Thank you for sharing your experiences James.

I don’t need others to share here the experience of buying a used car and having problems with it. I had such an experience with my ’89 Ford Taurus which I bought in ’92. By 2000, I’d spent more on it than I should have, before ultimately deciding to donate it because the shop was estimating another $4500 worth of repairs needed when it wasn’t worth that much in running condition.

Granted, it was 11 years old by that point, 8 of those years with me. That’s why I put my personal limit at around 10 years car age (though my 2010 Camry is still going strong at 150k+ miles so I’ll probably keep it for a few more years unless it starts acting up).

I think the main point of your experience (shared by some others) is that if you have the talent and expertise to maintain and repair your own car, you should absolutely buy used rather than new, because your cost of repairs will be limited to parts and supplies, which are far less than the labor cost of repairs that the majority of folks, like me, have to pay for.

Regarding your patriotic commitment to buying American-made cars, I’ll point you to Car and Driver’s list of American car makers. They base their test of whether a car maker should be counted as American not solely on where their corporate HQ is, but rather: “For our purposes, we’ve decided that to qualify as American, a vehicle must be assembled in the United States with at least 50 percent of its parts supplied from North America.”

Next to the ones you’d expect (like Chevy, Ford, and 8 other US-based companies), they include:

• Honda;
• Acura;
• Hyundai;
• Kia;
• Mercedes-Benz;
• Nissan;
• Infiniti; and
• Toyota

My personal experience with reliability (or lack thereof), having bought a Ford, a Dodge, a Honda, and two Toyotas thus far has convinced me to always buy Hondas or Toyotas. I’m glad those are on the list :).