If You Had To Buy A Car Today To Last 250,000 Miles, What Would You Buy?

Image: Bradley Brownell

New cars are an expensive proposition, with the average new car transaction price somewhere around $48,000 and interest rates ranging between five and 14 percent. It often doesn’t make financial sense to buy a new car and trade it in every couple of years, as has been the American norm for so long. You really should be committing to buying a car that will last a decade or more, if you want to get your money’s value out of it.

My First Car: Ed Burns’s Beater Buick

I recently crossed the 100,000 mile mark in our 2018 Buick Regal TourX with fairly few issues. Would I trust it to carry our household chores and road trips for another 150,000 miles? I’m confident that I would. It has been a good car, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t continue to be. It was a good use of our $36,000, and it’s still worth more than the remaining balance on the zero percent GM Financial loan. I recommend them all the time. It’s a great little wagon.

Unfortunately, the Regal TourX is long gone from the market, and the company that built them (Opel) isn’t even a General Motors brand anymore, so parts are getting a bit more difficult to come by. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, and I’m not entirely sure what I’d replace this car with in the new vehicle market if I were forced to. I’ve got a few ideas floating around in my mind, but I don’t want to sway your answers.

If you were to pick something today that can handle trudging around 14,263 miles per year (the average American’s annual mileage) for the next fifteen to twenty years, what would it be? Will anything sold today still be relevant on American roads in twenty years? Take your pick of today’s cream of the crop, and commit to it for a decade or two.