What's up today (bullchiting) thread.

Thanks for educating me Eggshooterist!
Everyone has mandatory things, fit in garage, 4 doors, safety etc I wanted/tried to convince her Toyota Taco She said quote yes you ride high but sit on the floor, it’s not comfortable for long trip and it handles like a pregnant water buffalo.
We tried 3 different fords she couldn’t put in garage
So it was a choice during Covid between
Chevy Colorado for 55,000
Ridgeline for $35,000 She’s happy and I am still happily married

 

Somewhere on the site, after this same type of conversation had come up, I posted the links to the actual interviews with the gen 1 and the gen 2 Ridgeline engineers. They described, in detail, how they designed them. The interviews were done buy some popular auto mags if I recall. The first gen started as an acura mdx with a Colorado bed grafted on and snowballed from there. I'm trying to find them again.

 

author's note: this turned into a long post..

I'll never get trading in a vehicle when you can't close the deal without still owing on the old one. That's crazy. People do it, but it's crazy.

I'd say average lifespan of a daily driven vehicle here is between 10 and 20 years. Rust is a factor, and I've seen a few older vehicles go from almost looking new to badly rusted within 2 years. It's easier to prevent than to fix, and if you buy a new truck and religiously wash and undercoat it from day one, it should last you a very long time.

But what often happens is people buy them new, and don't worry about it because they're trading it in several years anyway. Then the used customer gets to deal with it. Out west and down south, you can invest a new drivetrain into a 15 year old truck and likely get another 15 years out of it for far less money than a new truck. In the northeast, you have to be more wary of replacing an engine, only to have rust show up and quickly progress. But especially with bigger vehicles, they often rust out before any major drivetrain trouble ever happens.

Road salt can do a lot of damage, but, being on an island in the Atlantic, we also have a lot of salt in the air year round here. That generally affects hidden crevices in bodies for the most part, while road salt can do structural damage much more quickly.

If you mean me personally, I've had 7 vehicles in more than 10 years, but I acquired a couple of them with one wheel in the grave. I'm only 28, so it wasn't all that long ago I was barely grown up, working part time and couldn't invest in a great vehicle, nor spend a fortune to care for it. I don't expect to go through as many in the next 10 years.
Also, We all know what happened to used vehicle prices during covid, so it previously made sense to replace, rather than repair, sooner than it does in today's market.

I'm curious enough myself to do a little analysis now.

1999 F-150 - bought in 2011 for $4,000. Great truck, low mileage. Rusted beyond feasible/worthwhile repair by 2015. It was dad who bought it on impulse, but it became a shared project, and the first truck I drove. Sadly it was a project we didn't have the funds to save in time. It was also a weekend vehicle we didn't have proper storage for, so all that sitting may not have helped. We tried

2004 F-150 - bought in 2013 for $4,500. Dad drove it a couple years, then it became my first daily driver. To be fair, younger me wasn't kind to the truck (I never drove carelessly, but I worked the truck to death with limited maintenance). Still ran great all the same, but the frame was weak and the body had some rust too. A brake line burst in 2017, so we said goodbye.

2002 F-150 - bought for $3,000 in 2015. Me and dad bought it together with an agreement that he'd drive it for a while, and I'd take it over eventually. I did so after the 2004 bit the dust in 2017.
It had belonged to dad's coworker and was in excellent shape for it's age. Either just before I took it over, or just after, We decided the truck was worth it, and invested sizeable sum into a new exhaust system, right to the valves.
Well, that was when the truck decided to suddenly start rusting rapidly, along with some mechanical trouble. By 2019 the frame was cracking. Now, 17 years is a pretty good lifespan here, but in the end, it was apparent that if we'd bought another decent older truck instead of the exhaust job, and other repairs afterwards, it may have been less money, and certainly less hassle.
That was the truck that taught me to think hard before making expensive repairs to an older vehicle.

2010 Kia Rio - bought in 2019 for $1,500. Dad's coworker cut me a deal on it. I didn't have much money at the time, and was commuting a lot of mileage, so despite not being a car person, I bought it. Had it 18 months, drove over 30,000 miles, and after experiencing increasing oil consumption, it lost compression in a cylinder. Car was only 10 years old, was not rusty, and I don't know exactly what broke or how much it would cost to fix, but I did a lot with the car for $1,500, and I was a bit better off financially again, so I said goodbye and looked for something nicer.

2011 Hyundai Accent - bought in late 2020 for $2800, or was it $2850. I was hoping for a small truck or at least an SUV, but as small cars go, I did always like those accent hatchbacks. So I bought it, and despite being the same drivetrain, it was a much nicer car than the Rio in looks, comfort and handling.
I put almost 60K miles on it by spring 2023. I used it like a truck. It was not rusty, a couple small spots but nothing major. The suspension was worn out, it soon needed a timing belt, and little, but important things like the throttle cable and door handle cables were starting to break. I patched both with copper wire.
I was also thinking the engine had something wearing out, as fuel economy dropped and it started to use oil. It may have lasted many miles before it failed, but I knew I'd soon have to invest a few thousand $$ to overhaul the long suffering car, or part with it. I had became a manager, transferred closer to home, and knew that as much as I hauled with the car, a truck would make my life easier. So....

