Rant: new car styling that requires TINY WINDOWS

[aeronca65t]

<span style="text-decoration: line-through">One of the guys I work with is also a car nut, but all German stuff. So he drives a new Mini-Cooper.
But his wife doesn't drive a stick, so they settled on a Fit autobox for her.
Interestingly, he really likes the auto Fit more than his Mini. He lives on a steep hill and the trans will downshift and hold gears like there's a little racer inside. Our '08 4 cylinder Accord does the same thing. Honda uses a pretty cool shift map in thier slush-boxes.

And for another choice, I'd look at a ~Cruze~ . Especially the 1.4 turbo. Excellent fuel mileage and very nice to drive. Back window is decent. Same price point. Built in USA with some Korean and German engineering (Kia and Opel).</span>

OK, scratch the above: I see you've bought a new Kia. Great car with much of the same engineering as the Cruze (trans, engine architechure, etc). Congrats!

 

[drooartz]

No disrespect here,but if that was such a problem, why didn't you buy a (few year old) used vehicle?

Styling is just a pet peeve of mine, though it did disqualify a few things.

Everyone has a different philosophy on car buying, not better or worse, just different. I've had very mixed results with the used cars I've bought over the years, and never regretted the new ones. As cars in general have gotten better the initial depreciation hit, while still present, isn't as big as it used to be. Don't want to have to worry at all about my daily driver, I put way too many miles (in nasty weather to boot) on it to need the extra worry.

Also, we've already got one one older-ish vehicle in the fleet (wife's 2002 Isuzu Rodeo Sport) with 60k miles on it. Not much miles, but years are years. I'm trying to stagger the car purchases and don't want both to be wearing out at the same time.

Lastly the economic mess we're in has made interest rates ridiculously low. If the banks want to lend me money for free, more or less, I'll take them up on it. Not like that same money is earning any interest in the bank right now, and I'd rather have my capital freed up to be used for other projects, or just for building up the cash reserves on hand.

Basically I'm adopting my parent's car buying philosophy (better late than never). It's based on the premise that you *always* have a car payment, no matter if it's to the bank or to yourself -- a car is an expense, not an investment. Buy a modest car with a short-term loan if necessary, keep making that payment to yourself once the loan is payed off, and when the repair bills get larger than the payments repeat the process. It's worked for my parents for the last 40 years, so I suppose I can give it a try.

 

[aeronca65t]

I absolutely agree about buying new cars, especially with today's low interest rates (and, in my opinion, reasonable prices of many economy models).

And if you finance a used car, the rates are much higher....often it ends up costing the same to buy a 3 year old used car as a new car.

Like Drew, I've had much better luck with new cars than used jobs.

It makes much more economic sense and lets me focus on "hobby" cars without depending on them.

My street car is just a tool. Like my fridge.