What 1 st gen owners have known all along.

greatest vehicle ever made

 

Am I reading this right, at an average of 12k miles per year, it would take over 13 years to break even with a Maverick? A car/truck that has like a 4' bed. It would take me probably twice as long to break even since I don't pit anywhere close to 10k a year on both of my trucks combined.

 

Yes, if you pony up $27500 for one. Less time if you spend less out of pocket.

Unless you do a ton of miles, gas savings alone usually isn't a determining factor in deciding to get a new car. It can be a big factor in which new cars you consider, though.

 

Have you considered depreciation though? New cars depreciate way faster than our twenty year old Tacos.

 

Not really relevant here. This assumes you get some cash from selling your taco and drive the new one until it's worthless. If you count the next trade-up, it works out better as well. If you're talking about maintenance, that's a can of worms that can go either way depending on the car/truck

 

I only get 14 mpg if I dump gas out on the ground….

 

Yes, and then you're back to the same spot as owning a 2001 Taco in 2024, but still gaining the mpg benefits over keeping the taco that whole time

 

I can make it 16? Myself and seemingly every post I've seen is averaging 14-16. I could also tweak the denominators to account for a 5 year old truck and gas prices in 5 years though too

 

I’m more in 19 range but mostly just messing around.

other part is im not paying interest on the taco.

 

Got it. I think the conclusion is one could make the numbers work if you pick up a modern hybrid and drive it 200kmi. How that works out and what the tradeoffs are for each person is different, but at the end of the day if the goal is to save money over their lifetime, one has to trade up at some point

 

I love geeking out about vehicle finances, I even built a webapp to help calculate the total cost of ownership using a bunch of configurable inputs (not sure if I can link to it, not trying to break any forum rules - there aren't any ads, I don't make any money off of it). Between depreciation, the initial 6% sales tax, increased insurance rates, and the 1% yearly vehicle property tax my number crunching has shown for my purposes buying a newer vehicle is almost always more expensive than keeping my old ones running.

That said, I only average 4-5k miles a year on the Taco, if you drive the average American mileage mpg starts to be a much bigger factor.

 

I feel like that's generally true for most situations. People typically buy new cars because they want to, or have to; it's generally a spending money game, not a saving money game.

Edit: I don't know what the number is now, but the old Clark Howard advice was to keep your old car until it was costing you $1500 a year in repairs.

 

Only in the case of weird incentives can people save money buying a new car. Like when the original Nissan Leaf came out, there were some government incentives, so people were taking them home for about $100 a month (I think a lease). So the gas savings paid for the rental.