Which One Is Worth Nearly $8,000? 2000 Toyota Avalon vs 2012 Volvo C70

I’ve been doubling the price limit every day this week, and now we’re all the way up to eight thousand dollars, not an insignificant sum for most people. It’s still a lot less than even the cheapest new car, but it’s an amount many of us would have to finance. So a car in this price range has to be something really nice, maybe even a bit special. I think I’ve found a couple of choices that fit that brief.

Yesterday, at $4,000, we were looking at vans. It’s amazing to me how much people still love the Mazda 5. It’s not a car you would think would have such staying power, but it resonated with a lot of owners, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say anything bad about their experience with one, except maybe rust. It’s not that the Honda Odyssey is a bad choice at all; it’s just that it’s not a Mazda 5.

To find a place in our garage, however, one of these two would have to replace an existing vehicle. And the Mazda isn’t big or special enough to do that. The Odyssey could take the place of either my truck (with all but the front seats removed) or my wife’s Yukon (with the rearmost seats removed). Not that I would make such a trade, but technically, I could. If the Mazda were a manual, I could make a case for an addition to the fleet. But it isn’t.

We’re well and truly out of the realm of shitboxes now, at this price. That’s not to say you can’t find plenty of dreadful $8,000 cars for sale, but my intention this week was to show the best of what’s available at each price tier, not the worst. Both of these cars are clean, low-mileage, and nice enough that you wouldn’t feel embarrassed to be seen in them. They’re not particularly fancy, or high-performance; they’re both just really pleasant cars. And that’s not nothing. Let’s take a look.

2000 Toyota Avalon XLS – $7,800

Engine/drivetrain: 3.0-liter DOHC V6, four-speed automatic, FWD

Location: Austin, TX

Odometer reading: 73,000 miles

Operational status: Runs and drives well

I’m a fan of some pretty noisy music. I love punk, metal, and garage rock. Basically, if it’s got Glenn Danzig, loud guitars, and/or crappy production values, I’m in. (That link is not safe for work, just so you know.) But the thing about music like that is that it gets tiring after a while. You can’t just rock out to noisy stuff like that all the time. Sometimes you want something calm and soothing, a nicely-produced tonic for jangled nerves. Something like, well, “Avalon.”

Much like Bryan Ferry’s masterpiece, Toyota’s Avalon is slick, comforting, and flawlessly put together. It’s more special than a Camry, but not as highfalutin as a Lexus. Only one engine and transmission combination is available, which for this generation was a 3.0-liter V6 and a four-speed automatic, both utterly competent and completely invisible. The Avalon is like a good butler: it does what you ask of it without drawing attention to itself. This example has just 73,000 miles to its name, spread out over two owners, and the seller says it drives great.

I guess you could call this a luxury car, but in the old Mercedes-Benz sense of the term. It doesn’t have a lot of silly gadgets to impress your friends, or absurd materials that are there just so you can say you have them; it’s just comfortable, un-fussy, and extremely well made. As you would expect from such low mileage, this one is in very good condition inside. The seller says it was never smoked in, either, which is nice to hear.

It was repainted recently; my guess is that the Texas sun did a number on the clearcoat, so the seller had it redone. The fact that it was considered a nice enough car to repaint says a lot. The Avalon isn’t what you’d call a stylish car, but it’s handsome enough. No one is going to comment on its appearance either way, and sometimes that’s nice.

2012 Volvo C70 T5 – $7,950

Engine/drivetrain: Turbocharged 2.5-liter DOHC inline 5, five-speed automatic, FWD

Location: Fremont, CA

Odometer reading: 118,000 miles

Operational status: Runs and drives well

I know how a lot of you feel about convertibles, and because of that I debated showing this one to you. But this isn’t your typical convertible. For one thing, it has a retractable hardtop, and for another, it’s a Volvo. If there’s one company we should trust to make a nice, solid, safe droptop, it’s Volvo. This is the second generation C70, which replaced both the coupe and soft-top convertible versions of the previous generation with one car.

This is the T5 model, with a turbocharged five-cylinder engine driving the front wheels through a five-speed automatic. The seller is a dealership, so take the claims of “regular oil changes” with a grain of salt, but a clean Carfax report and a fresh smog certificate are encouraging signs. Best to bring a mechanic friend along if you don’t know what you’re looking at, though.

I have to say, I really love the interior of this car. It’s a sleek design, and it looks nice and bright. It’s in good condition, too. I really hope this car has a good sound system, because it deserves one. It deserves a nice sunny day and a wide open road, too.

It’s too bad there isn’t a photo in the ad with the top fully up, because this is one convertible that looks equally good with it up or down. That’s the advantage of a retractable hardtop; put the top up, and it’s just a coupe. I do have to say that I’m not crazy about the black wheels. That’s one trend that can die out any time.

So that’s what eight thousand bucks can get you these days: a nice but somewhat bland sedan, or a cool but slightly impractical hardtop convertible. Okay, it will get you lots of other things as well, but these are the two that caught my eye. Which one would you pick?