Comments on: When to Sell Your Car http://www.consumerismcommentary.com/2007/09/04/when-to-sell-your-car/ A premiere personal finance blog, established 2003. Within, Flexo discusses his own experiences with money, and he and other authors comment on a wide range of personal finance topics. Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:42:00 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 hourly 1 By: Chris http://www.consumerismcommentary.com/2007/09/04/when-to-sell-your-car/#comment-118665 Chris Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:26:48 +0000 http://www.consumerismcommentary.com/2007/09/04/when-to-sell-your-car/#comment-118665 Has fuel economy really improved? Do new car technologies really help the driver? You can add cruise control, GPS navigation, satellite radio, etc...for a fraction of it costs to get the same thing OEM in a new vehicle. Things like power windows/locks/steering/automatic transmissions have been more or less standard for the last 20 years. Has gas mileage really improved? From the 60s maybe, but there are plenty of older gas-sipping models. Certainly there has been no significant improvement to justify the cost of a new vehicle. New carpet, leather reupholstering, and a paint job can breathe new life into an older model, all available aftermarket. Our most fuel efficient vehicles today, like the Toyota Yaris, still gets about the same mileage that the 1991 Geo Metro did. You can argue for hybrids, but consider that a Civic Hybrid could cost $30k compared to a $2k well running Metro with the hybrid getting maybe 10mpg more. Where is the improvement there? I think it boils down to our vehicles being status symbols. Has fuel economy really improved? Do new car technologies really help the driver? You can add cruise control, GPS navigation, satellite radio, etc…for a fraction of it costs to get the same thing OEM in a new vehicle. Things like power windows/locks/steering/automatic transmissions have been more or less standard for the last 20 years.

Has gas mileage really improved? From the 60s maybe, but there are plenty of older gas-sipping models. Certainly there has been no significant improvement to justify the cost of a new vehicle.

New carpet, leather reupholstering, and a paint job can breathe new life into an older model, all available aftermarket.

Our most fuel efficient vehicles today, like the Toyota Yaris, still gets about the same mileage that the 1991 Geo Metro did. You can argue for hybrids, but consider that a Civic Hybrid could cost $30k compared to a $2k well running Metro with the hybrid getting maybe 10mpg more. Where is the improvement there?

I think it boils down to our vehicles being status symbols.

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