I don’t need to tell you this, but it really seems like absolutely everything has gotten more expensive. It’s getting harder to stretch that dollar, and that includes cars. You might have even thought that the glorious $1,000 car is dead. While there is a grain of truth there, you can still find one if you really check under those couch cushions.
In the past, the $1,000 car was something special. These were piles of junk with rust, dents, scrapes, seat tears, and an air-conditioner that hadn’t worked for years. But the mechanical bits are usually solid enough to work for maybe a year or two. Then you scrap what’s left, get another $1,000 car, and keep rolling. I used to be the queen of $1,000 cars, but I’ve been having a hard time finding them.
Today, Mark kicked off a week of used car showdowns featuring vehicles that won’t cost over $2,000. He kicked it off with a matchup between a 1990 Honda Accord and a 2002 Mitsubishi Mirage. My Other Car is a Tetanus Shot shares great advice on finding that beater with a heater:
My trick to used cheap cars was to buy unpopular cars with manual transmissions.
Or cars with well-known failure points that had sullied the value of the model, but were easily fixable or announced their failure well in advance of stranding you.
The Mitsubishi hits the marks. It’s not subject to the Honda tax. It was never really popular, but had Japanese-level assembly quality. It has a stick, so automatic transmission failure won’t bite you. Sure, the clutch could be junk, but a quick test drive should reveal a borked clutch.
California no-rust car for ten Benjamins? It’s not cool, but this will get you to work.
I wholeheartedly agree with this advice. In my experience, the cheapest cars are unpopular configurations of unloved cars with an issue or two that really isn’t that serious. A good example would be a Chrysler PT Cruiser with a broken air-conditioner, rust, and a check engine light for a problem that doesn’t actually stop the car. Of course, acceptable problems will vary based on where you live.
Speaking of cheap cars, David Tracy waxed poetic about the time when Jeep Cherokees were cheap. Widgetsltd points out that every enthusiast has a story like this:
This article could be written about a bunch of different vehicles. In my world – low-budget road racing, autocrossing and street shenanigans – a few stars come immediately to mind. I’m talking about the Mk. 1 & 2 VW GTI. The NA and NB Miata. The Fox-body Mustang 5.0 liter. The E30 and E36 body BMWs. The 1988-91 Honda CRX and Civic Si. Even the humble Dodge/Plymouth neon, preferably with the ACR package. Each of these was once dirt cheap, easily available, and could be built into a nearly endless variety of super fun combinations. But alas, these cars are thin on the ground now. This makes my Gen-X soul sad. Older generations could say the same about a bunch of formerly-cheap-and-available 60’s and 70’s stuff. Sigh.
We embrace slow cars around here, and Jason owns the slowest cars out of everyone on the staff. Now, as he wrote in Cold Start, Jason is getting a racy Citroën 2CV. Jesus Chrysler drives a Dodge:
Careful Jason, between the 2CV, the Pao and the Changli, you’re approaching 100 combined fleet horsepower!
If you’re curious, the total output of my fleet is 1,473 HP. Have a great evening, everyone!
I guess I’m at roughly 2150hp across 5 vehicles with a low of 230hp and a high of 770hp, including one motorhome and one EV. The EV is a recent addition so that’ll be interesting to get used to all that wacky modernity.
270 + 208 + 305 = 783HP. Clearly I need to get those numbers up!
445 horses, 3 cars, 12 cylinders, 6 driven wheels, 2 roofs, 10 doors, 15 speeds, 1 torsen.
Total mileage of 573,100!
I am managing 1032hp across five cars. High of 300ish, low of 80ish. Plus another 30 or so in gas-powered lawn equipment. My Cub Cadet is a performance *machine*.
The cheapest cars I have bought in recent years (the eight years since I moved to FL) were a scruffy $2000 ’02 Saab 9-5 Aero wagon from a friend of mine, and a REALLY beautiful 70K mile ’91 Volvo 940GLE 16V sedan I bought on eBay for $2700. The Saab was actually pretty great – it never had any major dilemmas and I should have just kept the damned thing. The Volvo was an expensive disaster, even though it was very, very pretty (don’t be a sucker for pretty). The Saab always felt like it was about to implode, but it never did, and I spent very little on it in the couple years I had it. Spent a small fortune trying to sort out the stupid Volvo. Sold both on to friends. The Volvo, of course, has behaved impeccably for them for years now. Sigh.
I’m DONE with projects, at least until I retire.
Volvos can be nice, but CHEAP Volvos have the potential to be huge headaches.
Mine was great, and suddenly it seemed to need 3K worth of work while being worth about half that.
More modern Volvos have the problem of being FAR less good to drive than the Germans while being every bit as expensive to run, and actually MORE expensive if you are a DIY’er – BTDT with an ’04 V70, never again.
I have owned 13 RWD Volvos (’76 242 to ’95 945, and a ’93 965 as well)- that one was the only one that had issues that were really just damned difficult to figure out. Because it was a fairly subtle combination of issues that added up to it running fine around town, but get it out on the highway for an hour or more and it would go to hell. Let it cool off and it was fine again. FUUUN to track that down. Turned out to be a combination of a weak fuel pressure regulator and a main pump that would drop fuel pressure when it got good and hot. But it acted like an ignition issue. The redblock cars are as complicated as a hammer, but they also have very little in the way of telling you what ails them. It never set a single code in the little “blinky box” that is all LH has for code reading.
Cheap cars are still around, but you have to be a careful, persistent shopper and not too picky. Living in a major metro area, or wanting something that’s popular among some group of the population won’t help keep $ in your pocket at all (Volvo 240s are lately beloved by Brooklyn/similar hipsters, and that’s driven the prices up beyond the post-pandemic inflation affecting everything).
