figure shouldn’t be taken literally, but the concept that cars would be more expensive may be reasonable.Report
Yes, something like that.
I guess what was on my mind is there’s a sort of self-righteous smugness in this post, or in my cashmere sweater post that’s a not too distant cousin from the self-righteous smugness in posts about heritage turkeys and what not, and I wanted to think about the tendency to draw the frame of reference most flattering to the choices we’re predisposed to make.
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David, after reading this post, I now like you. It doesn’t matter if you like me, btw.
My first car was a ’64 and a half Mustang. I bought my wife a new Firebird in ’73, it cost $4300 and we were paying $75/month payments and thought that outrageous, so we dumped the car and bought a ’65 Buick with a bad ball joint (I paid $500 for it) and ran it for two years.
I owned one of those three cylinder cars Chevy/Toyota made and ran if for 250,000 miles and junked after the hood blew off. I loved that little car. I owned a Renault and got the same mileage on it and would still be running it but she ran through a herd of deer, striking two. I’m currently driving a Prizm with 300,000 miles on it. Cars are like women, you get used to them and you don’t wanna get rid of ’em. I’m retired now and wanna build a garage where I can strip down VW’s-bugs, and rebuild them from the ground up. And, never, ever buy a new car again.Report
One of the reason I hired the fellow who responded to this post is because amongst other things he had restored a VW squareback. A very detail oriented fellow he is, which is good, because I am not, at least not the make it pretty details.
It’s a good thing for us somebody buys new cars.Report
I’m also a confirmed member of the buy-used club. I have bought two new cars in my life, one of which I traded in after 5 years for the other, not to upgrade but because I needed more room for a growing family. That second one (a Subaru Forester) will be driven until the wheels fall off (having replaced a wheel bearing and, just recently, the rear axles, that’s more than just a figure of speech). But in retrospect I should not have bought new then and can’t imagine doing so again. Our second cars have been, in order, an old Subaru, a ’79 Dodge pickup, a ’73 Chevy Crewcab pickup (loved that truck), a ’93 Mercury Grand Marquis, and now a ’95 Chrysler Town and Country (the perfect family car). Collectively, those used vehicles and their repairs were less than the cost of our bought-new Subaru Forester and its (blessedly few, but occasionally expensive) repairs.Report
When I was younger, a friend’s dad was of the drive-it-until-the-wheels-fall-off sort. It was so bad that at one point the heater stopped working, and he was reluctant to fix it. It was winter in Ottawa. Nights would get into the -30s (celsius, but that’s arround -30 farenheit, as well). Eventually, he relented and fixed the heater. Finally, one day, the wheel actually fell off that old car.
He had it put back on.Report