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Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary
That can depend on how necessary the car is: for an example if there's a second car, or if work and stores are close enough to walk.
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Whether or not that is feasible depends a lot on where you live. Some friends of mine live in an apartment and parking is $100 a month. That pretty much kills any savings from keeping an extra car around. Of course they also aren't allowed to do any work on a car on the apartment property and all cars must be licensed and running. So any work on the car is going to take place at a mechanic for $100 to $150 per hour.
Plenty of areas have city ordinances or HOAs that don't allow non-running cars or cars parked anywhere except for in the driveway. (No street parking / no parking on the grass). Plenty also don't allow any work to be done in view of the public so if you are going to work on your car you need a garage.
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Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary
With battery waranties these days I would think a rather new battery with just one bad cell or bad wiring would not be very common to have to fix. I guess if you got it replaced under waranty near the end of the coverage period and a couple years later it had a failure like that.
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That is the rare but possible scenario. A sudden battery failure just outside of warranty. Otherwise batteries generally slowly degrade with time and usage.
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Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary
One thing I've noticed is that besides repair, there is treating the vehicle nicely so things will last. It seems batteries are the oposite of engines. If you need to go long distances you can squeeze many more miles out of an engine with long distance drives. But batteries prefer to be kept cool and around 50% charge with as few charging cycles as possible.
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Yes, how someone treats their battery makes a big difference. The same way that some people can kill a cell phone battery within 2 years and others have batteries that last 5 years or more.
What batteries like depends on the chemistry but pretty much any battery used in a car benefits from frequent small discharge cycles instead a smaller number of deep discharges. It is far better to charge a car from 60% to 80% every day than to discharge to 0% and then charge to 100% every 5 days.
One of the reasons that Prius batteries last so long is that Toyota only allowed the battery to operate between 40% and 80% SOC. Ford took it even farther with the Escape hybrid. Early Escapes (up to 2008) only used 40 - 53% SOC. In 2009 Ford expanded that to 40-60%.
EV batteries that fail early generally have been abused. Either someone with a PHEV that completely cycles the battery twice a day on their commute or a EV owner that does deep discharges and then DC Fast Charges.
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Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary
Interesting. I don't know how that all works or how I'd save money that way. I'd have to think about it for a while.
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Say you borrow $10,000 @ 3% for 5 years. You will pay $152 a month for 72 months and pay a total of $10,939. However, if inflation was 7% per year you need $14,025 to buy the same amount in 5 years as that original $10,000. The bank lost 28% on the loan.
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Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary
When I first went and asked what just liability would be 25 years ago I distinctly remember being quoted $600 per month! Of course I ended up on my parent's insurance as a result. But my brother was still a 20 something at the time, needed full coverage, and had a few tickets under his belt. Even today, I pay $120 per month for full coverage on one vehicle at 40 years old with only one ticket in my whole life, some 6 or 7 years ago, that was only one point.
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That explains it. I paid stupid high insurance rates when I was young and dumb too. Then I got married, grew up, and saw my insurance rates drop.
When I was 23 I paid $2500 a year for insurance on a $6000 motorcycle!