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“Even $30,000 is within my means, it is still a little north of my comfort level.”

Other thoughts. Anything new is going to have a lot of things that will break and probably be expensive to repair or in few years, impossible to repair. A woman came into Oreily’s. Her smile was a rictus of frustration and anger. (I retreated out of range.) The collision alarm in her 2016 Passport was going off continuously and she’d tried all the fixes in the manual and off the internet. Oreily’s did some research and the list of things that might be the cause was long and expensive. (Taking a car to a dealership means around $150 per hour for labor plus a diagnosis fee. A former service writer at the local VW dealership said they were required to get $1500 out of everyone who brought a car in. It required lying and he quit.) Imagine when features like lane maintenance devices malfunction. The car won’t be drivable. I had trouble fixing even mundane things on cars ten to fifteen years old as the parts are nonfunctional out of the box or not available.

I’m currently searching for a used luxury station wagon from the late nineties as they were bought by old men and lightly used. Or a truck built before 2010 but with under 100k on the clock. I’ve had my last “new” car as I ended up spending thousands fixing the six-speed transmission twice.