Thank you for sharing your opinion Sankhya.B.Gowda.

Had you written “over the long run it is not bound to make [me] any happier” I’d have accepted it more readily.

As I wrote in the article and elsewhere, there are situations where you don’t need a car, in which case you should not buy a car at all, neither new or used.

If that’s your situation, you’re absolutely right that buying one wouldn’t make you happier.

Since you wrote “not bound to make you any happier” using the generic “you,” I beg to differ.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of situations where owning a car would likely make a person happier than not owning one.

• Your dream job and dream home are too far apart to walk or ride a bike and there’s no public transportation solution between the two.
• Your partner and you go to school in different towns and public transportation would make it a multi-hour commute for at least one of you, depending on where you live.
• You live in a rural area and the nearest grocery store is too far to walk or bike.
• You love to go on rides in the countryside on weekends.
• You love to drive.

Etc.

We have to remember that different people have different needs and different preferences.

That’s why it’s safer to say that something makes no sense for your personal situation, rather than making a broad-brush statement that it makes no sense for the generic “you.”