Buyers fret as the average cost of a new car nears $50K

[Cheezoholic]

10. I have never bought a new car in my life. I bought a year old Escape in 2003 for 15k dollars with 8k miles on it

Bought from a private seller, that was considered a "good" price for that vehicle at the time. It still had 4 years left on the warranty (never needed it). It lasted me 19 years and 325k miles before the tranny gave way. About 6 months after buying it I found the Dealer sticker underneath the back seat. 2022 from a local Ford dealer in SC for 24,999.

Anything newer than a 2010 -2012, unless you're good with cars its hard to do that anymore, especially if they're out of warranty. They're damn near impossible to work on yourself and even if you're good enough to do something like replace a transmission or something major yourself, you still have to take it to a dealer or a shop that has the expensive programming tools to reprogram the damn things just because the serial numbers don't match. That can be from 250 or so to 1500 bucks. I get recursive income but with todays autos its getting crazy. You can't even replace a windshield anymore without special programming (sorry I'm old and don't like it lol).

I have 4 vehicles and the newest ones are 2 2011's. One of them is pretty but all of them run as good as they did off of the showroom floor because I've worked on my own cars since I was 13. Stuff you have to learn when your poor