Looking back at my situation about 3 years ago I was in a low car situation. I put around 4000 miles on my car in the previous year and a half, including 3 300 mile round trips to neighboring cities, and repair costs were creeping up on me to the tune of about 100 dollars a month on average for a car that was purchased for a bit less than two thousand dollars. That was enough for me to seriously consider whether I was going to replace my car with an equivalent low value used car, a new(er) car with lower repair costs, a partial/full electric car, or just not having a car at all and going with a scooter for my various transportation related needs.
I could have also just done nothing, which would be to continue using my car, fixing it if it broke, and making no major changes.
That is actually pretty close to what I did. I kept that car, kept on driving it, and fixed it if it broke down for the past three years. At the same time, I purchased a similarly low value car (approximately 3000 dollars) to use when and if my primary car was broken down, which was necessary several times as the various parts of my original used car wore out and broke.
I continued to stack up about 4000 road miles per year between the two cars over the past three years, and continued to pay about 100 dollars per month in repairs on the older used car, 30 dollars per month on each vehicle for insurance, ~18 dollars per month on registration fees per vehicle, and on average $25 in maintenance per month on each vehicle. This wasn't really all that much in exchange for nearly seamless transportation and very little in the way of up front payments for each car, and I was able to make significant gains in the stock market and on a real estate purchase that I was able to make in the intervening time so I can't really say I lost out by buying cheaper cars in the beginning and preserving my savings.
If you have read any of my previous car related work, you probably recall that it isn't really the initial car payment(s) that will kill a younger man when purchasing a new(er) car, but rather the car insurance payments that make it a terrible decision to purchase a brand new car with financing. If you have a car payment of a couple of hundred dollars, it might even be more than the cost of paying for the car to pay for sufficient insurance to satisfy an automotive lender. I was, and am still, against financing a car against its own title as a young person since this kind of excessive insurance cost is really untenable.
Even so, in the summer of 2020 I decided to bite the bullet and use some of my savings and profits to purchase a new(er) car, and found a 2 year old car with pretty low miles for 14,000 dollars (plus fees). If I can keep this thing going for another 10 years with minimal repairs and the same amount of maintenance, I can afford to pay higher insurance costs, but since I paid cash instead of financing, I don't need to worry about the vicissitudes of the current lending environment influencing my insurance selections, and I also don't have to budget a car payment into my cash flow protocol. I just need to arrange for a private sale of my aging older cars, and I'll be in a good position to put my automotive concerns on the back burner for the next decade or so.
The best part about selling a heavily depreciated older vehicle is that the actual value of the car doesn't change much unless it is not serviceable. A 1600 dollar vehicle, after 4 years of use and regular maintenance, is probably still close to being a 1600 dollar vehicle, and a 3000 dollar vehicle can't really drop more than 3000 dollars in value. At worst, it has also become a 1600 dollar vehicle, and since both of them still run and drive I should be able to find someone in need of basic transportation willing to purchase them.
It's funny though, comparing my current concerns about transportation with those that I had several years ago. I was bike commuting at the time 4-5 days in the summer, and driving between the first and last frost of the year. These days I commute almost exclusively by car, and my bike has been relegated to a weekend/off day vehicle, exiled to the garage instead of always ready and waiting for me to hop on and take off in my living room.
I was seriously considering going car free and taking my chances in the rain, wind, dust and danger of the streets for my daily commute, and now really outside of potentially switching to a plug in hybrid or battery electric vehicle, I'm unlikely to completely remove the car from my daily routine.
Luckily, in the past few years I have also drastically relocated my primary dwelling, and now live 3 miles from my primary worksite. This means that my basic driving for work, mail and food consists of a 6-10 mile round trip 200 days per year, so I could maintain my annual mileage between 2 and 4 thousand miles even on the new car. Reducing my transportation needs and trying to bundle purchases with my commute, I could limit my personal carbon footprint while still preserving the convenience of an in-car commute. In consideration of the average North American driver that stacks 10,000 miles on their car in a year, I think that using 20 to 40% of that amount is still pretty good.
It's not as great as a no-car lifestyle, but a low-car lifestyle is still OK with me, and I can still ride my bicycle on my off days and when I don't need to cut through a ton of traffic.
It's important for all of us to think about the way that we are using our possessions in light of the ongoing climate crisis, and it's possible for all of us to be more efficient with our lives. I think that putting my two higher mileage used cars that are still fuel efficient at 25 miles per gallon on the market will hopefully take two more fuel inefficient cars off the road. Since my new car averages a 30mpg efficiency if I drive conservatively, I'm hoping to be incrementally kinder to the environment than I have been in the past.
