People often visit this site looking for ideas of how to make their current car run better or cost less to drive.  This page is for people looking for ideas of which cars to buy for saving money or getting into a fun project.  No one wants to start off with a lemon and sometimes there is a fine line between a lemon and a quirky car.

First off, it should be no surprise to anyone that a used car is always cheaper to buy than a new car due to the huge depreciation that occurs when the car is driven off the dealer's lot.  However, I have to admit that having a new car is nice too as I bought my first and only new car in 2002 - a 2002 Camaro SS - when I heard GM decided to discontinue their F-Body cars.  Anyway, my main driving machine is a 1973 Dodge Dart and my backup driving machine is a1977 Pontiac Parisienne.  There are a number of reasons that I like driving these old cars:

Besides the above reasons, even though the car looks to be in rough shape, I find that I always have people stopping to talk with me to find out more about my Dart.  No one will ever ask you about your 5-year old Honda no matter what its condition.  There are downsides, of course.  Obviously a 32-year old car pushing a half-million miles on the odometer will require some regular maintenance and annual repairs will likely be significant.  If you don't have a lemon, your annual maintenance cost should be far less than the combined cost of depreciation, interest, and insurance on a new car.  The bright side is that since these cars are so simple to maintain, you generally have some advance warning of problems, which allows you to plan when you need to spend money on repairs.  Another downside is that, depending upon the car you decide to buy, some parts are only available used and finding these parts sometimes requires some detective work on your part.

Buying Cars

With gasoline prices skyrocketing lately, I get a large number of emails from people asking about converting their car to propane.  These are often people driving relatively new computer-controlled, fuel-injected cars.  The conversion of newer cars is much more expensive and complicated than converting a pre-1987 American car because the conversion must tie into the vehicle's on-board computer.  There are still plenty of good pre-1987 vehicles still on the road and these should be considered when the time comes to get another car.  I've been following eBay on and off and I am just amazed that the cars that sell for parts are in far better condition than my daily driver.  If you buy a car for purpose of conversion, make sure that you can get the adapters to fit a propane system and you have a good place to put the propane fuel tank.

I am a big fan of Phil Edmonston's Lemon-Aid Used Cars series of books published by Stoddart.  I think he does a great job of identifying the pluses and minuses of the cars listed in his books and I highly recommend that anyone looking for a new or used car read his books before even visiting the first dealership.  Look from them at your local library if you don't want to spend the big bucks to buy a copy.  Let me simply refer you to Appendix II, Good Buys for a Bad Economy, where he lists older used cars.  Paraphrased from his book are:

Phil Edmonston's Recommended 1980's to mid 1990's Vehicles ($500 to $5000)

Phil Edmonston's Very Used Choices

If you are looking for an older pickup truck, SUV, minivan, or wagon, Phil Edmonston covers these vehicles as well.

How much does it really cost?

You can work this out with a pencil and a sheet of paper but it is so much easier if you can work it out in a spreadsheet.  The major items in the cost of a car are:

Whether you lease or buy, you are still stuck with the first four items.  Lease payments are similar to interest payments except that leasing factors in an assumed depreciation rate in the payments.  Depreciation is an important cost that people often overlook.  The simplest but least accurate way of accounting for the purchase cost of the vehicle is to ignore depreciation and consider only car payments. If you drive your car a great distance annually, the car payments could approximate depreciation only if your car will be worth nothing at the end of the loan period.

Depreciation (the amount of value it loses over time) is a hidden cost that is impossible to calculate accurately on a monthly basis.  You can get a good idea of it by at the end of the year by checking a used car guide and looking up what your car is worth on the used car market.  It is really the amount of money you can sell it for at any one time.   Obviously, how far you drive it and how good care you take of it does make a difference when you try to sell it.

If you really want to be accurate about it, you should also consider the value of the money you have tied up in your vehicle because, when you think about, you could be earning interest on that money in the bank.  Nobody does this as it would be a horrendous accounting exercise, although just including the interest cost of the initial purchase price would be manageable.

If you track your vehicle costs in this way, it is easy to see that, although cheaper to fuel, a brand-new fuel-efficient vehicle could end up costing you way more at the end of the year that a 20-year old gas hog if drive very little annually.  It just seems to hurt a lot more because the costs are right in your face when you stop at the gas station.

You don't really want to drive it in the winter

Unless it's your winter car.  Often, people in northern climates will have two cars: their pride and joy and their winter beater.  Eventually, road salt catches up with winter-driven cars and no amount of body work can save them.  For these winter beaters, a good oil spray (actually, any oil spray) really helps to squeeze a few more years of cheap service from these cars.  For your pride and joy, a good oil spray will also help to protect it from the elements, even if you don't drive it on salted roads.

Rodents

While your pride and joy is safely stored away for the winter, you need to protect it from another evil: mice.  These creatures love to make a winter's nest in the safe confines of your stored vehicle.  There are a lot of theories as to how to prevent mice from making a nest in your car.  Some theories involve chemicals while others involve traps or predators.

Some people swear by dryer sheets.  They put a few sheets inside the car and the sheets drive off the mice because the mice can't stand the smell.  Others recommend moth balls instead of dryer sheets.  However, the moth ball odor takes a long time to dissipate and passengers in a a moth ball protected vehicle will smell of it even after a short ride.

Mouse traps are great for trapping the hungry rodents.  The clamshell traps are quite effective at trapping them and mice trapped in a clamshell are easier to dispose of compared with those trapped by a traditional mouse trap.  Besides cheese, bacon and peanut butter also make good bait to attract mice.  As with food, it will eventually spoil to the point where even mice won't be interested so periodic maintenance is a good idea.

The best method of keeping mice out of your car is to keep a cat around it.  Mouse traps work well to catch mice when they wander into it but there is no guarantee that they won't make a nest in your car first before they get caught.  Cats, on the other hand, catch mice instinctively and seem to relish the chase.  As predators, they protect your car from mice proactively and you generally don't have to wait for the mouse to find the cat.

The only downside to having a cat is having to protect your car from the cat.  Cats, by their nature, always love to perch in high places, which will invariably be the hood or roof of your car.  Even though they seemingly have soft, padded feet, they also have very sharp claws that aren't automatically retracted because they are walking across your fresh paint or even your all-original 40-year old paint.  You can try to train your cat to stay off your car but you will probably have more luck telling the sun not to shine.

You can either keep yelling at the cat to get off the hood or you can find a better place for the cat to rest.  The best method I have found so far to simply put a heated cat bed in a high and cat-accessible place.  You don't need much to make it accessible because cats are excellent climbers and jumpers.