A new car every 15 yrs, or a used car every 5 yrs?
September 2, 2007,
Roy (
Car and Driving)
Consumer Reports magazine recently suggested
that driving the same car for at least 15 years can save you almost $31,000. That is a nice little sum to boost your retirement savings, or send your kid to a better college. The key points to note are:
- In order to run for 15 years, or 225,000 miles (with the national average of 15,000 miles a year), you must buy a new car and maintain it regularly.
- Many new cars, even with proper maintenance, do not survive 200,000 miles. The “good bets”, according to the article, are SUVs, pick-up trucks, and hybrids. This leaves out the significant segment of standard mid-sized sedans, a preferred choice of many average American families.
- The price comparison is made with a Honda Civic EX bought every 5 years, accounting for depreciation, insurance and maintenance cost.
This is a great advice for those who do heavy driving. In an earlier post, I suggested a similar “buy and hold” strategy for new car buyers. But my main suggestion there is to get a reliable used car every 5 years (or after it dies on you, whichever is later). This is for those who have a relatively short time horizon with the same car, mainly because of changed circumstances in family, job and such other that cannot always be foreseen.
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September 10, 2007 at 5:37 am
I think it’s especially good advice as operating a car costs more today than 15 years ago. So, if you were to buy a hybrid car today and keep it for 15 years you would save money, but I think if you are driving a gas guzzler right now that is say 5 years old or less, it would be wise to move onto something more efficient now. I haven’t actually firgured out any actual costs based on miles per gallon on my previous statement, although I’m pretty confident that if you are driving something like a Jeep less than 5 years old 5 years from now the costs to operate it will outweigh any savings in finance charges of buying new efficient car.
September 10, 2007 at 3:44 pm
You are right. Driving a hybrid car for 15 years at a stretch saves quite a lot of money, particularly if you drive a lot (at $3 a gallon, a hybrid that gives 40 miles a gallon saves you $16875 over these years on gas alone, compared to another car that gives only 20 miles, assuming the driving average of 15,000 miles a year). On the other hand, if you think of the standard practice of changing cars every 5 years, for these people buying a reliable used car makes better sense, which is what I talked about in this post.