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Comment by nateb2022 | Hacker News Reader

nateb2022

I currently make ~$12k a year as a student. Bought my first car, a 2013 Scion FR-S almost a year ago for $4k. Had about 150k miles on it. I do oil changes myself, twice a year, for $50 a pop. It's a reliable car, and I haven't needed to do any big repairs. I'm planning to take it to 250k, or further.

Bottom line: find a reliable used car. Don't take out a loan you can't afford. E.g. Toyota Camry/Corolla, Honda Civic. For about the price of a typical down payment, you get a functional vehicle that will cost you <$500 in maintenance a year.

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If the transmission failed on that $4k car it could cost you $3k to repair it.

I also used to buy cheap cars and do my own maintenance. I got lucky. I was also a college student who didn't have to be somewhere at a certain time to pick up my kids, and if I was late too many times and got fired from my minimum wage job I wouldn't lose my housing. But many people are not in that situation.

For a lot of people, car problems can cause significant disruption to their lives -- especially for single parents or people in some other kind of single-car household.

Also while I was in college, I saw a manager at my minimum-wage job get fired for missing too many shifts. She had an older car and had to defer maintenance because she couldn't afford it -- but of course that only made the car less reliable in the long term. It broke down so many times in a 3-month period that she frequently missed her shifts and got fired.

Situations like that are why a lot of people buy new, really low end cars like Mitsubishi Mirages or Kia Rios. Car enthusiasts look at that and say, you could get a used 3-series for that kind of money! But some people will get fired if they miss too many shifts, they have kids who need transportation, they don't have the cash to pay for a sudden maintenance issue, and a reliable new car with a warranty is best for them even if it's a low-end penalty box.

Jack Baruth wrote a good article about this a while ago: https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2015/02/no-fixed-abode-got...

>If the transmission failed on that $4k car it could cost you $3k to repair it.

Well it's an Aisin, so it won't. Part of getting away with buying cheap cars is knowing which one to buy.

There is no 100% reliable brand, and when you buy used cars you also run the risk that a previous owner drove the car abusively. Especially with a car that appeals to the boy racer/tuner crowd like the FR-S.

I remember hearing an expression growing up that went something like, "Buying a used car is buying someone else's problems."

I am not saying most sellers are intentionally selling lemons. A person may sell a vehicle for a variety of reasons, but you never know which ones are selling lemons, and it's a gamble at the end of the day.

It is often like that. You have to be picky.

My current car is over 20 years old. It rarely has issues, and has never cost more than about $1500 to fix all of them at once. It wouldn't be worth a lot on the used market. Practically any repair of $500 or more starts to get into "but how much is it worth" territory.

My comparison is not "how much is it worth", but "how much would I have to pay to get a similar vehicle with a completely known history of good maintenance, and how much would I have to spend for a new one?"

I spend about $1000-1500 a year on it for maintenance - oil changes, tires, brakes, things that break on a 20-year-old truck - and there's just no way that any new car can compete with that. If I could buy its twin for $5k, I probably would. Not because it's an amazing vehicle, because it's not. But having a completely spare car is GREAT. Primary car needs service? Keep it for a week, I don't care. One won't start in the morning? Take the spare, figure out the rest later.

This take is fanboy talk. When you’re talking decade+ old cars treatment by prior owners dominates the equation except in the rare cases of an engineering flub (Tacoma frames, Cadillac V8s etc).

Brands and models that are preferred by the people well enough off to buy more car than they need and not skimp on maintenance tend to be most plentiful in nice condition on the used market.

Or you get a car that needs a cylinder head replacement four months later. Or you accidentally bought a flood car.

"Buy used" is good advice, but at the low end of the market it's a risky maneuver. If you have the mechanical aptitude to evaluate the car, and you have space to perform your own maintenance, and other stars align for you, have at it. For others, it's worth buying a car with some warranty, especially if your livelihood is tied to having a functional car.

I don't think the survivorship bias involved in these recommendations makes for a good one-size-fits-all advice blurb.

Nearly all of the cars I've purchased have been inexpensive used cars, and only one of them has ever given me any real trouble. That's the one I bought from a used car dealer.

The rest I've purchased from individuals. So my approach is to never buy a used car from a dealership. And, of course, always have a mechanic look it over before you buy, even (or especially) for the cheap ones.

Not to mention there is not quite the abundance of used cars that there used to be, as during COVID the market went absolutely insane.

I know this is meant in the spirit of good advice

but I hope people from the US consider the fact that your city/town planners destroyed your liveable areas to make America car dependent

And honestly it wasn't that long ago, it bankrupts your cities and costs everyone

We know, but what can we do?

Vote and go to local city hall meetings

I would, but I can't find parking, no way to walk there, and my city lacks robust and/or safe public transit.

(I'm being facetious for those unaware).

It's almost like there are systemic issues that keep certain subsets of the population from participating effectively. Weird huh

We are well aware of it and extremely unpleased with that. They force everyone to drive a minimum of 2-4 miles to get to the closest store and chances are it's a stupid mcDonalds or some other nonsense like that. i really don't know what they were thinking. it's almost as if the car industry paid off the city planners. I know early in US history the car industry bought up trains and put them out business which is despicable.

You'll see this huge mass of houses crammed together like some kind of concentration camp. and it'll be endless miles of uniform houses like pods in the matrix. no libraries, no parks, no trees, no community compost, (none of these things have to be expensive) nothing. but lots and lots of pavement. some of those side streets are I'm not kidding you like 5 almost 6 lanes wide, meanwhile people's front yard is less than 10 feet long.

It's a complete unmitigated disaster.

I'm pretty sure large developed country/ low population per unit of area did that. Pick any city and drive an hour in any cardinal direction and you'll find woods and racoons.

Good on you!

I drove the same car from age 18-29. It was 26 years-old when I sold it. Never once took it to a mechanic.

Most routine services at a mechanic are just basic oil change, checking fluids, checking tyre pressure, checking brakes. The mechanics my wife takes her car to are so lazy, they didn't bother to check her drum brakes (despite ticking it off. drum brakes are more annoying to check than disc brakes). They were nearly metal-on-metal and I just changed them myself.

You can absolutely service your car yourself. And because it's so much cheaper, you can buy the best brakes (most important), the best tyres (just as important), the best parts.

There's plenty of guides online that will tell you what to check. Keep a log book, and you can start replacing things on schedule (eg changing the belt every 50,000km) before they break.

You can still take it to a mechanic for non-trivial stuff. But once you start doing minor things, you end up doing it all :)

This is massively hard to do these days, dealers watch for private sales and snap them up for health markup

I would love for a ban on as-is sales in the USA. How can you justify a salesperson trying to sell you this amazing Camry that they just cleared all the codes off.

Was it a salvage title car? A year ago a clean title FRS with 100k miles would still easily pull $10k at auction, so you got a heck of a deal if it didn't come with major defects.

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