In Defense of New Cars

The good blog­gers of the M-Network have been talk­ing about cars this week and invited other blog­gers to join them in the discussion.

I’ve owned three new cars and let me tell you, I love new cars. Unapolo­get­i­cally love them.

Grow­ing up, used resus­ci­tated cars were the stan­dard. My first car was an old beat-up Toy­ota Cel­ica that my brother had dri­ven before me and some­one else had beat up before him. When it died, we bought a cute lit­tle used Honda Civic CVC that was even­tu­ally passed down to my mom when her Dodge Omni died. At that point I bought a used Toy­ota truck that had sus­tained hail dam­age. I loved that truck and even­tu­ally gave it to my youngest sis­ter when she went off to col­lege. She killed it on a road trip by not heed­ing an idiot light. The only used car I owned that didn’t last long was a lit­tle used Dat­sun that I bought for my younger sis­ter. One night it was hit and totalled as it sat parked in front of the house.

I bought my first new car, a bare-bones, nothing-extra Toy­ota Corolla, when I was 19. Actu­ally I leased it and, when the lease was up, I bought it. It was an ’84 and when I drove it off the lot it had less than 100 miles on it. I bought it because I was the only one in the fam­ily gain­fully employed enough to qual­ify for financ­ing and able afford the $100 monthly pay­ment. I went for the lease instead of a loan because that was the only way to get the pay­ments low enough that I could afford them. In hind­sight, I know that in the long run I paid a lot more than the pur­chase price of the car but live and learn.

By 1995, that Corolla had seen me through three jobs, trade school, two years of col­lege, mar­riage, and two children.

On July 4, 1995, we bought a brand new Sub­aru Legacy wagon — a bare-bones, nothing-extra fam­ily wagon. We paid cash and drove it off the lot. It had less than 200 miles on it and I’m pretty sure I put a good 60 of them on myself in the course of my test dri­ves. At this point, I took over the new Sub­aru and The Hus­band drove the Corolla.

He drove the Corolla for another four years. It finally gave up the ghost with 170,000+ miles on it. I’m sure it would have lasted longer had it not been for the bru­tal paper route I drove after The Daugh­ter was born and the four years of gear-grinding abuse it took from The Hus­band (he had been dri­ving noth­ing but auto­mat­ics for umpteen years). When the Corolla died, I was 31 years old.

The Hus­band replaced the Toy­ota with a used car — a really dumb, unre­searched impulse buy that he ended up sink­ing a lot of money into over the next three years. We finally gave up on that car and, in 2002, bought a used Toy­ota SUV.

At this point The Hus­band and I switched cars again — I got the new used SUV to drive and he drove the Subaru.

Just this sum­mer we decided it was time to finally replace the Sub­aru. It was 12 years old and had over 220,000 miles on it. It was still run­ning pretty well but it had a few slow leaks that we knew were going to need atten­tion before too long. The final straw was that it was a man­ual trans­mis­sion and my Fibromyal­gia made it vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble for me to drive it when necessary.

Before the Corolla and then the Legacy, The Hus­band had never owned a car that had man­aged to top 100k with­out need­ing exten­sive mechan­i­cal work. Now he was hooked. In the spirit of “don’t mess with sucess,” just this July we bought a brand new — you guessed it, bare-bones, nothing-extra — Sub­aru Impreza wagon. It had approx­i­mately 200 miles on it when we drove it off the lot. This time I knew more about buy­ing a car. We went through Costco’s car-buying pro­gram and got a good deal on it (dealer invoice, we retained the $1,500 rebate which was applied to the loan, and a 2-year loan at 1.9% — we could have paid cash but took the low financ­ing instead).

And that’s were we stand today. One brand new Sub­aru and one reli­able but aging used Toyota.

And so you see, I’ve got noth­ing against used cars. But I love new cars.

Yup, that’s right, I love new cars. And not for the new car smell — which I hap­pen to hate. And not for any kind of “cool” fac­tor or sta­tus sym­bol. I love new cars because I can account for every mile put on them. I know that they been ser­viced reg­u­larly and care­fully main­tained. I know they’ve never been red-lined or oth­er­wise abused. I know that they haven’t been smoked in. I know they haven’t been puked in, and if they were, it was my own kids’ puke. I know every meal that’s been eaten in them, every trip they’ve taken, every repair they’ve had. I love tak­ing a car from “cra­dle to grave.”

I love new cars because I know what I’ll be dri­ving for next 12 to 15 years.

Other arti­cles writ­ten this week about cars include:

• Moolanomy writes about new v. used, insur­ance, main­te­nance, and hid­den expenses in My Cars and My Life
• The Dough Roller tells us about a new web­site in Ser­vice Bea­con: A Free Online Tool to Track Your Car’s Main­te­nance Sched­ule and History
• Gather Lit­tle by Lit­tle pokes fun at peo­ple like me in 5 Rea­sons You Should Buy a New Car
• Cash Money Life argues for trad­ing v. sell­ing your old car in Save Time and Money by Trad­ing in Your Car
• Bud­get of des­tiny asks New or Old what kind of car do YOU buy?

So, what was the last car you bought? Was it new or used? Why’d you buy it? How long do you expect it to last?

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