Automobiles

So the car broker dude got back in touch yesterday. Wants to know if I want to come over to his lot and view the 200+ vehicles he’s trying to peddle. I like the guy a lot and am sorely tempted to run straight over to his shop and buy something from him.

But…lookee here! Google is making great headway with its prototypical self-driving car. And I do want one of those. That thing is gonna keep me out of the life-care community and, with any luck, out of assisted living until I’m ready to shuffle off this mortal coil.

Happened to glance at the Dog Chariot’s odometer yesterday: 131,000 miles. And change. Hm. That car is 15 years old, far more antiquated than any vehicle I’ve ever owned.

Normally, I figure I put 10,000 miles a year on a car. But…

131,000 miles/15 years = 8,733 miles per year

And to what do we attribute this anomaly?

Looks pretty obvious to me: since I got laid of my job back in 2009 and no longer had to make a 40-mile round trip four or five days a week, I’ve been driving a LOT less.  Even when I was teaching face-to-face, it’s only a 24-mile drive to and from the college, and that was two or at most three days a week.

The 40-mile trip to Tempe alone added up to 10,000 miles a year (40 x 5 days a week * 50 weeks a year), although as a practical  matter I often worked from home; probably on average I really drove out there four days a week.

I think what this means is that since I “retired” to 60-hour weeks served almost exclusively at my own computer in a home office, my mileage has dropped enormously. In addition, because the car is so old, I no longer drive it out of town.

So…hm. I’ve been doing a lot of my shopping on the way home from my weekly meeting in Scottsdale and have limited the Costco trips to one a month. Assuming I drive out of the ‘hood to a more upscale Costco outlet, what do we have here?

It’s 24 miles RT to the Scottsdale venue; add 4 miles to that for a shopping trip that takes in Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Sprouts, Walgreen’s, Safeway, and if need be a Staples, a PetSmart, a Fry’s, a Nordstrom’s Rack, and a FedEx office. Assuming I did that once a week — in fact, I don’t shop for all those things that often, so this will inflate the figures — that’s 1,400 miles in 50 weeks (there are two or three weeks when we don’t meet around the holidays).

It’s three miles to the church, but choir only meets about 9 months a year; so 6 miles per trip x (9 months x 4 weeks) = 192 miles. Hm. Am I making a mistake here? Can this be possible?

Okay, let’s add a trip to the credit union once a month, plus a couple of trips to errant Costcos: To the Costco on the 1-17 via the credit union is about 30 miles, RT. That would be 240 miles a year, right (30 x 12)?

How about a trip to the Mayo once a month, much as I hope never to see the inside of that place again? 50 miles RT. Actually, it’s unrealistic to think I’d have to go there every month; once a quarter would be a lot. So 50 * 4 = 200 miles a year.

Okay, let’s add an occasional junket around town: restaurants with friends, extra shopping trips, whatever: maybe 10 miles a week; that would be 520 miles a year.

That would put my base annual mileage at around 2672 miles per year (!!) assuming I’m don’t have to run out to the Mayo every time I turn around.

Chuck thinks the car will run at least to 150,000 miles; other guys at his shop think it should run to 200,000. Assuming Chuck, the grand old man of automobile mechanicdom, is right, that’s at least 19,000 more miles.

19,000/2622 = 7.2 more years in the vehicle’s life!

Can that possibly be right?

What if we figure I drive 5,000 miles a year, half of what I used to drive when I had a job and the car was spry enough that I felt safe driving it out of town?

19000/5000 = 3.8 years

That’s still almost four years. And if the car makes it to 200,000 miles (heavens to betsy!!) it could (in theory) run almost 14 more years! At 5,000 miles a year.

That’s assuming I keep it in good repair, keep throwing money at it, and never drive it very far.

There’s an outside chance these self-driving cars will come on the market in four or five years. If I’m still living in 14 years, they almost certainly will be available.

And that is what I want for the next car. A car that would drive me around town would moot about 90% of the reason for having to go into an old-folks’ warehouse. As for day-to-day care, it would cost one helluva lot less to have Gerardo come here every week and a cleaning lady or other caretaker come to the house every week — or even more often — than it would to pay four or five grand a month (or more!) to live in one of those places. One of those contraptions could very well make aging in place possible.

Keeping the Chariot is an inconvenience, of course. It has to be serviced more often than a newer car, and it’s pretty confining not even to be able to drive to Prescott or Bisbee. If it gets into a fender-bender, the insurance company is going to total it, and then I’ll be forced to hurry out and buy a car I don’t really want.

