How to Pick a Car

#liverichly Time spent going to gas station is wasted time. Time spent stranded because some system broke unexpectedly is wasted time. Time spent taking a vehicle in for maintenance is wasted time.

I once spent several hours researching washing machines. Was that overkill? Perhaps, but it got me a washing machine that should last about a decade longer than the normal kind. At my hourly rate, considering the hassle and time that replacing a washing machine takes, that’s a great use of my time! Vehicles are a much larger investment, so you should carefully research your next car. Remember, money you spend unnecessarily on your vehicle is money you can’t use for your next luxury vacation with your family! I already did a ton of work on this topic, so let me offer you a shortcut!

It used to be that buying vehicles was super easy for rich people.

1. Take about 10% of your monthly spend, preferably a bit less, and set it aside for your next vehicle purchase.

2. When one of your vehicles needs maintenance, take that out of the money you set aside.

3. Every so often, add up how much your vehicles are worth using sites like Kelly Blue Book or CarGuru’s Used Car Price Trends, and when your set-aside money plus the value of your vehicles is consistently falling because of maintenance, go buy a used high end vehicle to replace the one that’s turned into a money pit. Personally, I liked to buy 6 year old Acuras with low miles, and I’d dump them at about 180K miles, because they had very predictable maintenance needs.

You could still do that, if you like. This “buy high end, replace rarely,” strategy is optimal for any sort of technology that’s changing very slowly. And let’s be honest, until recently, vehicles just weren’t getting better that fast. I used to have a 2006 Acura with automatic emergency breaking and adaptive cruise, so even “new” safety features are old enough to vote!

However, and this is really important! Do not buy any vehicle that still has a Takata airbag in it. Takata cut corners and designed airbags that slowly absorb moisture from the air and over the years transform into what is effectively a loaded sawed off shotgun aimed at your head. Then they declared bankruptcy and closed up shop, leaving everyone else to clean up their mess. Don’t be frugal here! Check for Takata airbags and just say no! If your current vehicle has them, get them replaced or junk it!

Let’s say that you want the new hotness in transport: a BEV (battery electric vehicle). BEVs are getting better very rapidly, so it makes sense to buy the lowest end vehicle you can get away with and replace it as often as you can put up with. In 2014, a BEV that got 200 miles on a charge was doing well! Today, for the 2024 model year, a vehicle has to crack 400 miles to impress. Future vehicles show every sign of improving dramatically.

And there’s good reason to get a BEV. Rich folks have the luxury of not worrying about cash flow. So if the cheapest thing for our lives takes more money up front, whatever. We don’t need to care. Most people know that electricity is a super cheap fuel, but good BEVs also need dramatically less maintenance. That, in turn, means we have to spend less of the one quantity we can’t buy more of: time.

Time spent going to gas station is wasted time. Time spent stranded because some system broke unexpectedly is wasted time. Time spent taking a vehicle in for maintenance is wasted time. Good BEVs are dramatically more reliable and have maintenance schedules that read like this for their first several years:

1. Change tires when the tread is low, and rotate them annually.

2. Refill windshield wiper fluid when the little light turns on.

3. Replace cabin air filters when they get clogged.¹

Unless you enjoy “doing car stuff” for fun,² you want a BEV.

Generally, a vehicle is going fall into one of a few “mission classes”: prestige/luxury/comfort, racing, “work,”³ adventure, and beater. This blog’s audience can afford a top 1% vehicle for any of those missions, especially if they don’t buy new.⁴

Personally, my dream fleet consists of a luxury SUV for attending galas or going on long trips, a roadster for fun, a work truck to indulge my construction fantasies, and a reliable beater so I have the option to not flex on people and not attract attention.⁵

With combustion vehicles, there are many gotchas if buying used, but with BEVs, a 30 minute visual inspection by a vaguely competent mechanic and pulling the battery health is basically all you need to do.⁶ Batteries lose range over time, and you can look up what "average” is for your prospective model and year, and see whether your potential fleet addition is above or below the competition. A combustion vehicle will work pretty well until the transmission or engine fails, often catastrophically. At that point, you may want to junk it. A BEV gradually loses range until it’s not worth driving, at which point junk it. Pretty much everything else is worth fixing.⁷

Ok, but how do you decide what to buy? Here’s a checklist:

