Why $25,000 Is Magic for Cars | Hacker News Reader

Why $25,000 Is Magic for Cars

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2 pointsilamont5 comments

I bought a Mazdaspeed3 on the recommendation of someone here last year. I was willing to spend much more on a car, but ended up buying the MS3 because I was amazed at how much the car had for the price. It goes fast (enough), handles well (enough); it's fun as hell to drive, and it feels like it's really well built. It ended up being 25k fully loaded.

Of course, there are things a driver must give up with the typical $25,000 car, including leather seats, navigation systems and eight-cylinder engines.

I can get a used Cadillac and an add-on GPS all for less than 5000 dollars. I honestly don't know what happens to people's brains when it comes to cars. 25K is what your average person makes per year after paying taxes. Would you exchange a year of your life for something that costs the manufacturer maybe 1000 dollars more to produce than and is functionally identical to the entry level equivalent?

I've gotten burned on used cars badly enough that I'm willing to buy new. I think the best outcome is a quality used car with low mileage, but that's actually hard to find, and there's some risk involved. The best you can do is find a used car that appears to be quality. I'm three times bitten, forever shy on that one.

A lot of people figure that the most predictable and low cost approach is to buy new and take good care of the car for at least a decade. There's a big difference between a used car with low mileage that you've owned since the start, and one that you've test driven once or twice.

The worst approach from a financial pov is to buy new and sell every few years. But buying a lemon of a used car and running up the maintenance bills sucks big time.

When I was in college, I went through a string of used cars. So I actually did the math: continuous minor to moderate repairs and parts cost, plus needing to buy another used car approximately every 2 years when inevitably something would go wrong that cost more to fix than the car was worth, divided by the number of months this had been going on, came out to approximately $333/mo. So I bought a new Hyundai for $10K and paid $235/mo. for it. It will be 5 years old this March and I hope to drive it at least another 5 years after that.

I agree with geebee. I generally buy new and drive it into the ground. I bought my current car new for $25k in 1998, and I can probably comfortably squeeze another year out of it, before expensive stuff starts to break. I'm in the market for a new car, again in the $25k range.

It's not about the car's purchase price, it's about how much that car costs you to own over time: how much it depreciates in a year, and how much it costs to maintain it. I think I'm at about $3k per year for my current 1998 car (not counting gas), assuming it has zero resale value (which isn't the case).

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