But…renting a car for day trips would barely register compared to the cost of buying a newer car. Insurance premiums are rock-bottom. Registration fees are negligible. And it runs like a proverbial top.

(Why are tops said to run so swimmingly? Mine always used to fall over…)

Images:
Toyota Sienna: Public domaiin.
Driverless Toyota; Google technology. Steve Jurvetson. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
“A Tough Gang of Spinning Tops.” Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

And I don’t mean Missouri. 🙂  Here’s a recent update on a very interesting technological development, the self-drive, self-park private vehicle.

This thing, if it ever comes to fruition, could present a partial solution to the huge headache America faces as its baby-boom generation ages away from independence. The biggest pressure to move oneself into a life-care or assisted care institution is loss of the ability to drive a car. And the reason for that is that in about 99.9% of American towns and cities, public transit is simply not a practical option.

Most of us wish not to be warehoused in a holding pen where old folks wait for death. It’s a horrible prospect, and those of us who know people who have enjoyed that treatment have seen the depression and decline that quickly follow admission to one of those places, which drain your life savings in exchange for sad living conditions and bad food. But for many of us, there’s really no other choice.

If you don’t live in a city like New York, which has more or less usable public transit, your days of living independently in your own home expire with your final driver’s license. A friend of mine, Tootsie, saw exactly that happen to her.

In her mid-80s, she ran a signal at a major intersection and, not surprisingly, someone crashed into her. No one was injured, thank goodness, but both cars were totaled. A few months later, she ran a stop sign in my neighborhood, apparently because she thought it was a four-way stop. It was not. The SUV that ran into her was, yes, totaled. Again, no one was hurt.

But the two accidents in close succession alarmed her kids so much that they insisted she get rid of the car, which, being the accommodating type, she did.

The result was dismal.

She lived just far enough away from her son that it was inconvenient for him to get to her place to help her and drive her around on errands — nor did he feel much enthusiasm for having to do so. He would go out there about once every week or ten days. Less, if he could get away with it.

Phoenix being a 100% automobile-oriented city, access to even the most basic necessities meant blocks of walking through heat that can reach 118 degrees in the shade. Heat radiating off asphalt and concrete can make your external car thermometer register numbers upwards of 125 degrees.

Public transit in Tootsie’s part of town was essentially nonexistent. She tried: waited 30 minutes before a bus showed up. I myself have stood for 45 minutes waiting for a bus in this town. Few bus stops here provide seating or shade structures — most people end up standing in the full sun or, if a nearby business or home has a lawn, sitting on the grass. Getting around on public transport here is extremely inconvenient for younger, fit people and out of the question for the elderly.

The city used to have a Dial-a-Ride service for the disabled and the elderly, but recently they discontinued access to it for people who were merely too old to walk far. Unless you’re in a wheelchair or on crutches, you can’t use that anymore.

This meant she couldn’t get groceries, she couldn’t buy personal products or pick up a prescription, she couldn’t take her ailing dog to the vet, she couldn’t get herself to the doctor unless her son or a friend drove to her home, picked her up, and schlepped her around town.

Trapped in her double-wide, she grew increasingly depressed and listless. When her daughter visited from Seattle, she was appalled to find the cupboards low on food and Tootsie’s normally spotless house disheveled. She persuaded her brother that their mother should be put in a care home, and within a few weeks, off she went to the Beatitudes.

This old-folk’s warren is one of the better institutes in town. But still…an institution is what it is.

Tootsie, who had a resilient and up-beat personality, at first bubbled on cheerfully about how grand it was to have someone else to do the cleaning and cooking. But it didn’t take long for the depressing aspects of imprisonment in a one-room studio inside a facility with locks on the doors to take effect. Within a few months, she lost interest in living, withered away, and died.

Personally, I’d rather take a flying leap off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon than die a day at a time in an “assisted living facility.” I am convinced that Tootsie would have lived longer if she had been able to stay in her home, and the quality of the last year or two of her life would have been infinitely better.

Being able to get to grocery stores, drug stores, and other routine destinations on her own would have made that possible.

That’s why I see the planned self-driving, self-parking car as a life-saver in more ways than one. It not only may save lives by avoiding collisions, it will keep older adults independent in their homes.

