One day, my 2001 Durango with 160,000 miles will give up the ghost. It has been, and still is, a good car. Maybe the best I've owned. It is my GOODD (get out of dodge... in a Dodge) car. But since I only own one car at a time, if I had a Fiat 500 that would also be my GOODD car. Anyway.
I'll never buy a new car again. I don't see the point. Pay twice as much to get to drive the first 40,000 miles myself? When I intend to add 100,000+ miles to it my own self? And I had a bad experience with the last new car I owned.
So a recent trip to the garage to get the power steering fixed got me looking at he online used car market. I paid something like $16,000 for this fambly truckster in 2005. Now, six years later, if I want to buy a 4 year old car with the same wear I will pay... $16,000. Not bad.
When I bought the car I have now, I shunted the car payment to a separate account so I could cover the monthly bill. I never stopped doing that, just put it into savings. I figured I shouldn't get used to not paying a car payment. So I now have a sizable sum in liquid form saved up for a rainy day (nigh stormy at this point) or, more likely, that money will go to a down payment on the next car. With a little luck and time, that pile will go to just buying the next car outright. Dave Ramsey would be proud. And I didn't have to eat beans and rice to get here.
I like long trips on the Eastern Shore of Maryland on weekends, for whatever reason, because that's a good time to catch Dave Ramsey. He is one of the few call in talk radio shows that doesn't annoy me. The problem with call in shows is that an interesting host turns over their programming to amateurs that like to hear their own voice coming in over the radio. You have to a be a skilled Boss Jock to make that worth listening to. I think that was the secret to Rush Limbaugh's success a couple decades ago. Effective management of the callers. He was the first one to develop that talent and it got him more sponsors and stations. Rush could have had a radio show about car repair and done just as well, I think.
Back to my car. I chose the Durango because it was a mid sized V8 SUV. It could cover the 4x4 work I need with snow that twice a year it snows enough, and is good for camping that twice a year I need that, and for hauling a trailer those 3 times a year I need that. Church picnics, that sort of thing. And it could haul my crap inside. A Suburban sized SUV was too big, and the Jeep Cherokee was too small. Not too many SUV models out there that achieve the Goldilocks effect for me. The Trailblazer and Escape had other things going against them.
A neighbor started selling this "rebuild the engine" stuff a couple of years ago. Another neighbor bought some for his diesel truck, his diesel field tractor (John Deere, 100 horsepower). It seems to work.
ReplyDeleteI added it to my 92 Ford Escort. Two years later a Chevy pickup pulled in front of me, so I cannot attest to the claims to add 50,000 miles to the life of an engine. But I am getting ready to add some to my 95 Toyota pickup, at 220,000 miles.
(I got the stuff at Autobahn Power [http://www.autobahnpower.com/] out of Wichita, KS.)
The theory goes that this ceramic gel, added to the oil, will bond with metal fragments in the oil at the hottest -- highest friction and wear -- points in the engine to form a metallo-ceramic surface that is lower friction and tougher than the metal, rebuilding the normal shape of the engine. They have promotional pictures of rebuilt cylinder walls, etc. I don't know, it didn't hurt any engines I have known about.
What caught my attention, though, was buying a new or used vehicle, instead of considering replacing the engine if that is the only part you are concerned about -- and selecting a vehicle tough enough that the engine is the part most likely to fail (as opposed the the front end that fell off my old Lincoln Town Car, that was the only car on the used lot I could afford that would start).
Luck.