1. Unless you plan to use the vehicle only around town, is it a Tesla? If not, is it a Ford or another brand that will have access to the Supercharger network? The Supercharger network is the only way to take a long trip. Day to day, you can charge up at home off a normal outlet, or if you drive many miles on back to back days, a charger that your electrician can put in your garage. But for a long trip, accept no substitutes for the Supercharger network. Using it is just like a road trip with a combustion vehicle, and using other networks is gambling whether you will get stranded.⁸

2. Does your manufacturer have a history of spontaneous combustion? (If you are buying an older Hyundai/Kia or GM BEV, the answer is yes, because the same company designed both batteries.) It’s pretty stupid that this is something you need to check for, but some companies seem to be wildly incompetent.

3. Does your model come from brand with a history of building batteries that degrade quickly? (If you are buying a Nissan, the answer is yes. Just don’t buy a Nissan for this reason, as early model LEAFs lost battery health at many times the speed of the competition.)

4. Does your specific model and battery have a battery history you can look at? Many brands are just getting started, and some batteries degrade much faster than others. However, if you are looking at a LFP⁹ battery, you can skip this step, as LFP batteries will, barring gross engineering incompetence, outlast the vehicle.

5. If it’s a Tesla, don’t purchase the first 4 model years of any particular model. For whatever reason, while Teslas have bulletproof drivetrains, everything else is often rushed for the first few years of production. So Model S is fine for 2016 and later, Model X for 2020 and later, Model 3 for 2021 or later, and Model Y for 2024 or later. Don’t get a Cybertruck until the 2027 model year.¹⁰

Once you’ve picked out the mission, go find the battery degradation curve online.¹¹ Make sure that the vehicle ages more like a Tesla Model S than a Nissan LEAF. Go buy the oldest vehicle you can with the best battery health. Don’t get attached! Like cell phones in the 2010s, you’ll want to swap for newer and better regularly!

Especially as you climb north of $10M, spending 10% of your budget on your toys is a large amount of buying power! Add in the value of your time, and your choice of vehicle can be the difference between being able to squeeze in all sorts of extra purchases, experiences, and time with the people who love you. So invest a little bit of time up front, and you’ll earn dividends, both monetary and in your schedule, for years to come!

We’ll go over how to actually buy that vehicle that next post. Stay tuned!

1. Every 5 years or so a BEV might need a brake job, but it’s nuts how needy combustion vehicles are! We put up with it because there wasn’t an alternative before recently.

2. And hey, if you enjoy doing car stuff for fun, great! More power to you!

3. There are scare quotes here because for every “work truck” that supports the trades, there are probably five that are working super hard going between the grocery store, the office, and maybe an occasional trip to the lake. Meanwhile I know a bunch of trades folk who operate their business out of the back of a beat up minivan.

4. For example, as of this writing, you can get a Rolls-Royce Phantom with less than 50K miles on it for under $100K easily. Yeah, you’d have to keep it for many years to have enough for maintenance, but it’s perfectly reasonable for someone with as little as a $20K total monthly budget to own that as their only vehicle, if they don’t do too many miles per year. And prestige and racing are the only two missions where it’s worth it to even think about spending $100K.

5. I don’t own all of those, and just for simplicity’s sake, I may never. But it’s good to have goals, right?

6. Well, once you pick a good make and model. But we’ll get to that.

7. Or else it’s glaringly obvious, like rust holes in the body, etc.

8. I hope some day I can update this post without this warning, but for today, only Tesla has built chargers every few miles along every major highway. As of this writing, only Ford has access, but other manufacturers are scheduled to gain access rapidly. And only the version 3 and 4 chargers offer access to non-teslas, but here’s a map you can use to see whether your trip will be viable in a non-Tesla that has access to Superchargers. (Spoiler, it will be, and remember, this is the worst this network will ever be.)

9. Aka lithium iron phosphate, aka LiFePO4.

10. The current version has some bugs, like slicing off careless fingers when the front trunk closes! I’m pretty sure they’ll fix this, but if they let that bug ship, what else is lurking in there?

11. Do an image search for your make, model, year, and trim along with “battery degradation” (the quotes are important). Recurrent also appears to have individualized reports for each vehicle you are looking at, but I only found them when I was researching this post, so I’m not sure how accurate they are. The best source appears to be crowdsourced data from owners’ forums, but Kelly Blue Book just unveiled a battery health metric, so this is about to get way easier.