I've been seeing an increasing trend on my campus, brand new or late-model used cars instead of old beaters. I simply don't understand this from the admittedly biased position of a broke college junior. Even with the support of parents, these newer cars are a financial nightmare during college, especially in the event of an unforeseen breakdown or accident. If you're considering buying your college student a new set of wheels, allow me to make my case for an older used vehicle. I will attempt to combine my personal experiences with properly researched data in order to provide an accurate case.
As an example of the potentially better older vehicle, we'll use my 1996 Nissan Sentra GLE (Though I recently learned that some of its' components, primarily the internal computer, were scavenged from a 1999 Altima. No idea how or why.) My Nissan comfortably putters along my twenty mile commute, and averages 28 miles to the gallon based on a logbook that tracks its' fuel consumption. I bought it for $4500 in early 2015.
I'm going to borrow from an article from ScientificAmerican.com written in 2009. Let's examine the financial and environmental impacts of turning in an older 28mpg vehicle for a new one that gets 35mpg.
A new vehicle can cost upwards of $30,000 dollars, research by Toyota and Seikei University in Japan estimate 12-28% of a vehicles carbon footprint is produced during manufacture and original sale. The remaining impact occurs over the lifetime of the vehicle as it operates. This already puts older vehicles a step ahead of new vehicles off the line. Having been reduced in price from leaving a lot, and already having passed the production and sale stage, a used vehicle is both financially and environmentally advantageous. In the event you choose a new vehicle, you need to consider the fate of your old one. If still in inspection passing condition, it will likely return to the road under new ownership and keep producing emissions. If it's reached the end of it's effective lifespan, it'll have to be scrapped or recycled. I'm going to briefly sidetrack here, sell your junk cars to a reputable recycler, they can recycle up to 90% of a cars' raw materials and safely dispose of the hazardous components. The edge case exception ifs if you're doing a little DIY recycling. Before my 96' Sentra, I had a nearly identical 97', the 97' now sits in my yard after saving my bacon in a collision with a phone pole in a snowstorm. Every part that wears out on my 96' usually can be replaced by something from the 97'. Once I've salvaged it for everything it can give it'll be sent to a recycler. Another big part of sales that has financial impact is keys. Let's look at another personal example;
My 96' Nissan came with one key and two keyfobs. For redundancy, we got two backup keys, for $4.99 each at a hardware store. My mother, when purchasing a 02' Mercury, spent $80 on a single spare key. Newer model vehicles have keys with microchips as a security feature, which increases the cost of a key sixteen-fold. I personally find that a little ridiculous.
I'm sure many of you are thinking that a hybrid or electric would still be better than years of use by a gas burning car, but don't be so sure. We've yet to perfect a clean way of making the batteries for electrics, and hybrid vehicles produces much more emissions during production due to the creation of two engine systems instead of one.
To clarify my point, because I'm told I can ramble and be somewhat confusing, riding those older cars through college is both a frugal and eco-friendly move. It reduces the need for new vehicles, a big emission maker, and keeps those older cars out of junkyards and scrap piles.
