October 4, 2008
Did I Forget?
Four years and one day. I still love the car.
It got me thinking of Hayek (as a convertible so often will...) Seriously, the conventional wisdom is that a late model used car is the best play: "let the other guy take the depreciation of driving it off the lot." I always believed that. For most people, that likely still holds.
But let's look at distributed knowledge. I drive very few miles. On my other cars, most of the miles were usually racked up by the first owner. This is my first new car and, after four years, has only a little over 20K miles. What is true for most people is not true for me; this new car was a good buy. I like it, it's cheap to run, cheap to insure. They want $1100 to put four tires on it, but in every other respect, it's a reliable, economical efficient Toyota. I'll have it for damn-ever. And every October 3, I'll post a picture:
I likewise bought my car new. Paying cash saved a lot in interest, and I can't really say that it offsets the immediate depreciation, because I could have paid cash for a slightly used car, but in one case, a particular certainty is worth paying more for new:
If you're careful about maintaining your car, then buying new means you know exactly how well it's been maintained. You don't know if it went the first 20,000 miles with just one oil change, or heaven forbid, if the original owner just poured new oil in.
Posted by: Perry Eidelbus at October 4, 2008 1:26 PMHuh. Mine has 20,000. Was there something I was supposed to be doing about the oil?
Posted by: jk at October 4, 2008 4:32 PM | What do you think? [2]