I’ve bought a car with a salvage title (from a mechanic that I trusted, and he showed me pix of the car before he repaired it) and it was fine. I also had no trouble reselling it down the road, even w/the salvage title, because I had priced it accordingly (it was an NB Miata w/just 3Kmiles on it, in which the airbags had deployed).
More recently, I bought another Miata (an NA this time, with a hardtop no less!) even though the seller, who had inherited the car, didn’t have a title for it. While there’s some risk in this, I got a good vibe from the guy (well, he had a wife and kid, and a roof over his head) so I went ahead and bought the car w/o a title for a good price ($2,250. five years ago) and it turns out that it was his to sell, and there weren’t any liens against it. It took some extra paperwork and patience, but eventually the state of CA mailed me a clean title w/my name on it.
I also bought a (single owner) car that had been keyed. It was otherwise in good shape, test drove fine, came with service records, and was nice and dry underneath. So I bought it and have no regrets (no, I never got it repainted, but it’s hard to see the scratches if you’re more than 20 feet away and over 50 years old).
Last week, I bought a 36-year-old car with over 167,000 miles on it. While this scenario would have given my dad yet another heart attack were I able to time-travel back and tell him about this in the 1970s, he routinely bought GM and Chrysler products that were on their third transmissions well before their odometers clicked over into six digits. The car I bought is a Volvo 240 wagon (which semi-ironically could have been purchased back in the 70s, but my dad preferred a Vista Cruiser for some reason) so 150-200Kmiles isn’t really that much, though ancillary items and anything rubber will usually need some TLC just due to the number of trips around the sun the car has experienced.
I like it when cars don’t cost too much. The most I ever spent on a car was for a lease on a $50K late 90s Benz, and though it was very pretty, it was among the worst cars I’ve ever owned from a reliability standpoint. Many was the morning when I’d turn the key in the ignition only to be greeted by a dashboard full of warning lights and assorted errors. I sold that car just a year later.
Lately (well, for the past decade or two) I’ve lusted for a Citroen DS. Though I have preferences year/version/option-wise, I’m not that picky… any intact, running, driver that’s not actively hemorrhaging hydropneumatic fluid will suffice. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a truly cheap DS, at least not here in Southern California, no matter how patiently I shop. 🙁
“If you’re curious, the total output of my fleet is 1,473 HP”
I like this but how about a fleet average. My four cars total 650 from the factory leaving me with an average of 162.5hp.
Put this way my fleet is weak.
This makes me feel better. I’m about 130hp up on you with one less vehicle.
To be fair the 73 super beetle tanks my average with a whopping 60hp and I used the factory 215hp for my 95 mustang.
But Mercedes, what I’m really looking for is a $500 Dodge Stratus. Are there any of those left?
Pardon me for being so predictable, but let me just put this itty bitty link right here for the 2-3% of Autopians who’ve never seen Will Ferrell do this before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy0n7IS_JmI
I am sure there is a sad-looking example sitting in a driveway here in God’s Waiting Room, FL somewhere.
But those things are darned near extinct between all the explodey mechanicals and rust.
The best thing about that would be loudly proclaiming “I drive a DODGE STRATUS”.
(Will Ferrel, SNL)
1,227 hp among 4 cars.
My strategy to get a cheap car is to very carefully buy one with a salvage title. It really depends on what happened and when in its life it acquired said branding. If it was early on and has been trouble free since, I would be pretty confident driving it.
I thought 1473 HP sounded good until I added up the total of the 6 vehicles in the yard. 2 Mustang Gts, An Edge, a Fusion, an Expedition and an Outlander totaled 1635 HP. Adding the Yamaha Seca would add another 40 hp.
I seem to have the opposite approach unpopular cars with popular manuals.
Anyways my fleet of two Civics have a combined 325 Horsepower.
I’m gonna combine points from both articles! I daily drive a $2700 BMW e36. It’s in great shape and drives perfectly, but is saddled with an extremely lame (and undesirable) 4-cylinder automatic combo.
IMO one of the best cheap used cars right now is a manual Ford Focus. The reliability issues in the automatics have totally crushed their values.
The 2CV isn’t slow, I’ve often surprised people at the green light in mine (years ago). It just doesn’t have the horsepower to do much on fast multiple lane roads.
Are you telling me it was designed to be adequate at the lower speeds of rural roads?!
“My trick to used cheap cars was to buy unpopular cars with manual transmissions.”
Or popular cars that were super unpopular with a stick. Around 2005 I bought a 1993 Plymouth Voyager with the 2.5 I-4 and a 5-speed stick for $900. By that time, the junkyards were chock full of 3rd gen T-vans with failed Ultradrive automatics. I upgraded my base model interior with lots of fancy Grand Caravan and T&C bits for a couple hundred bucks.
I like your train of thought. My sick mind wanted a base 2.5 Dodge Spirit/Plymouth Acclaim, but junkyard-upgraded with the interior from the top-trim Lebaron sedan. You got the poofy brougham-tastic faux luxury amenities and interior accoutrements, with the patient reliability of the 2.5 and a bulletproof transmission instead of the smokey 3.0 Mitsubishi with a A604 UltraDrive. (I never had a AA-body, but I had a 2.0/5-spd base Stratus)
“The smokey 3.0 Mitsubishi” – is that the one that they put in all those Diamantes, which I have never once seen driving around without trailing a plume of blow-by smoke?
1473hp?! Damn that sounds impressive until you remember that’s spread across 30 cars haha. Mine currently is all of 450 on a good day, but that’s counting the non running Yugo so really only 400ish.