cos | What car should I buy?

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What car should I buy?

I meant my current car to be "temporary", then four and a half years passed. It's time: I'm not about to move, or change jobs, or spend half the summer away from home, or work on a big campaign in the next few months, so I can do stuff like find a car. What should I look at?

Whatever I get, I want to keep for a long time. At least 200k miles, maybe 300k or more. New or used is okay. I don't plan to resell for a long time.

It needs to basically work, and stay reliable as long as I maintain it regularly and fix things as soon as I know they need fixing.

I don't care if it looks cool or feels great to drive or any of those things, just reasonable.

I do want to be able to get up steep dirt roads in Vermont and the Berkshires and such places in bad weather. That doesn't necessarily mean all wheel drive. My previous car, a Saturn SL2 with front wheel drive and "traction control" (ability to have the two front wheels turn separately) was very good at it. My current car, a Saturn SL1 (less power) with front wheel drive and no traction control, is not good at it. I'd take a front wheel w/traction again.

And I want fuel efficiency, particularly on highways and country roads, which account for the majority of my driving. I've been getting 33-39mpg on those kinds of roads in my current Saturn, though it's not rated that high. I'd like something that good or better.

Edit: I'd also like to have as much space as a Saturn SL2/SL1, for people and for stuff. More space would be fine, but not needed. It'd be annoying to have to adjust to a car with less space.

Suggestions?

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For fuel efficient, good for long life span, low maintenance, rock-solid reliable, and typicially able to handle Berkshires etc roads, consider some of the following:

Scion xA or xD
Mazda 3 or 6 series
Toyota Matrix or Corolla
Honda Fit or Civic

mazda3 (2.3liter engine) gets about 30mph highway, 25 city.

the new 3s have a 2.5liter engine, so expect lower milage

Hrmm. Good to know. I'd rented one and it seemed to get better mileage than that. Must have been a slightly older model.

OTOH, Mazda offers the cool hybrid transmissions where you can swap in and out of manual or automatic. I really liked that on the rental I used.

well, my 3 gets the above numbers. YMMV, literally.

The transmission is kinda fun, but I find I never use it unless I need to do engine braking in the mtns, or keep the car in low gears on snow/ice.

Yes, but when you do need the flexibility of manual control boy is that feature handy!

I agree with most of this, with some reservations...
- The Matrix doesn't get very good mileage compared to the rest of this group.
- The Mazda's are quite excellent and usually comparatively cheap used. Also consider '99-'03 Protege's. Again, mileage will likely be under 30mpg.

As hawver mentions below, Civics and Corollas are the two most reliable cars on the road for the most part.
That said, if I were in your shoes I'd likely go with a Scion xA or xD. I'm partial to Toyotas but don't much like Corollas after having owned two.

Actually if you want long term reliablity and low maintenance then a used protege is a bad choice. I've known 3 people who had them and thy were a serious maintenance headache on par with most of the VWs I've known.

BTW, Edmunds review says that if considering a Scion versus the lower cost Toyota Yaris, skip the Yaris and go for the Scion. The Yaris apparently gets poor marks compared to the Scion because it feels rather cheaply made.

I'm on my second Toyota. The first was an 81 Tercel that got run into the ground after 12 years of use. The engine still turned over in the dead of winter when it was retired. It was the body rust that finally made the car unsafe to drive. The current car is a 93 Corolla that has well over 150k miles on the clock. In the end, the body rust is gonna be what stops this baby. Every three years or so I need to do $500-$1000 of maintenance mostly due to city driving wear & tear like shocks and brakes and exhaust parts rusting.

The other caveat to buying a Scion is whether or not you need cargo room. The xA and xD aren't big on cargo capacity. They are fantastic city or commuter cars. If you want cargo room too though, you'll have to go with the less elegant but more capacious xB. (Nicknamed Box for a reason...)

My boyfriend and I have an xB of the previous generation (the more boxy-looking one). We test-drove a 2008 xB and it is quite spacious, but they upgraded the engine as well as the body, so it gets slightly worse MPG. (We usually get between 30-35 MPG in the 2006 xB, mostly city driving. Highway is a bit more efficient, but the boxy shape creates a lot of drag at high speeds -- the xA is better that way.) It's amazing for hauling a lot of people/stuff around, though. A car shaped like a box makes moving sooo easy.

The little box can handle mountain roads, but not with the greatest of ease. We survived taking Rte. 2 out to western MA and back, but most other cars were passing us.

