I am considering retiring at the end of December 09 and I’ve visited cars.com to research a used car to keep at my daughter’s house near Phoenix, so I can get around on my own when I visit.
1998 Automatic New Beetles with 60K miles or less are showing up for under $6K or so.
I can’t get something any bigger than that to fit in daughter’s garage. Is it possible that these used cars are good deals?
For whichever car that is parked for extended periods , remember to put in fuel stabilizer (Sta-bil) with your fill up of fresh gas. ( add stabilizer to new gas, stabilizer does not make bad gas good again.)
Even though you may visit monthly or so, calculate how long the gas IN THE TANK wiil be there between fillups. More than six months and you will want stabilizer in the gas.
Most people don’t think of cars and fuel stabilizer in the same sentence. It’s normaly associated with boats, atvs, chain saws, lawnmowers and other ‘stored gas’. But a vehicle that sits is ‘stored gas’.
Case in point is my own 1979 chevy pickup, bought new in 79, has 68,975 total original miles. I filled up both tanks yesterday after about two years since adding gas. With the stabilizer pre-added back then, the truck ran beautifuly all the way to empty. ( I purposely drove it for the last couple weeks to run out the old gas )
…Yesterday my truck doubled in value…I filled it up !
In Phoenix, the MOST important thing is that the A/C work properly. Be sure to check THAT!! A Nissan Stanza would probably meet your needs also…The correct color is WHITE.
Some VW’s of this time period have an oil consumption problem, and Consumer Reports indictates that there are reliability issues. Howver,a 1998 automobile is a dozen years old, so the condition of the individual car you are considering is much more important. It doesn’t sound like you will be driving enough to make oil consumption a big issue unless it uses more than a quart every 1000 miles or so.
Have a mechanic check the car to be certain that it is safe (brakes, tires, etc), the automatic transmission shifts properly and the engine’s compression is good on all cylinders. Since you won’t be doing interstate travel, but want something for around-town use,a $6000 used car may be pretty much o.k.