My S and my other relatives had found used cars with car rental companies. They have been pretty happy and some have bought extended warranty with the car rental company as well. It shaves a lot off the price of a new car. S was going to buy from Hertz and tried driving it before deciding he was GOING to buy it before he inherited a car (literally).
@katiamom In the past I have bought two new cars and my current car I bought used through Carmax.
I also bought an additional 50,000 mile warranty on the car that covered me up to 95,000 miles. I have been told that my car is well maintained and the expenses I have had are normal wear and tear. BMW’s are built to last but the repairs are expensive. The decision I have to make is it cheaper to pay for repairs or buy another car.
I hate going to the shop for repairs but I go to a AAA car care center which provides a 2 year/24,000 mile warranty on repairs.
@katliamom:
There are a lot of sources of used cars where you can get decent prices. One of the tricks is to buy cars that have shown they are reliable, read up on what people say (and to be honest, stay the heck away from consumer reports, their car ratings mystify me, for a lot of reasons). These days most cars are pretty reliable, but I still would give the nod to cars like Toyota, Honda and to a certain extent Hyundai (their quality is much improved), though you can do well with a US maker’s car, especially with Ford IME.
Some have mentioned buying a car from a rental dealer, and that can be a good deal. The other thing is getting a car coming off a lease, a lot of them terminate at 36,000 miles, and in general because people know they will pay through the nose when they return it if is isn’t in good shape, they are not going to be in bad shape…and a lot of the depreciation has happened, so they may not be as expensive.
If you buy a car from a private person or a used car dealer, I would have the car checked by a mechanic, make that contingent on the sale (if they won’t allow it, walk away). Depending on how much you can afford, you could probably get a civic or corolla or something like a scion or maybe even an accord or camry, coming off lease at a decent price. Used subaru’s are not a bad deal either, I looked at late model used subaru’s and they were significantly cheaper than a cheap new car would be (and I am a fan of Subaru’s, the impreza is not a bad little car at all or the legacy sedan may be decent, the outback and forrester from what I saw tend to be a bit more expensive).
Usually if you buy a car coming off a lease or from a dealer in general, it will have the powertrain warranty (which depending on the car, can be up to 100k miles), and will have a bumber to bumper that varies from a couple of months to a year.
If money is really a factor, you may do better with a US maker’s car, they tend to be a little cheaper than some of the Japanese cars. Something like a Chevy Impala or a Ford Edge may be reasonably priced, and they from what I have seen seem to be pretty reliable, maybe a little less than some of the top brands, but if you can get a good deal, may be worth it.
We live in a small town area. We wrote a personal check for our last car purchase. No problem! I was all ready to go get a bank check…but they said it wasn’t necessary. This is the second car we have purchased from them.
The car we bought a year ago…personal check for,the deposit…and they wanted a bank check for the remaining costs.
@deb922:
The days of screwdriver and plier mechanics is long gone, but I would argue that all that complexity has also led to cars that are a heck of a lot more reliable. With only regular maintainence, most engines and transmissions will last up to 250,000 miles, and that is something that would have been a pipe dream back in the day (I remember an old car commercial on the radio, with Arthur Godfrey, talking about the electonic ignition (c1975) on a dodge car that would last 250,000 miles, or “the distance from the earth to the moon”, but “who would want a car to last that long?” lol). I don’t know what you needed done on the headlights, these days headlights are removable bulbs (that you can do at home), the only thing I can think is the headlight unit got damaged in an accident and needed to be replaced, there really aren’t adjustments on headlights these days the way they were back in the fixed beam days (though to be honest, I have never had to adjust them, so didn’t look all that closely). Yes, it can be expensive to repair them when something goes wrong, but those kind of major problems don’t happen all that often, and if you compare that to the maintainence costs of the ‘good old days’, the good old days weren’t so good.
Great info, @musicprnt, @HImom and @raclut, thank you.
One more question: so how do you know that the car you’re buying is off a lease program? Is it advertised as such? Do you go to a dealer and say that’s what you want? As for used rentals, do you actually go to, say, Hertz and buy from there, or would Hertz sell it through a dealer?
Late to this thread. I keep my cars for a long time, usually 7-10 years before selling or trading in. I have no problem with using financing if it’s a low rate. My latest purchase was for a new 2015 RAV4 that Toyota was heavily discounting at the end of last year. It was about $1000 more than a used with about 20k miles, and with 0% financing it was a better deal.
