Cost vs. practicality?

[Isaac Zachary]

How does one choose how much practicallity to get vs. cost?

1. Bare feet. Hey, they work.
2. Shoes/boots/other footwear.
3. Bicycle. Human power.
4. Scooter/motorcycle. Not human power.
5. Two door, two seater. Keeps you out of the weather.
6. 4 or 5 seat sedan. Move some people.
7. 4 or 5 seat hatchback/wagon/CUV Move some people or a larger object.
8. Minivan/van/pickup. Move a lot of people or large objects.
9. Trailer. Move even larger objects and still get sedan fuel mileage.
10. AWD, SUV/pickup, CUV's to an extent. Go nearly anywhere on land, good ground clearance.
11. Anphibious. Hey! The bridge just got closed down indefinitely and I'm on the other side. An hour trip is now a 7 hour trip. Why didn't I get an anphibious car?

[freebeard]

Why didn't I get an anphibious[sic] car?

[Isaac Zachary]

Seriously! The bridge was closed Thursday and it's going to be that way for a long time.

And even with the bridge open, that was the route I'd take the Nissan Leaf on and eventually needed a tow truck because winter had set in.

Maybe I'm looking at this wrong. Maybe I need to start a ferry service. They actually had to boat kids back home from school last week because there was no way for the school bus to get around.

[redpoint5]

All of that depends on how much your time is worth. If your time is worth very little, you walk. If your time is worth a lot, you fly. Most of us fall between those extremes for most circumstances.

[Ecky]

I've always been attracted to #5 (or lower). Two door cars tend to be much more uncompromising in their designs, and that "purism" brings me joy. Name a two seater and I probably like it.

You can even make them not keep you out of the weather if you get a soft top.

But, in all seriousness, money is freedom. Driving a G1 Insight for a decade paid for itself many times over. Even if I had needed to rent something with backseats a dozen times per year, it still would have been better (financially) than owning something with backseats.

[Isaac Zachary]

I've got to rent a passenger van a couple times this summer and so far it looks like it's going to cost an arm and a leg for only a few days. Sometimes I cuestion if not buying a van is actually saving me any money.

[Isaac Zachary]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

All of that depends on how much your time is worth. If your time is worth very little, you walk. If your time is worth a lot, you fly. Most of us fall between those extremes for most circumstances.

There are also limits to that. If work and store are a few minutes away to walk, costing around an hour a week or 4 hours a month in walking, but it costs 1/4 of one's pay or 40 hours a month to own a vehicle, then a person could be waisting more time on a vehicle than on foot.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by Ecky

Name a two seater and I probably like it.

RSX

[freebeard]

Arcimoto FUV.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Sometimes I come to the conclusion that, if I were going to own more than one vehicle, most likely the best choice would be a VW Kombi for most tasks I could need anything larger than a motorcycle, and maybe a Honda ADV 160 for short errands and a 250cc Yamaha with a side-car (which would be useful to haul car parts, tools and dogs).

Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary

Sometimes I cuestion if not buying a van is actually saving me any money.

I had always been favorable to vans, maybe due to influence from Argentinians who went to Florianópolis on vacations with vans of the '90s which still had an even more reasonable size compared to most SUVs. Not to mention the greater interior volume for a very same footprint. On a sidenote, Spanish Army is likely to replace a fleet of Santana Anibals with a 4WD version of the Peugeot Partner.