My wife backed the Volvo into her father's truck, so that was that. Goddammit. We just replaced it with a Lexus CT200h. It's built on the Prius power train, and can't get out of its own way unless you tune the transmission to "Sport" -- literally, turning a knob -- and then the dashboard lights up red and it becomes a very nice little car. 43 mpg, beautiful fit and finish, fun as hell. It's like a cross between a private jet and a go-kart. It actually gets better mileage in gridlock than it does at freeway speed, which is ideal around here.
We did pretty well flipping condos back in the day, and paid cash for our cars about 8 (Jesus, almost 9) years ago. Since then, we've been taking what would have been our car payments -- $350/month -- and putting it into an indexed fund to save up for the next cars, which we originally figured we'd need within five years or so. So, essentially, we've been making payments, but to ourselves, picking up interest instead of paying it for the last nine years. Well, we know what the market has done in the last nine years. We're good for the next couple of iterations of cars at this point. I'm having some work done on my 2003 Grand Cherokee: seals, new fan clutch, dash lights, and fixing a minor delamination of the clearcoat. It's running beautifully, even having just turned 200K, and I see no reason to replace it.
It was really nice walking into a Lexus dealer, pointing to the car we want, and having the finance guy call our bank and work it out while we had cappuccinos. I felt like such an adult. We went with a CPO because we're still on the early list for a Tesla 3 and we want to see how it shakes out; we want to be able to dump this one if the Tesla is everything we dreamed. The CPO included an extra 2-year warranty on top of the remainder of the original. Lexus's CPO program is outstanding.