Choosing Your Car

There are many ways to get to work each day, and the place you live either expands or limits your options. For now, it's sufficient to say that many people who work in Houston live outside of or on the outskirts of the city, and have determined that the best way to commute is in a car, alone. I'll discuss another day what options are actually available and the pluses and minuses of each.

A few weeks ago I would have proudly told you what an exceptional choice I made in 2003, when I purchased a 1999 Saturn SL1. For the previous five years I had been driving a 1985 Corvette. I had always wanted a Corvette, and when I found myself in need of a car, at that time in my life a 13 year old Corvette with 156,000 miles for $8200 seemed like a great idea. And it was a great idea! I enjoyed the 120,000 more miles I put on it, but it reached the point where it wasn't worth the expense of the repairs. By this time I had one son beginning his second semester of college, and another one in high school. I began to look for something economical.

Shopping exclusively online, I had narrowed down the choices to the Saturn or a Chevrolet Prizm. (Prizm = Toyota Corolla, made less expensive on the used market due to the lack of a high-perceived-value nameplate.)

In my "wisdom" I bought the Saturn. This turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. My wish as I drove it home from the dealer was that I wouldn't hate it. (I was coming out of a Corvette, after all, and into a car with 100 horsepower.) As it turns out, weighing only 2350 lbs make a car fun to drive, even without a lot of power. (My children may not agree about the fun part, and I know my wife doesn't, but it would corner like nothing else,  even with skinny tires.) Not only that, it got 36 mpg in the months when air conditioning wasn't needed, and 33 in the other months. Repairs? Less than $200 for mechanical problems in 7 years, plus a brake job (the most expensive thing), a battery or two, and multiple sets of tires. The drawbacks? Well, such a car does not fit your wife's idea of your status in life, especially when the guy she almost married 25 years earlier is kind enough to let you out of a crowded parking lot ahead of him, and he's driving his new Hummer H2 that he's made sure everyone knows about. (Politically incorrect and perhaps embarrassing now, but in 2003 he could think he was hot stuff and have some people agree.)

Ah, well. The car turned out to be exactly what I needed at that time. But I had been thinking that it was time to get rid of it, and had been internet shopping again. After all, at some point any car is going to become a headache, and there were signs it would come soon. How ironic, then, that I decided on the way home one day that, no, I would keep it until next spring, and five minutes later I was rear-ended in traffic and pushed into another car, ending the usefulness of the only wise financial decision I've ever made in my life. My mind was changed for me.

And now I had to choose again. How do I pick a car now? Can I possibly do as well? Do I still want, at age 50, to be seen in a car like this? I had been looking online for months, actually. I had looked at Mini Coopers, Porsche Boxsters, Honda S2000s, between $12,000 and $15,000, but also at Hyundai Sonatas, Pontiac Vibes, and Honda Civics, under $10,000.

Time to haul out the sage in myself that chose so, so wisely before, right? And since I'm blogging about it, well... no, this isn't a blog by an expert. It's a blog about life.

If you can afford a new Ferrari, get it! But at this point I will give one bit of advice for those looking for inexpensive, reliable transportation, while admitting to not being any sort of an expert: Get the best thing you can afford, taking care to find something with both a low price and low miles. But low miles and low price don't usually go together, so sometimes that prospect is scary. (A place called "Smart Motors" has prices that seem amazing, but it's because their cars all have big dents. Maybe that's okay!) My local Chevy dealer had two prospects, and a sale involving my credit union and a $500 gas card. One car was a Saturn Ion, successor to the SL1, with less than 60,000 miles, for $7995. The other was a Chevy HHR, a small "crossover" that actually rides on the same GM Delta platform as the Ion. It had 79,000 miles and was listed for $6995. I went the day after I totaled my car and drove both of them. The Saturn was awful, but the HHR drove okay, looked cool, and I've always liked wagons anyway, so I bought it. Without taking a good look at the tires. Two of which I had to replace a week later.

I was hoping for 30 mpg in the summer, but my first tank only yielded 27.6. There's a bit of a clunk in the suspension, but you can potentially drive for years with a clunk. I like it okay, though I'm not completely comfortable in it. (Will my lower back conform to the seat?) I like the looks a lot. Very important: My wife isn't embarrassed about it; in fact, she wanted to drive it home when we picked it up. Pluses and minuses, that's the way it is. Time will tell whether the choice was wise, foolish, or (more likely) somewhere in between. It'll probably be okay, but I no longer feel like a genius. Wish me luck... because skill has nothing to do with it.