What car should I buy?

[cos]

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?

Comments

Re: Scion, and cruise control

[cos]

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.

Re: Scion, and cruise control

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

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.