Why Keeping the Miles Off Your Car is Foolish
Photo: Library of Congress
I’ve always been confused by people who have perfectly practical luxury vehicles but choose to drive an older commuter car during the week. If you ask them about it, they say that they’re “keeping the miles off of it.” Exotic cars that have ridiculously expensive maintenance costs or are utterly impractical for regular use may be exceptions. Then again, that’s not the point of buying a car like that.
Cars that are made in quantities of more than a few hundred are unlikely to become collector’s items, and therefore probably will continue to depreciate over time. Mileage will make a difference in the resale value, but even still, that is more a function of time than mileage.
Keeping a second car around so that you can keep the miles off your car will also cost you some money, even if it is a total beater. You still have to pay for the insurance, gas, tires, brakes, etc. While these will be cheaper than the “weekend car,” these costs add up and would probably cost just as much as if you racked up a normal amount of mileage on a single car. The bonus there is that you would be able to actually enjoy the car you bought more, and there would only be one car to maintain instead of two.
After all, presumably you bought the car to drive it, so what’s the point of keeping it in the garage all the time? To me, it’s kind of like when people cover their nice couches and their remote controls in plastic so that they don’t get messed up. At the end of the day, you’re sitting on some hard, slippery plastic instead of the nice plush sofa that you paid for. In 10 years, it will be perfectly preserved, but that’s not really the point of a sofa – you bought it so that you could sit and relax on it.
The same thing goes for your Mercedes/Audi/BMW/Porsche/Corvette – get some use out of it, otherwise you will have paid for something very expensive without getting full use of it.
The flip side of this is that if owners like this didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be able to score great deals on barely used cars. I used to drive over 25,000 miles per year, and my strategy has always been to buy a car with low miles (about half of what the average is for that make and model) and just pile on the miles for a few years. By the time I’m done with the car, the mileage will still be considered low. In some cases, it is roughly average, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it without worrying about mileage.
When the time comes to buy the next car, I’ll be looking for the one that’s been garaged and driven only on the sunniest, clearest days on the weekends. I’ll pay a little bit of a premium on the front end of the purchase, but that’s a small price to pay for enjoying the great cars I’ve been fortunate enough to own. It’s also probably a smaller price than keeping a second car around for the sake of practicality. To each his/her own, but for me, I’ll keep racking up the miles.
I was thinking about buying a smaller car and driving it during the week, and driving my truck only on the weekends to save gas. But the money I would be spending on that second car is the money I could be using to put gas in my truck. By the time I added it all up, I would have been LOSING money in the long run. It doesn’t make sense to drive an old beater during the winter while you have a nice vehicle parked in your garage.