Comment by close04
13 hours ago
Most people need a recommendation for something more current, from people who work on these modern cars daily. The reputation of 25+ year old models can be misleading.
Another source of good recommendations could be insurance companies. Cars with low reliability or very expensive fixes probably need more expensive insurance. But I don't know if this data is public or if you can tell apart the reliability from the repair cost.
If you're in Europe, you can consider Dacia. A lot of their stuff is old Renault parts that they've bought a license to use/manufacture. Get a pre-2023 model with the 1.6 non-turbo non-hybrid petrol engine - it's actually a Nissan HR16DE, which has been in use since 2004. Very reliable and low complexity.
Is it using that Nissan/Renault CVT? That transmission is notorious junk.
I must say that I've been impressed with Dacia. Even the build quality is excellent - on par or beating VW. I've driven on Romanian roads so I can see why they would prioritize such high build quality.
And parts are ridiculously cheap and widely junkyard-available.
At least over here where we have mandatory inspections you can find statistics on percentage of cars which fail the inspections, broken down by brand and model. Toyota seems to consistently place in the top.
Those sorts of comparisons are highly misleading because the overwhelming majority of failures for any inspection program are simple stuff that doesn't affect the operation of the vehicle in the base case. Light out, bald tires, brakes below replacement threshold, windshield crack, minor exhaust leak, etc. So what you wind up measuring by proxy is the owner behavior, since that's the dominant factor in how proactively those sorts of things get addressed.
And it ought to surprise nobody that trophy wives in 4runners show up with their vehicle in a statistically different state of repair than single moms in Altimas.
The big failures that you really want to avoid almost never show up on safety inspection data because they typically render the car much less drivable so they either get fixed promptly or the car stops coming around for it's inspection.
That's very interesting. I could argue that you are reading the signal wrong here. You want to go for the car that has the most failures in some cases, since it has survived long enough to fail in minor ways that leave it still able to drive.
If you have car brand A that has a reputation for having catastrophically expensive failures in major components, and car brand B which just keep chugging along for decades, you will probably see an elevated failure rate for brand B since it is still driving, while brand A will not be failing since it has already failed so badly it has been scrapped.
> Most people need a recommendation for something more current
Bless them, I would rather buy 10 shitboxes than one modern car (and that cost is about the same).
I’d rather not die in a very survivable crash.
Pretty much every major safety feature is an order of magnitude less meaningful than the last.
If you wear a seatbelt and eschew the most risky driving behaviors your chances of getting in a crash where the difference between 2005 and 2025 matters are very, very, very, small.
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Crash safety has become grossly exagerrated because the standards have been sharply rising last few years. Most 15yo cars will keep you safe just fine in a median crash.
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