Obviously these things are going to be ludicrously expensive when they hit the market. But consider what a year in a life-care community costs: thousands of dollars a month. You can hire a lot of cleaning help and buy a lot of restaurant breakfasts and dinners for six or eight or ten grand a month. And you could realistically get there in a car that will chauffeur you to the restaurant while you kick back and read your Kindle. Even at sixty, seventy, maybe even eighty thousand dollars, a self-driving vehicle would save so much over assisted living that it would pay for itself within a couple of years.

And you might have a shot of living life and enjoying it for that couple of years.

This is one of the reasons I decided not to replace the aging Dog Chariot in 2015. Admittedly, it’s way down on the list of reasons…but it surely does register. The lightrail extension past our ’hood will go into service late this year or (more likely) next year. A station will be within walking or scooter-riding distance of my house, and the train will run down to the Ghetto Costco, passing a Sprouts, a Walgreen’s, and two other grocery stores, as well as to the upscale AJ’s market and to all the downtown entertainment venues.

If that strategy works — riding the lightrail to reach places that sell basic needs — it will extend the ancient car’s lifetime by a lot. Even before I retired, I only put about 10,000 miles/year on the tank. If some of those miles can be traveled on a train, then the 30,000 to 50,000 miles that Chuck thinks he can squeeze out of the Chariot translate not as three to five years but as maybe six to ten years.

By then, automakers may very well have functional self-driving vehicles to put on the road. 🙂

…is buying a car. Happy day.

Over at The Savvy Scott, Pauline describes her recent purchase of a Hyundai Tucson with 140,000 miles (!) on it. Pauline, the proprietor of Reach Financial Independence, evidently lives in Guatemala and decided to buy a car through an auction house in Orlando while vacationing in Florida, the costs being significantly lower and the chance of getting a decent car significantly higher when one buys in the US.

LOL! To say you’re less likely to get ripped off in Florida is to say something startling about Guatemala, eh? 😀

Later models of the Tucson are indeed very nice — it’s among those I’ve been considering — and Pauline is very pleased with her find. And she got a good price on it by purchasing at auction.

I’ve never bought a second-hand car from a dealer. My ex- and I got our Mercedes second-hand, but we bought it from one of his law partners. We knew where the guy lived. 😉 The prospect of coping with a used car salesman makes me shudder, and I can’t even imagine the risks entailed in buying at auction.

But given the outrageous cost of new cars, and the fact that they’re mostly equipped with so much unnecessary electronic frou-frou that you have to go back to school to learn now to drive one, I’m considering the possibility of a used car. One of my friends knows a car broker. If I can get him to give me a referral to that gent (and I don’t hate the gent), I’ll probably see if he can get me a late-model Toyota that comes with a six-banger.

Pauline points out all the perceived joys of buying second-hand: lower cost, less depreciation, lower insurance costs. In Arizona, we can add lower registration taxes, since these drop as a car ages. I can pay registration out of cash flow now; I’d have to draw down from savings to register a newer vehicle.

On the other hand…

If you drive your car until it falls apart, it will run for ten to twenty years (depending on how much you drive and how well you care for the vehicle). An old junker will have to be replaced in less than ten years — possibly less then five.

If you drive a car for ten years, you have ample time to set aside “car payments” in savings, accumulating enough to pay for the next car in cash.

If you buy new and keep the car for ten to fifteen years, depreciation is irrelevant. A reliable vehicle, such as a Toyota or a Honda, will give you your money’s worth over that period.

Over a fifteen-year lifetime, the cost of insurance and registration will drop into the sub-basement, whereas if you buy a five-year-old car every five years, these costs will never decrease significantly.

New cars tend to be safer, because they have up-to-date safety technology and because key components like brakes will not fail from age.

New cars come with warrantees, usually for 100,000 miles. Junkers do not — they’re pretty much guaranteed to cost you money for repairs.

A Hyundai that has 140,000 miles on the odometer may run for another 60,000 miles, give or take. That’s not very far. It certainly isn’t if you live in the US. Possibly it would be a good buy if you lived someplace that had decent public transit and amenities such as grocery stores within walking distance. But that certainly is not true in most US cities. Here, such a vehicle would be penny-wise and pound-foolish.

While I surely do resent having to pay more for a new car than my first house cost, I’m also uncomfortable with the downsides of buying a used vehicle.

I dunno. Maybe I’ll just get the Dog Chariot’s brakes fixed and try to coax it to run to 200,000 miles.