Curmudgeon said:
I LOVE it when someone says how great a motor vehicle is....followed by "I've owned six (or a dozen, or more).
I bought this Ford over 38 years ago, the pickup about 18.
Saving money by buying new cars?
I don’t think so.
Did have a local picked up a used Daihatsu, heater core gone.
As in, one tube missing, hoses bypassed.
Nearest one was in Ireland…MAYBE.
Car wasn’t worth putting air in the tyres.
TOC
Eh? Where do I say “how great” Daihatsus are? I said “environmentally-friendly”, and that’s because they all got (and get) over 40 mpg when driven sensibly. Around town, 50 mpg is not impossible.
Out of the six, I didn’t mind the two 2-seaters, but the van and the three Charades didn’t (and don’t) work for me. Working the stick shift on a Charade is like changing gears with a pogo stick. However, the Charades were for my wife and our kids, and my wife and two of the four kids still love 'em. Unlike other E-W engines (e.g., early Honda Civics), the 2- and 3-pot Daihatsu engines were easy to work on.
The other two kids see it Dad’s way. These days I drive a Mitsubishi Colt. It would get around 40 mpg, too, except for my driving style, and it’s a much bigger car than the Charade. There’s something to be said for the fuel efficiency of modern 4-cylinder engines.
If you’re saying you got by with a car and a truck while you were married and raising four kids, I take my hat off to you. We couldn’t do that because we felt a responsibility to take care of the kids’ education (all four are college grads). That meant tuition (a lot more affordable here than in the US), textbooks, computers, cars and anything else they needed to finish their studies and face the world debt-free. We bought new Daihatsus instead of 2nd-hand cars because both my wife and I loathe any smell of cigarettes, and Daihatsu was the cheapest new car around.
All the kids worked, which helped, but we shouldered primary responsibility for their education. Whether that was smart or stupid, right or wrong, I neither know nor care. If we had to do it again, and the cheapest new car on the market was a Hindustani Bumbleshoot made in Uttar Pradesh, that’s probably what we’d buy.
I reckon it’s great you’re getting 38 years out of a car. Beats the best I know of by a year, and that was a Datsun 120Y, 300,000+ miles, original gearbox and motor but not much of the original paint. That was a couple of years ago - for all I know, it’s on the road today. The best we could do with the Daihatsus was 14 years for one Charade (the other two are still going) and twelve years for one of the two-seaters.
When I worked in the US from late '99 to mid-2003, I first drove a Chevy GEO (i.e., a Toyota Corolla), then a Chevy Cavalier. I was amazed at the value-for-money of the Cav - less than 12 grand on the road. For a similar-spec car in Oz, change the one to a two and add a few grand. Fair enough, that’s Aussie dollars, but the point is Americans get a much better deal on new cars than Australians do.
I can understand why someone like yourself, hanging on to cars for decades, would be in the minority in a country where new cars are so affordable. What’s wrong with an Impala?
I don’t call that cheap or affordable. I imagine the Caravan will be gone in a year or two, but the F150 will have to be “until death do us part”. And the supposed KIA as an affordable car…is the biggest pile of junk there is on the roads.