Comment by ionwake

1 day ago

Man you Americans, here I am with me 20 year old Mini and it works great I think it’s only valued at about 2k

Agreed. You can buy a lot of gas for the price difference between an old economy ICE car and an EV. Plus cheaper insurance and in many places, cheaper registration fees.

  • The problem is you burn that gas and put carbon into the atmosphere which warms the planet.

    • But only a mini amount, how much energy do we spend making the new car vs maintaining the old one. Young people need opportunity to buy cars as well, but the price jump can be too big for many. My experience with transit around Vancouver is great unless you need to get to the next spoke over, or went for a drink downtown and then have to walk an hour to get home in the evening (not solved by having a car obviously, but a shame there isn't an affordable responsible option after 8pm)

    • Yeah both use significant energy in both moving the 4000 pounds around and maintaining the millions of miles of highways.

      The real win for environment would be building cities and towns to support not having to drive everywhere.

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The average car in the US is 12.8 years old. The used car market has adjusted to the fact that many of them go for 20 years/200K miles.

> 20 year old Mini

> it works great

I have a feeling that you can and do work on it, because maintenance otherwise would easily be triple the market price of that car yearly. That significantly changes the economics of old cars.

  • you can just ask me lol.

    In 20 years: I got a garage to replace a radiator after a stone hit it, for $600 Also 2 tires once, for like $200.

    I might not drive as much as you all, but when I do its at a relaxed pace and the roads are good where I live. I have a manual transmission and Im always careful how I accelerate and how I brake and change gears. It has about 100k on the mileage now

    Its a Mini Convertible if anyone cares

  • $6k maintenance per year? That's crazy high, where are you getting that number?

    • What do you mean crazy high? The amount of shops that will take an old European car like that are few and far between and they'll certainly charge you a premium for it.

      Say, you go for the cheapest option and get minor services done at around 500-700$. Okay, a medium or major service is going to be over 1K and you're bound to have one. Down 2-3K if nothing goes wrong, at all.

      But if something breaks, you're going to be down 2K at minimum for the part itself (not counting labor) and your car is going to be in the shop for two months while the part that broke is imported, and that's if you bought a Chinese replica. Original parts might as well equal the total value of that car.

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  • Wat? We have a 2005 Toyota and a 2005 Mitsubishi. We've had them for 12 and 8 yrs. They don't need anywhere near that much maintenance. And if something really expensive came up that exceeded their value, we'd replace them with another 10yr old car.

    I assume you're in the US? Are things that much worse there?