2014 Ram 1500 - bought in June 2023. Cost $19,000 and change, they did accept some haggling and adjusted the price so that the OTD price including taxes etc was a round number.
Now this truck was almost exactly the same age, mileage, condition, and configuration as the 2004 F-150 we'd bought 10 years ago, was at that time. Four times the price, but that was how much the market had gone up, and it's only somewhat better now, although pickings aren't as slim now. I originally planned to sell it after a couple years, but obviously I didn’t, and I'll never again buy another vehicle, new or used, without intending to drive it till it's scrap.
Almost 3 years and more than 50K miles later, the truck is still in great shape for it's age. Front fender corners have small rust spots, and the rear wheel wells are rotting on the "lip" where the sheet metal folds in and attaches to the plastic liners. Hasn't spread to be visible from the side yet. That's it. Frame still has a lot of paint on it which is outstanding for a 12 year old NL truck.
I've put several thousand into mechanical repairs, mostly normal stuff you can't hold against an older truck. I like the truck, but If the market hadn't skyrocketed and I'd paid less for it, and could replace it for less, I may have done so by now. But that's an alternate reality. It'll be my second vehicle and beater till I can justify scrapping it, which won't be soon.

2017 F-150 HDPP - just bought last fall. Low mileage, aluminum body, and undercoated, and clearly very well cared for. I intend to continue that treatment, and hope to have this truck for a long time to come.

 

Same concept with the maverick. It's unibody, but it has a bed. It is, technically, a truck. And I've never seen a dictionary define a truck as needing to be body-on-frame.

It's all in your perspective. Some people refer to SUVs as trucks. A lot of professional drivers always specify "pickup" in the same context as most people would just use the word "truck", because when they think "truck", they automatically picture a semi.
I once had a driver refer to a certain parking lot and told me he'd have to arrange to meet the customer elsewhere because "you can't get in there with a truck."

Mine can go in there quite easily

 

Correct. The definition of a pickup truck is a vehicle with an open cargo area that is seperate from the passenger compartment. I think some people's egos get in the way of this fact with regards to this debate. And it seems to only be the traditional truck owners that have the issue. I've yet to see someone say a unibody suv isn't a real suv because its not body on frame like a Yukon ect. Its comical actually.

 

Very true. I don't think I've had anyone say that either.

I'm not completely innocent. At the risk of repeating myself, I can confidently say that a minivan would be more versatile for me than a half ton truck, and yet it would be with some reluctance that I actually chose one. The truck is a better looking, more fun to drive vehicle.

I mentioned to one of our truck drivers, the debate I had on that other site about bed length.

He said their fleet of trailers only proves the point that there's no winner. A 53', tandem axle trailer is great for what he usually does, which is stop and go, delivery and pickup of mostly light pallets. But it's not a good idea to put 24 pallets of shingles in one, which is why they have tri axle, yet much shorter trailers.

It was me who then mentioned B-trains. Two shorter trailers exceed the capacity of a 53' unit, both in weight and volume. Great for pallets of salt or shingles, tanks of liquid, what have you.
But if you strapped a 60' pole to one? I'm pretty sure either the pole, or your strap mounts, are going to snap when the two trailers make a turn.

Same driver once mentioned to me how so many people insist on a long nose Peterbilt, because they're "cool". And he admitted they're good for what they're meant for, pulling heavy loads on long highway runs.
But he's in and out of parking lots, some teeming with retail customers, all day, often one pallet at a time, and mostly driving through towns and communities rather than the open highway. The visibility of his sloped hood volvo makes that process much easier for him, and safer for his surroundings.

 

Making extra payments on the principal really adds up quickly!

 

Get in a fender bender with a unibody and half the vehicle has to be replaced if the insurance doesn't total it. The electronics, wiring harness, sensors are all interconnected. Get in a fender bender with a body on frame and just replace the dented part or not.

What is scary is the average price of a vehicle payment is $767 which is as scary as 40 and even 50 year mortgages.

 

That may often be true;

But a maverick is still a truck

 

I've seen some bent frames from accidents with body on frame vehicles too. It all depends on the accident each vehicle is involved in.

 

It's actually crazy, and a lot of people don't realize, how much interest a mortgage costs over time.

My truck loan, which I've made some amount of extra payment to every month, but even if I didn't, would cost less than 5,000 in total interest.

I know that 5-10 year old me learned that 26% credit cards accumulate interest every day, and thought that meant 260 in interest every day, if you charged 1,000. I likewise assumed that 9% interest on a set loan meant that a 100,000 loan would cost 109,000 to repay.

Adult me realized that there's a thing called APR in both cases. Which is a relief if you do need to use a credit card for a thousand dollar emergency.....

But, a $100,000, 30 year, 5% mortgage can cost almost 200,000 when it's said and done. Apply the same logic to 500,000 and the thought becomes real scary.

 

I agree. I was in a minor accident (as a passenger) in a small unibody car, and it drove away just fine. My relative who owned it never did fix it properly.

 

Yep. All depends on the severity of the accident. Plus, all modern vehicles are full of sensors and systems that can get damaged in accidents regardless of their construction. Unfortunately its the way it is.