The average in the US is 12.5 years old.
I think people’s impression of things is skewed because overall cars are much more reliable than they used to be. When I was a kid a car over 10 years old was something you expected to have issues, and certainly wanted to avoid buying. That’s not the case these days, and the huge numbers of functional older cars on the roads make us not realize just how many old vehicles are out there because they’re normalized.
My car is 15 years old, my wife’s is 9. They’re both perfectly fine and they don’t feel old to us.
Toyota Camry or Corolla. If you just need transportation that you can rely on to start every morning without requiring major repairs all the time, these are your best options. Honda Accord or civic if you just like Honda better
If those are too boring buy something else from either Toyota or Honda.
I have personally seen double digit numbers of these vehicles go north of 200k miles and multiple over 300k miles with little more than basic maintenance. Some of them were outright abused with maintenance not done, driven with no oil, in accidents, etc. They just keep on ticking. These are individual anecdotes that should be taken as such but I encourage you to read others’ accounts as well. My experience is not unique at all. I’m convinced you have to actively kill these cars. I live in the rust belt and I am quite sure that the bodies of our Toyotas will completely disintegrate before the engines give out. All I do is follow the maintenance plan in the manuals.
This is not to say you don’t get small issues, or maintenance items. You still have to replace brakes, tires, etc. We had random minor issues with the interiors. But they always started and did their best to get us from point A to point B.
This is good advice in general.
But the answer to this question is extremely well known across the internet and every thread that comes up will eventually boil down to the same two responses: Toyota and Honda as 1 and 1a.
There isn’t some secret answer to find, those are just the answers. People will definitely come up with anecdotes supporting various other cars, but as these threads hit a certain mass of replies they invariably boil down to those two choices.
They are not the flashiest cars, nor the most feature rich, nor the most efficient or most powerful. But if you want to buy a car that will just keep on running after years of minimal maintenance, often even after being abused during that time, a Toyota or Honda is what you should buy.
That’s a good anecdote.
For my part I took Spanish from 2nd or 3rd grade all through college. I basically knew enough to be dangerous and it was occasionally useful in online chat where my broken Spanish was marginally better than some people’s non-existent English. But honestly the biggest strength was that I knew enough to be able to tell when Google translate did a bad job conveying my meaning.
Nowadays I’m several years removed from the last opportunity to use it at all and I hardly remember anything. It’s definitely a “use it or lose it” thing.
I have these faint memories of watching my uncles play The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends for NES when I was super little. That’s probably where I first got an interest. But then the first game that I actually played myself that got me truly hooked was Super Mario World for SNES.
Still one of my favorite games ever.
I too question the overall ire against subscriptions.
I understand the hesitance regarding the proliferation of streaming services. It’s hard to keep track of them and the sort of transient nature of their content makes it frustrating.
But I don’t think subscriptions are inherently bad insofar as the costs related to upkeeping things I want to have access to are ongoing expenses. It follows that my access would be an ongoing expense to support that. It’s why people subscribe to the newspaper or magazines. A one time fee (or not paying at all) does not keep the presses running over time.
I pirated a lot of things when I was younger. But as I’ve grown older it has become clearer to me that without the financial support of those with the means to provide it, many things I enjoy could not exist. I’m happy to contribute so I can keep enjoying things I enjoy.
The internet.
And no I don’t mean every single part of it. But somewhere along the line there became an expectation that the internet be free. That continued for sites that rapidly grew well beyond the point where it was reasonable for them to be maintained for free, but instead of a natural progression where we pay for things we use, we simply became the product of the internet at large in the form of data about every aspect of our lives.
We now live and exist in a world where very little of what we do is private in any way, our preferences and relationships and tendencies are digitized and correlated and used against us largely without our active, conscious knowledge. And it’s all so Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube can be free. Or rather…“free”.
It has always felt like the biggest scam ever to me, that everything I do and think online should be bought and sold without me really ever having much of a chance to have a say in that.
My grade school stopped allowing kids to go up for second helpings of hot lunch because of me. In 8th grade I recruited the help of quite a few classmates and managed to take down 50 chicken nuggets, 2 milks, a pile of veggies, and two dessert cakes at one lunch hour.
This performance became somewhat infamous, and I learned from a friend that they banned second helpings for the next school year in part because of that occurrence.
Still kind of proud of that one. And not sure I could manage 50 nuggets now as an adult.
sitting for 8 hours doing maybe 2 hours of work
This is funny, and something I’ve thought about and talked about with coworkers a lot. When I first started permanent WFH at the beginning of COVID, I used to feel really guilty about doing random chores and stuff around the house during the workday. I felt like I always had to be “on” trying to busy myself or whatever, even if there wasn’t really work to do.
Over time as we have done a partial return to office and I realized I do even less work on the days we go in, I have done a lot of reflection on the way we used to work when we were 100% in the office pre-covid. My conclusion is that on any given day most people were doing between 1-4 hours of actual work, and the rest of the time was spent wandering around, bullshitting, taking walks, browsing the Internet, etc. And everyone thought that was just fine. But a solid half of most days was literally wasted doing nothing productive at all.
So these days I have shifted my attitude to one that is focused on getting my assigned work done, and being somewhat flexible on meeting times and when I can accomplish things. In return I don’t feel guilty if I need to mow the lawn or do some laundry during the day. I have a smartphone and I get notifications. If there is something urgent I’ll drop what I’m doing to handle it. If it can wait, I finish up then take care of it. It’s greatly helped my sanity and I think it’s improved my work, too. We do go to the office once a week or so but I honestly plan to get almost nothing accomplished on those days and consider it a bonus if we do get work done.
Careful what you wish for regarding cubicles. I would kill for a cubicle in our office. When companies implement these modern collaboration space ideas, it’s all about hotel desks, movable workstations, short or no dividers and open air spaces.
Having a cubicle to myself was fucking awesome. Now there is no privacy, no space to call my own, no place to simply have a phone conversation without everyone within 50 feet of me hearing every word.
- Pulp Fiction
- Donnie Darko
- The Big Lebowski
- The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
- In Bruges
- The Matrix
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
- Ocean’s Eleven
- Indiana Jones original trilogy
- Get Out
- Bladerunner (a book, apparently)
- Bladerunner 2049
- 28 Days Later
- American Beauty
- The Usual Suspects
- Gladiator
- Schindler’s List (also a book??)
- Saving Private Ryan
- There Will Be Blood (dammit, a book!)
No not perfect, certainly. And cars are definitely complex, and recalls are a normal and expected component of car ownership for most people. Watch for them, get them rectified.
To be clear though, recalls are sort of outside what we are talking about when we are talking about reliable and long lasting cars. A recall is a known issue that the company addresses. It doesn’t mean the car won’t last.
Toyota and Honda, while they have the normal minor issues any car might have, are absolutely head and shoulders over other makers when it comes to their cars simply lasting longer with less maintenance.
Consumer reports is good for identifying which older models or vehicle have stood the test of time. I’m not sure it’s as useful for newer vehicles since it’s very hard to assess longevity of new models before there is data.