At Star Auto Authority, we are your vehicle service experts. Whether you drive a domestic minivan, European sportscar or Asian sedan, one of our highly skilled, experienced professionals specializes in your make and model.
And we want to share our wealth of knowledge with you. While there are scores of blogs about new cars, we're here to bring you money-saving advice, resources and information about the car you already drive.
If new car buying habits are any indication, U.S. consumers are doing more than giving lip service to the notion of downsizing and tightening the budgetary belt in this economy.
The record high gas prices of the past three years are likely influencing their purchases as well. Compared with consumers in the first half of 2007, Americans now are buying:
More cars, fewer trucks and smaller vehicles in general.
Smaller and less expensive cars within segments.
Ordinary rides that replace bigger or more luxurious vehicles.
Cars are outselling light trucks again, taking 53.4 percent of the market in the first half of 2010. Compare that with 49.2 percent in the first half of 2007. Perhaps not surprisingly, SUVs have fallen more than any other segment since 2007: from 12.8 percent to 7.9 percent. Meanwhile, the car-based crossovers have grown by 5.2 share points — up to 19.6 percent this year.
Life’s full of surprises, and some of those surprises come with a price tag. A leaky roof, a broken tooth, an unexpected car repair. While planning for scheduled maintenance is fairly straightforward, it can be difficult to budget for unexpected repairs. Fortunately, there are tools online to help you plan for those.
One such tool is on Edmunds.com. The site’s True Cost to Own calculator helps you estimate a service and repair budget. Let’s suppose you have a 2003 Toyota Camry. It’s paid for, and you’d like to keep it running for the next three years. Go to Edmunds’ and enter your vehicle’s data. The calculator will provide estimates of what it will cost to service and repair your vehicle over the next five years. The estimate is based on where you live, manufacturers’ recommendations and repair experiences for your particular model. (The calculator also estimates depreciation, financing, insurance, taxes and fuel costs.)
Of course these are just estimates. There’s no way to predict what will actually happen to the car in your driveway, but it’s a good starting point. Here’s some additional information that may help. This table shows that the average monthly cost of maintenance and repairs is $83 dollars. That may sound like a lot, but compare it to a new car payment. And if you can set aside $83 a month, you’ll go a long way toward taking care of routine maintenance and being prepared for the unexpected repairs that arise.
As vehicles age, some motorists worry about what can go wrong with their older car and they buy a new one. That’s fine if you really want a new car, but if you properly maintain your older vehicle, you’ll save a ton of money on new car payments and insurance. It just makes good economic sense. Of course, if you want personalized advice, please don’t hesitate to contact your Star service advisor.
I saw a news report online today from a Georgia TV station that posed the important question: Should I repair or replace my car?
Given the gloomy state of the economy, more people than ever are forgoing a new car and opting for major repairs. Quite frankly, this is a financially prudent practice in any economy. We wrote a newsletter article a couple of years ago about how you can save as much as $10,000 by keeping your car for eight years instead of four.
There’s no better time than now to revisit this article, and I’m purposely choosing our piece over the TV station’s because I feel it gives you a much more complete picture of the facts. Enjoy! Let us know what you think.
Every once in a while a piece of automotive news hits the internet and gets a lot of people talking. Recently, a Yahoo news piece proclaimed the end of the SUV is near. Their reasoning: According to some analysts, the projected cost of owning an SUV five years after purchase is now over $100,000. Yep. Six figures for five years of owning one of the most common vehicles on our roads. The main culprit for this whale-size expense is the rising cost of gas.
While I don’t believe for a minute that SUVs will go away any time soon—they’ll still be the vehicle of choice for many—the important part in this news piece is the national notoriety given to the cost of vehicle ownership.
Most motorists consider car payments, insurance and sometimes even fuel costs when calculating their cost of ownership, but very few give consideration to maintenance and repair expenses. Whether you’re buying new or used or own a vehicle that’s paid off, you’re going to have maintenance costs. Experts recommend budgeting $1,000 annually for maintenance and repairs, and that’s a good starting point. But the truth is, these costs vary dramatically from car to car and from car to minivan to SUV. Based on what I’ve seen in our shop in the past seven years, I can make blanket statements like “SUVs and full-size trucks typically rack up higher maintenance and repair costs than sedans or minivans” and “if you want reliability, you can rarely go wrong with a Honda, Toyota or Nissan.”
But if you want more scientific information, Edmunds.com and Consumer Reports are just two of the online resources working to quantify the true cost of ownership. They even factor in resale value, depreciation and loan costs. And while I don’t always agree with the vehicles Consumer Reports recommends to consumers, I have to applaud them and Edmunds for bringing awareness to the true cost of ownership issue.
If choosing a new car for its safety, style, affordability and fuel economy weren’t enough to make the selection process grueling, a new website is adding yet another criteria for the socially conscious—the car’s role in the U.S. economy.
JobsPerCar.com, which launched on May 5, gives you the ability to compare up to four makes and models at a time to see what percent of each car is domestic content and how many U.S. jobs are created by each automaker.
Some results you might find intuitive. For example, if you compare the Ford Taurus and the Hyundai Elantra, you probably won’t be shocked to learn that the Taurus supports nearly seven times as many jobs per car than the Hyundai, contains 90 times more domestic parts, and was assembled in North America versus Korea.
But you may not know that Honda employs fewer Americans than Toyota while supporting more jobs on a car-by-car basis.
You may be thinking, “This is a fascinating conversation starter, but I really don’t see myself basing my car-buying decision on this.” Perhaps that’s fair, given the number of criteria we have to weigh when choosing a new car.
But I’ll leave you with this statement: Level Field Institute, the pro-U.S. jobs organization that launched the web site, reports that 74 percent of Americans in a recent study said they are more likely to buy a car if the company producing it employs significantly more U.S. workers than its competitors.
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