If You Had To Reduce Your Fleet By Half, What Would You Hang Onto?

Some car enthusiasts allow themselves to collect or hoard more cars than some people may own in a lifetime. We recently wrote about a guy who collected 1,300 cars over 26 years, and now he’s finally selling them off. Then there are your favorite Autopian writers, who probably also own way too many cars. If someone forced you to downsize your fleet by exactly half, how would you do it?

This subject has been rattling around my head for a bit, and, admittedly, these thoughts have been supercharged by the responses to my post about the mechanical maladies of my spouse’s Scion. Maybe it’s time to be a responsible adult and downsize. Logically, downsizing would mean less time fixing stuff, less money spent on storage and insurance, and the miles that I drive each year would go into fewer cars; thus, all of them would get more miles per year.

As of publishing, I have 15 non-motorcycle vehicles in the fleet. That’s cars, SUVs, and a single bus. Let’s be a bit aggressive here and say half will be seven. That’s eight vehicles to get rid of. How would I handle that?

I think I would just go back to my roots, and also keep a couple of teenage dream cars. This would mean selling the manual BMW X5, the Honda Life, the Suzuki Every, the Plymouth Special DeLuxe, the BMW 530xi, the Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen TDI, the 2005 Smart Fortwo, and of course, the Nova Bus RTS-06. The Jetta was already on my “to sell” list now that I finally have a valid title for it.

That would leave me with four Smarts, which are super easy to take care of and cost me very little money. It would also leave me with the Volkswagen Touareg V10 TDI, the MGF, and the Saturn Sky Red Line as the three teenage dream cars.

Admittedly, it would not be easy to sell the other cars, except for the Jetta. I generally enjoy every moment I drive all of my cars. I also usually enjoy cleaning them and fixing them, too. I think I have narrowed down the Plymouth’s lack of spark to one component! So, I would heavily regret selling the cars, even if doing so would benefit me.

Post-sale, I think I would press my 2006 Smart Fortwo diesel into service as my daily driver. It gets 70 mpg all day long, is nearly bulletproof reliable, and it would hit the spot of being weird and different. I used to daily nothing but Smarts for eight years, so I know it can be done.

I pitched this plan to my spouse, and she’s fully against it. But maybe I should do it, anyway. I don’t know, I suppose I should look deep within myself.

What about you? If you had to reduce your fleet by half, what cars would you get rid of? Which would you keep – and why?