On the Road to the Right Car for Us

For many Americans buying a first car is a rite of passage. Perhaps it’s because I spent my formative years living in a place with abundant public transportation, I didn’t own a car until I was 26. Rite of passage, my foot. The only reason my (then new) husband and I bought a car was because he almost got mugged many times on his way to work on the aforementioned public transit.

For us car ownership sucked, beyond the car payments and gas we had to buy. There was the hassle of parking on the street, break-ins (someone smashed the passenger-side window the first night we owned the car to steal our Ford-issued stereo system, with AM-FM radio only), and basic maintenance. But our little red Ford Escort served its purpose. For at least two years, it got my husband safely to and from work, which was why we became car owners in the first place.

Fast forward a few years, and we were ready to buy our first new car. We had a baby on the way, no airbags to speak of in our used car, and the clutch was doing a bad job of letting us shift gears. Nothing like having to rely on gravity to get your car started in the morning–not a great option when you’ve parked facing upwards on a hill. Just like before, we had a specific reason for buying a car that was all about practical and nothing about ego–we needed a safe car to drive our baby home from the hospital in. We opted for another Ford Escort (this time the station wagon), which had all of our required safety features of the time and it got decent gas mileage.

Since those first Ford Escorts, we’ve owned a number of other cars. We’ve never paid more for a car than a teacher’s starting salary, and that’s been good for our bottom line. Our requirements for cars have stayed pretty much the same over the years–get us from point A to point B, provide safety for our children (and their friends we might be driving) and, if at all possible, deliver decent gas mileage.

Earlier this month, our oldest car, a 1999 Ford Windstar, stopped fulfilling requirements one and two. Things were breaking on it left and right, and since the car was up for inspection at the end of the month, we knew it was time to figure out if continuing to own the car would make more financial sense than trading it in. In addition, now that we were living in our new house, on a dirt road and up a hill, we knew that come winter, this van, which was front-wheel drive only, would be useless to us.

We started by getting an estimate of how much repairs were going cost to get the car up to code to pass inspection. Then we figured out the Kelly Blue Book/trade-in value of the car, given its age and mileage (over 96,000 miles). Then we did the math.

In a perfect world, we would replace the van with a hybrid vehicle that would be good to the earth and our pocketbooks, by saving us on gas money in our $3+ a gallon world. That’s about the same sentiment that 69 percent of Americans in the market for a new car revealed in a recent CNN.com/Money poll–in buying a new car, they would get one with better gas mileage.

But we–meaning my family and I–don’t live in a perfect world. We live in suburbia, with bad winters and carpools to drive. And we’re on a budget.

Just as we had requirements for that long-ago Ford Escort purchase, we had newer and different requirements for any car we were going to purchase. These included:

* 7-passenger seating for carpooling
* front and side airbags for keeping my kids and everyone else’s kids safe
* AWD or all-wheel drive for icy winter days and nights
* affordable sticker price (hard to fathom in a day and age when minivans cost more than what my parents paid a year to send me to NYU)
* decent gas mileage

We spent a couple of days and many, many hours researching on the Internet and then sitting in and testing driving various vehicles. We looked a foreign and domestic cars. We looked at new and used vehicles. We looked at our budget again and again to figure out how much car we could afford to buy. My husband even created a fancy schmancy cost-per-mile spreadsheet so we could compare cars in an apples-to-apples way.

In the end we bought a used Ford Freestyle, a crossover vehicle that gives us the room of a minivan with the handling of an SUV. It met every single one of our requirements, including on pricing and gas mileage. (It’s in the 20s on the highway. Sure, that ain’t hybrid-style mileage but it ain’t Hummer-style mileage either.) We even got a few extras we hadn’t planned on, including a DVD player–which has already cut down on the “she’s touching me” cries from the back seat–and a five-year warranty.

I’ve yet to fill the car up with gas, because I’m trying to walk more and drive less to save money and cut down on my family’s carbon footprint here in our suburban town. But it feels good to know that I’ve got a safe and affordable vehicle in my driveway now that, come winter, won’t leave me stranded—physically or financially.