Well I am at least thinking about it. The way I see it, SUV’s are like bank stocks right now, they are heavily beaten down in price, but there is still value there. Dealers and private party sellers are selling medium to large SUV’s for way under blue book.
Everyone agrees that it is a great time to buy a house; I would say it’s a better time to buy an SUV, if you’re thinking about getting one and can deal with the gas prices; there is no time like the present.
This is just one more example of people getting emotional about their finances. So it costs you $100 to fill up your SUV. That hurts your wallet no question, but selling your SUV for a $3k loss, and buying a prius for 2k over blue book is just foolish.
The Pros: Its bigger, has less miles, 4WD (it snows where I live), and it would be close to an even trade with my car.
The Cons: The gas mileage($), The insurance($), and the maintenance($).
Final verdict: Probably a good way to take advantage of panickedsellers, costs would be significant, but not out of control. But would the benefit of the more flexible vehicle outweigh the costs?
Feel free to tell me what you think.
It wouldn’t maneuver like your small car. Do you think you would like driving something big? Are they mostly automatics? Would you like that? What if gas went to $5 a gallon, would that make a difference in your calculations? Only you can answer those questions.
i almost posted a comment when you first wrote this, but thought you’d accuse me of being a tree-hugging hippie. here’s the thing – the sooner we get away from our reliance on gasoline, the better. yesterday at 8:30pm there was a traffic jam of cars lined up trying to get gas from the only station in town that has it. SUVs are soon to be obsolete. sure, walkman’s got cheaper when the discman came out, but now you wouldn’t by either even though they are a fraction of the price of an i-pod. Also, the Prius is holding it’s value waaay better than any other car on the market.
The problem with getting away from gasoline is that we have nothing to replace it with. All of our alternative drive vehicles’ are vastly inferior to the internal combustion engine. I would love to drive a car that takes no gas, go 150 miles, and takes 5 mins to recharge, and costs $25,000 but we are not close to that yet.
I am not buying a new SUV, and hopefully someone would buy my fuel efficient car who drives 20,000 miles a year, and I could take their SUV and only drive under 10,000 a year. The cars already exist; I am just trying to get the most efficient usage out of them.