For that price I would strongly recommend not going with Honda or Toyota. The prices on those cars are just too high for what you get. Take a look at the domestic models and I think you’ll get something a little more serviceable. The daughter of a guy at work just picked up a 97 Park Ave. for $300 with less than 50K on it. Elderly couple just getting rid of it and very good condition. Its a boat and a V8 but good transportation for a couple years. Also a lot cheaper to fix.
If you could get 2 years or so out of a $1000 Honda Civic why would people spend $20,000 on a new one? Yes I know,people have gotten longer than that on cheaper cars, but people have also won a million with a one dollar lottery ticket but I don’t think it’s a good business plan.
For $1000, you have two choices:
(1) A car that is basically used up, or has obvious (to the seller) major flaws, OR
(2) A car that is so hideously unsexy that no-one would want to be caught driving it.
My advice would be to go for 2, not 1. If this were 10 years ago, I’d say, “Go buy a K car.” As it is, go buy a stodgy, ugly car…you just might get a vehicle in working condition. If your state has an inspection program, place a LOT of emphasis on lots of time before re-inspection, as there is a 50+% chance inspection will total your ride.
In general, we were looking at Hondas and Toyotas, imagining them to be more reliable.
Perhaps, Hondas+Toyotas are more reliable than other cars of the same age and mileage, but that’s not what you’re comparing. $1000-worth of Honda will likely be LESS reliable than $1000-worth of domestic, simply because Hondas typically sell at about a 70% premium over comparable domestics. A $1000 Honda will have more miles and/or be older than a $1000 domestic…or will have some kind of major flaw. I am quite convinced the marketplace over-values the comparative reliability of imports vs domestics, esp. once one reaches the “bottom of the barrel.”
The way I did it: domestic, plus manual transmission (which nobody wants), plus no a/c (which nobody wants) resulted in a decent car, 8yo and 70k mi, that I got 60k more out of (did cost $1700, though, and needed $800 in repairs…which is actually pretty good, IMO.)
Whitey, Your Old Car May Not Be Worth Much More Than $1000 (Market Price), But What Would It Take In The Form Of A Purchase Offer For You To Sell It ? That Is How How Much A Typical Well-Maintained “$1000 Honda” Costs.
All I’m saying is that most of the well-maintained ones (“blue-booked” at $1000) are valuable (considerably more than $1000) to their owners and many (most) of these folks plan on driving them for a while.
Most of the $1000 cars are sold because of problems associated with poor maintenance or other problems and those are the ones with one tire out of the crusher.
Many of us in the Car Talk Community drive cars like the one that you own and operate (more valuable than market value) because they are maintained and things are repaired as they fail, not just added to a growing list of problems. I know what you’re saying. I agree with you. I generally run my cars to 250k - 300k.
CSA
Here’s Your (Not Much More Than) $1000 Car In This Morning’s Local Newspaper:
Buick Lesabre, 1992.
Very dependable, new tires &
brakes, runs great, good MPG, 86,000 miles.
Asking $1,300 or best offer xxx-9559 or xxx-3851
Notice the OBO. Cash talks.
CSA
I once bought a Honda CRX for $270. That’s right, $270! It had 270,000 miles on it and was being sold by a foreign graduate student who was getting ready to leave the country. I put another $300+ into it by having the timing belt changed. It ran and sounded fine and my daughter drove it to college (200 miles one way) and such for 6 months. It got totaled when she was rear-ended by a Buick, but it still ran fine. Anyway, yes, there are some Hondas out there for cheap with a couple years left in them, but it is a gamble!
If you need the car (my daughter did not really need a car) then I’d look for a well maintained car of any make that is going for cheap. Friends of mine have had good luck with used Ford Focuses. They lose value quickly, but are pretty reliable. But, don’t get hung up on brand, just find something that is common and non sexy. Avoid European brands, but other than that any car that has good running gear in an ugly body is what you want.
Agree; buy a basically good car that nobody likes. I once bought a 4 door stripper small 6 Mercury Comet in hideous brown with only 55,000 miles on it for $700 for a relative. He ran it for 2 years with almost no expenses. The car had been “lady driven” and sure enough when we cleaned out the interior we found a half used “wheel” of birth control pills under the front seat!
The relative sold the car 2 years later for $500!
Last summer I bought an 87 CRX for $400. It needed the choke repaired. I put a timing belt on it immediately, since I had no vehicle maintenance history. The drivers seat is worn out, but the car runs fine. It has less than 150,000 miles on it. Body is in great shape.The car is all original.
