car foo

[cellio]

When evaluating a car model's maintenance record, I would like to be able to distinguish between "things that tend to break after X miles" and "things that tend to break after Y years". I don't drive a lot; my 15-year-old car has about 78,000 miles on it. So I don't necessarily care all that much if a part that ought to last 100,000 miles dies after 80,000 on a certain model, but I do care if a part that ought to last four years dies after two. I wonder if there's any hope of sorting that out on, for example, the Focus. (Of course, maybe I'll fall in love with the Echo on Tuesday and this will be a non-issue.)

Thanks to schulman for this link, which looks like it will be well worth reading. The car-buying world has changed a lot since the last time I did this, and I don't know how the game is currently played. This should help.

Noted in passing: three of the four sales people I've spoken with ended the conversation with the same words: "I hope we can earn your business". By the third time I was starting to wonder if they were all quoting from the same manual or something.

Comments

[linuxwitch.livejournal.com]

Wow, I guess I should be thankful that my 18 year old car with 226k miles really hasn't had anything major break...well unless you count the crank shaft pulled just falling off the engine block in '02.

PS It's a Volvo. :P
PPS I'm terrified of car sales people.

[rani23.livejournal.com]

I'm terrified of car salespeople too. Icky.

I am, btw, amazed that you only have 78,000 miles on a 15 year old car. I've put on 100,000 miles in under five years. Of course, I was driving 40 miles each way for work for about two of those years....

Re:

[cellio]

I'm not terrified of salespeople; I have no problem getting into the right mindset for that kind of adversarial negotiation. I did pretty well last time. But I want to know what the rules are first, so I don't do something either stupid or unreasonable. (Probably won't get to read the article until after Shabbat.)

I am, btw, amazed that you only have 78,000 miles on a 15 year old car.

The longest my commute has ever been was about 6 miles, and I spent many years taking the bus rather than driving. We used to take my car on occasional road trips (SCA events, cons), but eventually most of my friends got bigger, AC-equipped, automatic-transmission cars and preferred to not take mine, and I almost never take such trips alone. Since I prefer not to drive, that works out fine. (I'm perfectly willing to supply the car for such trips if others will do most of the driving, but in practice people like to drive their own cars and we're not college students worried about incremental hits to wear and tear any more.)

Re:

[cellio]

226k is pretty impressive!

I'm pleasantly surprised that I got to 15 years without the road salt eating my car alive. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't had off-street parking at home for the last 12 years, though.