We are looking for a new car now to replace our “tuition mobile” 2004 Honda Odyssey. We also buy cars with cash (never lease or finance). Our budget is ca. 35K. My question is whether I should buy a fully loaded new Honda Accord with a V6 engine (I want a powerful engine for quick acceleration in the highway driving I do every day, on a road with short on- and off-ramps–the Garden State Parkway) or buy a used lower-end luxury car that has just come off-lease.
@musicprnt, re: the headlights. You need to take the front tire off to change the headlights. Something that wasn’t in our owners manual. The dealer charged me $50 per wheel plus the cost of the bulb. I forget why it was so hard to have the headlights adjusted but I tried 2 local mechanics and neither could and had to take it to the dealer. Seeing how hard the bulbs were to replace, I wish they had replaced the bulbs then instead of when they burned out 6 months later. Which is one of the reasons I hate the dealership service department.
Yes, cars do last longer for which I am very grateful. My grip, as it is, is that when cars do break, you are tied into the dealership service.
I have compared lease vs buy on cars I want to drive, and lease has always worked out better for me financially. I am also one who doesn’t believe in paying off mortgage when you have income, but many posters on this forum believe it is the right thing to do.
I started paying attention to the way cars are designed an laid out for doing minor maintenance. On the Toyotas I’ve owned, doing things like changing the air filter, cabin air filters, and the headlight bulbs are pretty simple tasks. On my wife’s Mazda, it was torture. The way everything was put together it was designed by a sadist as far as DIY maintenance is concerned. Changing out a headlight bulb required a contortionist and mirrors, and I have small hands. The cabin filter was just plain ridiculous and I’ll never do that again by myself. They design it so it discourages most owners and they would gladly bring it into the dealer to have the mechanic do it.
We have the following cars - Toyota Camry (H), Prius (me), Prius (S) and Prius C that our housekeeper drives. S’s girlfriend came over our house, saw the other cars and said - does everyone in this house have the same car?? Well, actually yeah and when H’s Camry bites the dust he will likely get a Prius! I loooove good gas mileage on a car! And we’ve never had an SUV or minivan. I have a real dislike of them (for myself; I don’t care or judge one bit for others).
One of H’s coworkers was ending a lease on a low mileage vehicle. He offered to let H buy it for the price that the dealer would allow them to purchase it. It was a 3 year old car with 25,000 miles on it in excellent condition. It was a lower price than anything similar we could find.
S and relatives just checked out vehicles at Hertz and other rental dealerships and chose among them.
@Pizzagirl, we too are a Prius family. One is 10 years old, the other is a Prius V we bought last year (needing a station wagon for the dogs). It would be very hard to switch to another kind of car at this point. The gas mileage and reliability are hard to beat.
You may not need to choose the larger engine to get significantly better acceleration than your old Odyssey, since engines have generally become more powerful, and a regular car will weigh less than a van.
Nova, totally agree! In my 20s it was a point of pride to have learned a little basic auto maintence, and I’d change my own air filter as well as oil at times. After attempting to change the air filter on my '98 Voyager, never again…contortionist is right.
Katliamom, I don’t like spending a lot on cars, and the miles add up very slowly, less than 6000 per year. So a new car is wasted on me. I buy on Craig’s List. My dad taught me to not be too emphatic regarding type of car, but have a few acceptable models in mind. I spent a few months looking for my last car, and finally found one with low mileage, in an acceptable model. The owners let me take to to my mechanic to be checked, and I was able to bargain a bit.
Normally I’d expect to keep this car for a decade or more, however at retirement I may get something newer with the hope of road trips to warm places in winter.
I bought my Lexus from my mechanic and he does all the repairs on it - plus lots of other luxury cars, too.
H’s new Honda he got at a dealership. It came with a 5 year warranty. He’ll likely bring it to the dealer if it needs anything.
@NJSue, the Honda H bought is a V6. Very zippy with excellent acceleration.
I hate car shopping. I bought my car from Carmax–it was about 2 years old at the time I bought it. I found the whole experience much less annoying than other car purchases I have done.
Thank goodness for the internet. I used autotrader.com to get the best prices from the dealers on the site and went from there. I told them how much I wanted to pay and if they weren’t willing to deal, I crossed them off my list. It helps to be flexible about your choice and be willing to walk away from a car if it can’t be had for a deal.
Car shopping. Ugh. Feels like dunking your head into a toilet. Come on, Elon, don’t get tangled up in a long divorce. Get us Model 3 as quickly as promised. 
No gimmicks, no haggling. No bs.