I could not agree more you, jayhawkroy. I made the mistake of purchasing a Honda that was in an accident and had a total front-end repair. The car only has 131,000 or so miles on it but because of the accident- and the fact that whomever repaired it did a half-ass repair job- the vehicle has been an endless source of headaches.
I was stupid and impulsive- don’t make the same mistake!!! If I would have taken that car in to my local guys before purchasing it like I should have, I would be quite a lot richer.
I would not touch a carbureted Honda with YOUR 10 foot pole…
Don’t fall into the Honda/Toyota reliability trap. For the money you are looking to spend, your best bet will probably be an older GM product; late '80s or early '90s will be better in terms of reliability (pre-dexcool era). For $1000, you should be able to find a clean, solid Cavalier, Celebrity, LeSabre, Electra, or pretty much whatever you want. For some reason, everyone hates these cars and wants to get rid of them, but I have owned several of them and found them to be some of the most bulletproof cars on the road. I currently drive a 1990 Buick Skylark. I have had the car for six years, got it for free from the original owner, an 88 year old lady, and have done little more than basic maintenance and wear item repairs to the car. I have probably spent $1500 to $2000 on the car beyond oil changes in the time I’ve had it. It has never left me stranded, but it did leave my sister stranded at school once when she left the headlights on and drained the battery…
At $1300 what else would you offer but cash?
I would not touch any carb’ed vehicle with a 10’ pole. Fuel injection is plain better for economy and power.
As a point of comparison, I just recently bought a used Honda Prelude. It’s a 1996, making it 14 years old, and it had 211,000 miles on it, and even it was $2400 AND I had to invest another $500 or so in new ball joints, belts and water pumps (and that doesn’t include labor since my brother and I did it ourselves). It was a really great deal because it had only one owner who had obviously taken obsessively good care of it during its whole life. Plus my brother is a very capable mechanic who knows what he’s looking for when buying a used car.
So the moral of this story is that my Honda is quite old and has quite high mileage, but its quality in spite of that made it a very unlikely find, and was still two to three times as expensive as you plan to spend. Granted a Prelude is going to be more expensive than a Civic, but not that much more.
A little trick you may want to consider is that there are several examples of “imports” which are sold under domestic labels with correspondingly lower price tags. The Chevy/Geo Prizm, for example, is a Toyota Corolla. It has nearly the same features and reliability but typically costs hundreds less for similar vehicles (same model year, trim packages, etc). The same is true of the Mazda Protege and the Ford Escort.
Andrew, In Rural America Where I Live There Are All Sorts Of Arrangements.
Some people try to leave a deposit to hold a vehicle and others barter. I took a deposit once on an old dependable beater until a guy got paid on a Friday. He really needed good transportation and I tried to help him. He stopped at a bar that Friday with his buddies, played pool and lost most of his pay check. Reluctantly, I gave back his deposit and sold the car to the next one on my list.
Most people here pay with personal checks. All I’m saying is be first to show up with a stack of cash and you can often make a better deal when it says, “Or best offer.” Money talks and you know what walks.
CSA
What ?
It is worth paying more for any car that has had the proper maintenance and care as described in the owner's manual.
When looking at a used car, the actual current condition of that specific car is what really matters. Miles make and model are all minor factors.mope87, was the car in need of $500 worth of ball joints, belts, and water pumps, or was it well-maintained? I don’t see how it could possibly be both at the same time. A well-maintained car would not have needed these things.
It needed ball joints to pass inspection, so that’s really the only thing that was broken. After 14 years, that’s just one of those things that wears out sometimes. The belts and water pump (only one pump, sorry the plural was a typo) were preventative maintenance. Someone even mentioned earlier in this thread that timing belts often break in Hondas, and I changed them in an attempt to avoid that. So really the belts and pump were a continuation of its being well-maintained.
The Ford Escort and Mazda protege use the same “platform engineering” but are not the same car. At one time in the past the Mercury Tracer was really a Mazda 323 thinly diguised and built in the same plant in Hermosillo, Mexico.
A better example of what you are saying is the Pontiac Vibe which is essentially a Toyota Matrix.
Escorts have less quality in them than Proteges, although they share some components. The Ford Focus and Mazda 3 share the same “platform engineeering” but that’s where the comparison ends. The Mazda 3 is a significantly better car than the Focus.
Similarly, Nissan and Renault share platforms, but Nissan knows that Renault levels of quality would be unacceptable to Japanese and North American buyers.