We preferred the old xB to the new xB, but the more powerful engine of the newbie might suit you better. The newer model is more expensive, but includes as standard things like cruise control and an iPod dock, which were optional upgrades for the 2006 model. (Now that we're making fairly regular trips from ATL to FL, we wish we had cruise control.) If you can find anybody still selling an old xB you can compare and contrast yourself.

Previous car was a workhorse '92 Camry that was good for 16 years of tough love.

Cruise control is really sucky for fuel efficiency, because it does exactly the opposite of what makes sense: It applies more gas when you're going uphill, and then slows you down when you're going downhill (and makes no use of flat sections). It's basically trying its best to waste gas without driving unreasonably.

Which is to say: I do not want cruise control, even though I do a lot of all-day drives :)

Which is the little box, the xB? If it has trouble with route 2, it probably wouldn't do at all for the kinds of roads I'm thinking of, but maybe there's another Scion that's better at those. What kind of drive is it?

The 2006 xB is the "little box." It's the top car here:

The newer model is pictured on the bottom. From this review of the newer model: "Only one engine is offered for the 2008 Scion xB, a 2.4-liter 158 horsepower in-line four cylinder. With more power, the xB has unfortunately lost some fuel efficiency. The EPA rates the xB at 22 miles per gallon in the city and 28 mpg on the highway. Weight has increased by about 600 pounds which does not help its fuel economy." The little box's engine is 1.5 liters, 103 horsepower. Both are front-wheel drive. I think traction control is standard in the newer model; not sure about the 2006 (but it is available). Perhaps the bigger engine in the newer one would be better for mountain roads. Steep hills are okay in the older one, but you end up slowing down noticeably.

"Cruise control is really sucky for fuel efficiency"

Really? I've always noticed the economy on long trips goes up when I use the cruise control as compared to when antimony drives the same leg without CC...

I guess the real question is which wastes more energy --
1) using brakes to convert forward momentum to heat
2) using engine braking to convert forward momentum into engine rpms.

My gut tells me engine braking is more efficient b/c you can get some of the energy back in the form of faster acceleration at the bottom of the hill.

Also, I think mataining a constant speed is more efficient than oscillating.

The most efficient (I think) would be to turn the car off at the top of the hill and coast down, turn the engine back on when drops below set speed, but this setup isn't going to happen, b/c you need brakes and stuff to keep working...

Well, a human certainly *can* drive a lot less efficiently than cruise control. But a human can very easily drive a lot more efficiently than cruise control, because cruise control does some really wrong things.

To increase fuel efficiency, you can coast on the downhills (neutral is better, but switching back and forth into neutral puts more wear on your transmission so that maybe you'll need to replace it twice during the life of the car instead of once, so it's a tradeoff that depends on other stuff), use the flats and/or downhills to gain speed, and slowly lose speed on the uphills. Do not keep a constant speed, let it vary up by to 15mph (so in a 65 zone, maybe vary between 55-70), use less gas when going uphill. Keep a long enough distance between yourself and the car in front of you that you can avoid ever needing to break except in really dense traffic.

When sharing cars, I've always gotten better mileage than even other people who drive for good mileage. And I do that while maintaining a constant (rather high) speed, so long as the road isn't so hilly that' I'd need the brake to do so. Provided you're not so relaxed about time that you're prepared to coast down to below 40 mph, the4 two biggest thing you can do to reduce fuel consumption are coasting when you know you'll have to slow down anyway and, despite all the semi-nonsense about avoiding jackrabbit starts, accelerate up to the speed where it's safe to upshift as rapidly as you can without making the engine ping. You want to spend as little time as possible in low gears, because they're inherently wasteful.

I never noticed a significant difference in fuel efficiency between you and me on long car trips. I have no recollection of us ever doing that comparison. Besides, we almost always split tanks.

I do, though, drive at least 5-10 mph faster, on average, on freeways. Which alone would drop the mileage a fair bit.

I LOVE my Matrix

But I'd add Subaru to that list. The outback sport would totally fit your requirements but is harder on fuel than the ones listed. Mazda's are expensive to fix as you can ONLY use factory direct parts (discovered this with the mazda minivan I had).

I've mostly stuck to using a Saturn dealership on my two Saturns over the past 12 years, and have thus mostly stuck to factory parts. I don't mind that, because it saves me time part-hunting while still ensuring that I get good parts and the car lasts for a very long time. However, I don't know if Mazda has the sort of customer-service-oriented dealership system as Saturn...

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What car should I buy?

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Scion, and cruise control

Re: Scion, and cruise control

Re: Scion, and cruise control

Re: Scion, and cruise control

Re: Scion, and cruise control

Re: Scion, and cruise control

vouch

Re: vouch